Class:COM375 - Section 9 - Fall 2007/Homework/constructing knowledge

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In the course of conversation, we spontaneously identified the elements of the rhetorical situation (author, audience, and content). From content, we also generated - together, from memory and learning! - the four elements necessary to a semiotic analysis: content, context, media, and function.



This led us to consider where meaning comes from, and how meaningfulness is built from originally random connections that are linked together through the force of talk combined with experience -> this is thinking using the ritual model of communication. (We used the example of certain blogposts that have created and maintained a conversation over time. The horizontal/vertical axis with spiralling loops is a representation of time.)



And then there is always the problem of power, authority, self-confidence, trust, intellectual integrity, fear, punishment, and the established "knowledge" already conditioned into us because of the institutions (such as school) that need to keep order.