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Articles Conference Reviews |
B.33 Multimodal ComposingB.33 The Remix in the Classroom: Innovations and Implications of Multimodal Composing This panel, presented by faculty from MIT, focused on integrating new media technologies into the composition classroom and how these tools aided students’ understanding of academic writing. The opening presentation, “At Play in the Digital Archives,” explored the idea of creating what presenter Suzanne Lane called “a truly 21st century writing process.” First, Lane offered the idea of having students create a digital archive in which they could collect their digital resources. In her class, she uses Evernote™, a free online service that students can use to upload articles, websites, images, video, and even voice recordings. Additionally, everything loaded onto the program is automatically indexed and made searchable, allowing students to quickly find information for their research or citations. The second tool Lane presented was the creation of word clouds, a tool she uses to help students analyze texts. She finds it useful because it allows students to experience texts visually, rather than in the texts’ original linear format. I admit I was initially skeptical of this tool as I felt that, though perhaps a fun classroom activity, creating word clouds didn’t have much educational value: reducing a full text to a disorganized set of words obscures its original complexity, context, and meaning, as one audience member commented. However, Lane pointed out that this tool should be used alongside reading the text to enhance rather than replace a traditional analysis. She also gave an example of how this tool could be beneficial by describing a student who used word clouds to discover that he was summarizing rather than analyzing a text. He discovered this because the word cloud showed that he was using almost identical language to the text he was supposed to be analyzing. This led him to extensively revise his piece in order to make it more analytical. The theme that continued throughout Lane’s presentation was that of using technology to create new ways to visualize writing; however, I question if these tools could leave some students behind. One audience member questioned how useful these technologies would be for non-traditional students whose computer literacy was low. Though Lane explained that these technologies are quite easy to learn, I do wonder about those students who perhaps do not possess the “digital learning style” we assume belongs to the current generation of first-year college students. Further, though Lane worked from the need to find alternative ways of “seeing” written texts, how useful might these techniques be to non-visual learners? That said, however, as Lane suggested, these tools are not meant to replace but to enhance other classroom techniques, and as such these tools may prove quite useful for writers who need a new perspective on the written word. The second talk, “A Multimedia Approach to Writing about Social and Ethical Issues” by Andrea Walsh presented the model Walsh had used for two classes on visual literacy. Again, the focus was on incorporating new media as a tool to teach writing strategies. Walsh said that she began her classes by having students think about images in terms of how, when, and to whom images speak, considering everything from photographs to clothing to MIT's school seal. After this discussion Walsh moved on to having students analyze photographs. She said she finds that such analysis can help students who believe they are bad writers or who are “frozen” when it comes to writing or analyzing traditional texts, because they are more comfortable with this medium than with written text. Walsh then spoke about how she used documentary film to teach about organization. This was especially interesting as a documentary’s organization is often almost entirely created during the editing process—scenes are usually shot out of sequence and meaning is created through the juxtaposition of sound and images. According to Walsh, examining the filmmaking process also teaches students the value of writing too much and editing to include only the most effective content. Then Walsh brought up again the importance of using visual media during workshopping as doing so often helped her students who had difficulty when it came to workshopping traditional texts: Those who had little to say about texts were often much more talkative when examining images. Finally, Walsh explained the media autobiography she had her students write, in which they explained their relationships with various media. She also said she encouraged her students to quote from text messages or Facebook pages with this project, something that must also be quite useful in teaching the idea of writing for specific genres and audiences. Overall, what was interesting about Walsh’s presentation was that she stressed that many of her activities were experimental, determined by trial and error. She emphasized this point by explaining a failed assignment she had tried with her students—that of creating a hypertext—in which she found that, rather than giving students new ways to present and explore a chosen subject, this assignment was actually detrimental for students who already had difficulty with focus and organization. The final presentation, Rebecca Faery’s “Culture Shock! Creating an Online Magazine in a Composition Classroom” focused on Faery’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing in Cyberspace class, in which students create and publish an issue of an online magazine called Culture Shock! She admitted that she relies heavily on her students to provide the technical knowledge of actually publishing online, but I found this to be great way to allow students to take ownership of their learning. Though she didn’t explicitly mention the idea, this theme of students’ “ownership” over the project continued throughout her explanation of the classes’ organization: The students signed up for various committees for everything from researching and choosing a journal layout to reviewing manuscripts and choosing whether to “accept,” “accept with revision,” or “reject” their classmates’ submissions. What I found most interesting about this was that, according to Faery, this review board seemed to hold very high standards. One of Faery’s criteria for passing the class was that students write something publishable for the magazine. However, Faery emphasized that this was a “real” publication, not just a class exercise, and that the review board was not afraid to reject manuscripts. I would have liked to know more about how she encourages students to maintain such high standards, as I could see that in many classrooms, students would be unwilling to critique or flatly reject their peers’ work, especially since the failure to write a publishable article would mean a failing grade in the class. However, Faery did offer a few of the challenges she is still struggling to address each time she publishes the magazine. The first is that certain groups of students handle a larger share of the work than others, depending on which committee they have joined. And, of course, this model creates more work for her as a teacher as she has to incorporate both management of a magazine publication in addition to her regular teaching duties. Secondly, she has had to confront the issue of whether or not to publish articles on sensitive or personal topics. Some students have published anonymously, but she has still had former students ask her to remove their articles from the site. Despite these drawbacks, however, Faery related that the creation of the magazine was largely a positive one. The magazine has developed a global readership and pushed her students to develop great writing—she has even been contacted by editors interested in republishing articles from the magazine. Faery, like Lane and Walsh, also demonstrated a classroom culture in which new media technologies did not replace traditional writing instruction, but used these tools to enhance what she was already teaching. In my own pedagogy I have long felt that the problem of incorporating technology and new media composition into the writing classroom is that it takes away from work on more traditional forms of writing, which are of course still very necessary in the academic community. This is important because, though it is true that students will be required to have an increasingly advanced familiarity with these technologies both in and out of the classroom, they will also still be required—at least for the foreseeable future—to have an solid understanding of traditional academic writing as well. For that reason, I was quite impressed by the presenters’ ability to integrate and teach these technologies, and to use them to support the teaching of more traditional academic writing, and I look forward to adapting many of their suggestions into my own classroom in the future. |