I'd be interested in hearing about successful activities that you use at the end of a course, especially if they're good for revision or for portfolio-style analyses of what students have accomplished over the course.

http://homepage.mac.com/gapodaca/digital/digital.html

This impressive page allows users to scroll the mouse over touched-up photographs and see the original. Some of the differences are startling. We and our students know that airbrushing and other digital magics make some pictures (especially of famous persons) more appealing. But I think these are some good examples of how drastic that can be.

The objective of this class is to introduce students to the final chapter of Seeing and Writing, which I present as an opportunity to purposefully apply the principles with which students are already familiar to current events/images/topics of special interest to them.

The assignment below originated in my second semester freshman composition course. It is the second portfolio in a series of three, and it satisfies the requirement for a research component. Here the students are actually writing an I-Search paper that incorporates personal research, field research, and traditional library research. We also use film, in this case “The Truman Show� starring Jim Carrey, as a resource for ideas for this paper. The topic of the portfolio and the subsequent final research project is Reality vs. Make-Believe…in other words, how do we decide what is real and what is not in today’s fast-paced, mediated society?