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Articles Conference Reviews |
B.33 Multimodal ComposingB.33 The Remix in the Classroom: Innovations and Implications of Multimodal Composing There were three speakers on this panel, all from M.I.T., and a respondent. Kathi Yancey chaired the session and said that all the presentations were concerned with “how multimodality has been integrated into courses that were not originally designed to accommodate it.” The first speaker, Suzanne Lane, under the title “At Play in the Digital Archives,” discussed writing-intensive courses at M.I.T. and how they ask students to manage digital sources. Currently, she said, students fall into two broad groups in their interaction with online research sources: those who download a .pdf file, print it out, and highlight it manually and those who are visual learners and do “a lot of looking” at screens as they research. She said that this distinction had given rise to two questions that drove her research: first, what would it mean to have truly 21st-century research practices, from source to published (student) text; second, what is now possible, concerning academic writing, with digital archives? She then described a sequence of actions within a research/writing assignment that she offered as “play” and as a way to move students – even those supposedly as tech-savvy as M.I.T. undergraduates – from the first group of researchers/writers into the second group. In the first of these activities, students were asked to analyze Websites. Students used the program Evernote to store and search multimedia sources in the digital archives. This software supported those among her students who were visual learners by enabling a kind of multitasking not possible when working with print-only sources. Second, students used the program Wordle to make Word Clouds of texts they were studying; these are visual displays that emphasize key and repeated terms in an alphabetic text, thus aiding the rhetorical analysis of texts that was part of the assignment. Lane found that the visual display and visual learning of the Word Clouds simplified the analytical task over what it had been when students worked with print sources only. Students then were asked to use WordNet to make a visual display of rhetorical structures in texts. Then they applied these programs to drafts of their own writing so as to use visual learning as a way to realize a structure in that writing. She mentioned Webspiration as another digital means of enabling visual learning, especially for rhetorical invention. This program creates cluster diagrams and flow charts, and students can toggle between these displays and the more conventional outline method of structuring thoughts for writing. As someone who is learning multimodal composition himself, I found the discussion of these software programs very interesting. Lane’s presentation prompted me to look them up on the Web and see for myself what they are about. The next speaker, Andrea Walsh, described what she called an experimental approach to the introductory writing course as that approach was applied to two versions of that course at M.I.T. One version was a course that investigated social and ethical issues; the other was concerned with analyzing mass media. She said the first course puts visual rhetoric at the forefront of the examination of the topic through study of images of clothing and of institutional images such as logos and of documentary photography and film. In the process, she found that students who had been “frozen” in their writing became more fluent. Building on that, she said she offers students the technique of film cutting as an effective analogy for writing: have a lot of material but don’t use it all. She also mentioned an “art gallery” assignment that allows the incorporation of visual elements with text for student essays. The second course, she said, examines media as a social and ethical issue and that it starts by asking students to bring in their favorite media texts as a starting point for discussion of visual rhetoric. The third speaker was Rebecca Faery, and she discussed a version of a first-year writing course that she began in 2000 and has taught seven times since. The course title is “Writing, Editing, and Publishing in Cyberspace”, and in this class students were asked to create an online magazine called “Culture Shock” on media topics. She showed examples of individual issues of the magazine while explaining the benefits to students of writing for a real publication written for real readers. Some of the student essays published in “Culture Shock” have even had requests to be reprinted, indicating that people are reading what the students write (unlike the typical classroom assignments) and valuing that writing by a real-world standard. She allowed as how such a production was a lot of work and that she relied on students to provide technical expertise that she herself did not have. But she said the benefits to students far outweighed the difficulties encountered. The respondent, Doug Hesse of the University of Denver, identified a strand running through all three presentations, about the relation in which we stand to new media: Are they for analysis, for modeling, for production, or for presentation? And he offered two thoughts by way of response to what the presenters had offered: 1) the presentations highlighted the differences between digital and print-only texts and between digital and print literacies; 2) the question was raised: what’s next, given the increasing complexity and sophistication of digital media? |