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Articles Conference Reviews |
B.33 Multimodal ComposingB.33 The Remix in the Classroom: Innovations and Implications of Multimodal Composing Each presenter on this panel was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and each offered a different take on the overall theme of remixing. Suzanne Lane began with her presentation, “At Play in the Digital Archives,” which aimed to question students’ typical system of managing information while researching. Lane noted that, oddly enough, students often spent great amounts of time turning digital sources into print to be able to highlight, underline, etc.; a process that one student noted was “inefficient … students don’t get much out of it.” So what would it mean if we had truly twenty-first-century information management practices, from source to published text? Perhaps where we have to begin, Lane noted, is questioning what is now possible with a digital archive that wasn’t possible a decade ago? This is where I came away from the presentation with several new ideas and tools that I can use in my teaching and research, something that I love about attending conferences like CCCC. I learned about manyeyes, evernote, word clouds, word trees and webspiration. Lane shared assignments that could incorporate these tools: analyzing a speech, analyzing a rhetorical situation through a particular lens and analyzing the visual rhetoric of the MIT (or other) web page. Next, Andrea Walsh presented on “A Multimedia Approach to Writing about Social and Ethical Issues.” She described two different classes where she took multimodal approaches to social and ethical issues: The first was a social and ethical issues class and the second was a mass media class. In the first class, students examined images and questioned the language and politics embedded in that image. “When does an image speak?” asked Walsh. “When does it stop speaking? When you speak back, must you speak via an image, too?” Students also looked at clothing, symbols (particularly those that institutions used to represent themselves), documentary photos, and museum exhibit booklets. In the mass media class, students were asked to bring in a media artifact that could represent them, stemming from Walsh’s focus on media as an extension of self. In a media autobiography, students analyzed their own media use in conjunction with the class readings. Finally, students looked at media adapted to another form of media, such as fan fiction. Her presentation offered multiple pedagogical suggestions for focusing on social and ethical issues via multimodality. Finally, Rebecca Faery presented her portion of the session, “Culture Shock! Creating an Online Magazine in a Composition Class.” She described a course in which students created an online magazine; it has now published seven online editions, each with a different look and feel. The students worked as members of an editorial board, peer-reviewing the submissions and sending them back with acceptances, accept with revisions, or rejections. They also worked to copy edit and publicize the magazine. Faery closed by describing some of the possible issues that might come up with such an assignment, such as submissions with racist or sexist themes and students who ask for their work to be removed after graduation. Her final example of a student who committed suicide after writing an essay about depression for the magazine was a clear reminder that creating an online magazine with student submissions can be rewarding but also contentious. |