The Future of Visual Rhetoric

I was surprised to hear that "students don't understand visual rhetoric" from some members of the class, since others seemed to reinforce the idea that students are in fact more visually literate than text literate. Because my 111 class has not focused on visual rhetoric, I am not in a position to comment on their understanding. As Hocks points out, most of use are still teaching ourselves about how to best teach visual rhetoric, especially with computers (203). Multimedia design projects are promising ways to incorporate visual rhetoric into the classroom. If, though, copyright laws become more strict and it becomes difficult to access web images, we as intructors might have difficulty accessing certain information for students. It's already difficult to get music (which is understandable so the artist is protected), and an iTunes download seems to be a viable option.
Multi-media oral presentations are also options for instruction, though I am amazed at the lack of audio/visual equipment available at conferences. We can argue that an oral presentation is good preparation for a conference, but if the universities cannot accomadte new and evolving technologies into their conference presentations, there will be a gap between the potential technological quality of a presentation and the usual oral presentation (or worse, the reading of an academic paper).
It will be interesting to watch where technology goes in the future, as related to conference presentations.
Bethany