Payne | Honeycutt | C. Selfe | Smith | Crockett | Anderson | Halbritter | Ross | Taylor
A Review of Digital Video Production in Post-Secondary English Classrooms at Three Universities
Digital video production in composition courses is both new and exciting. However, this newness comes with challenges and obstacles as well as more questions than answers. What exactly is so fun, attractive, liberating, and transgressive about digital video work? Is it the time invested in editing minutes or hours of footage into seconds of film clips? Is it the sheer thrill of having the power to overlay images, words, and sounds to produce an effect impossible in the real world and highly effective in the multimodal, rhetorical one? Is it that the composition teacher is finally asking for a product where grammar (understood as punctuation and sentence structure) is mostly invisible? Is it the crisis moments when the software, the hard drive, and/or the accompanying hardware crashes and we are still left with a classroom full of students to teach? Or, is it the mesmerizing effect of the screen that promises sustained attention to a composition assignment? The answer, we think, in all cases is "yes" – yet sometimes that yes is a hesitant one.
by Melissa Meeks, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alex Ilyasova, Michigan Technological University
Where we don't hesitate is admitting that alphabetic literacy is not enough anymore – for our students or for us as teachers. Although we don't know all the answers to the questions these new media raise, we recognize that digital video has the qualities we are looking for to engage students in combining design, production, and literac(ies) in the classroom. We agree with Michael Rubin, who states in Nonlinear4: A Field Guide to Digital Video and Film Editing, "The future lies in the convergence of media: the useful control over images (still and moving) and sounds" (xi). As he explains, the shift from linear video production to non-linear production makes video a feasible medium for student compositions in our classrooms. Linear video production refers to traditional videotape editing process where the only option was to start recording at the beginning and keep recording until the end: when using magnetic audio and/or video tape, there is no way to revise or reorganize without having to start from the beginning again. By contrast, non-linear video production in digital bytes allows for the deleting, adding, moving, and repeating of clips, making it more like editing in a film-like style. Being able to revise and reorganize video clips (and even alter them with careful splicing) allows students to do everything they could do in a draft workshop on text to video. Moreover, digital video allows them to use more than alphabetic (text-based) literacy in their compositions; their familiarity with film, television, and an image-saturated culture means that more of what they bring to the classroom counts. Digital video is a challenge we welcome.
And yet we hesitate. In the CCC's article (2002) "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing," Diana George asks a question that resonates for us: "How does the visual both promise and threaten to change the composition course?" (14). She argues that the "terms of debate" about the place of visual literacy in the teaching of writing has limited the types of assignments we can imagine in composition. We worry that we lack not only the imagination, but also the technical skill and the pedagogical savvy (can we teach it as we learn it ourselves?) to engage such literacies in front of college students.
Even so, we cannot ignore the power that images and sounds have over us and our students. There is a constant voice tempting us to jump in feet first, exploring the new potential of digital video production and trusting that inquiry will make it all worthwhile in the end.
Our inquiry begins with those who have already gotten their feet wet, those who have used digital video in their
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"How does the visual both promise and threaten to change
the composition course?" |
Iowa State University of Science and Technology
In 1999, Iowa
State faculty began a dialogue about curricular reform that prioritizes
communication skills across the curriculum throughout all four years of
undergraduate education. While the discussion continues, the articulation of
goals by ISU Communications Ad-hoc Committee enables interdisciplinary cooperation as
well as an intentional acquisition of technology. The acronym WOVe – Written, Oral, Visual, and electronic communication – indicates the reformers' commitment to multiple modes and media. The reform requires that all students
complete a communication proficiency portfolio as sophomores as well as
fulfill the communication requirements designed by the respective department
for their major. Eleven computerized classrooms on campus are mostly used for
the first- and second-year courses where students develop their portfolios;
three of these classrooms are optimized for multimedia. As Iowa State builds a
multimedia infrastructure to support its curricular goals beyond the first-
and second-year courses, departmental technology labs and collaboration
between these labs will be increasingly important.
Digital video certainly fits well with the WOVe communication paradigm, and the following profile highlights an undergraduate
course in Technical Communication taught by Don Payne and a graduate
course in Rhetoric and Professional Communication taught by Lee
Honeycutt. Payne and Honeycutt also suggest practical steps for building the
classrooms and labs where multimedia projects can be composed and shared – a
multimedia infrastructure.
Don Payne
Payne's Multimedia in Professional
Communication
course concentrates on "approach[ing] multimedia vigorously and immersively." This course usually attracts about seventeen juniors and seniors, most of whom
are Technical Communication majors. (Technical Communication as an
Undergraduate
degree program is in its third year at Iowa State.) TechCom 410X
"serves as an introduction to rhetorical and technical issues in multimedia
development."
In the course,
students compose a portfolio that displays their multimedia projects as well
as articulates their learning processes throughout the semester. The first
assignment requires that students in assigned groups conduct an interview and
produce that interview in three ways (text only, audio only, video and audio).
The next assignment asks that students compose a two-minute video describing a
physical object to a particular professional audience that needs to understand
it. The final assignment is the production of a promotional commercial for a
product, organization, or idea. This brief overview masks the attention to
process that is built into the assignment sequence. Each assignment includes
various draft stages (like storyboards and proposals), attention to the
development of particular skills sets through exercises,
and a reflective writing task. From these assorted artifacts, students compose
a multimedia argument about what they have learned and how they have learned
it, marrying the process and the product in powerful ways.
Lee Honeycutt
Designed as an introductory
graduate survey course, Technology in Business, Technical, and Professional
Communication "places equal importance on theoretical and practical
understandings of how new technologies help shape the rhetorical decisions of
technical communicators in an increasingly electronic workplace." Honeycutt's course has traditionally been a graduate seminar class that
focuses on reading primary theoretical works about the role that technology
plays in technical and professional communication; students work toward
writing a research paper appropriate for publication. The course "plays an
important role in helping Ph.D. students prepare for their comprehensive exams
and in acclimating MA students to graduate textual scholarship."
Honeycutt,
however, requires students to complete "techtorials," which serve as "more of
a corrective balance of the theory/practice dichotomy" often found in such
graduate courses. He says, "It's difficult to talk about Manovich (author of
The Language of
New Media) intelligently if you haven't tried to make your own digital
video. I wanted to introduce students to specific key technologies in short
modules, but I still wanted them to be able to write an intelligent research
paper on this subject matter." These techtorials also give students firsthand
experience in "learning new technologies through communities of practice [such
that they must] rely on one another and socially constructed Internet
resources for their learning."
Two of the
techtorial projects in this course involve digital video. The first assignment
uses TechSmith's Camtasia to turn screen captures into videos, which is useful
for creating tutorials. For this assignment, partners create a training film
or tutorial for a software routine by first capturing the screen shots as a
video and then recording a voice over. The second assignment involves iMovie 3
and encourages students to explore the interface more than to perfect the
product. Taking advantage of the beautiful and historic campus, he divides the
class into five groups and designates a building for each group to research.
Students develop a two-three minute video on the "history and present
function" of the building in two weeks.
Honeycutt provides elaborate scaffolding for the assignment: he hyperlinks to
an online campus history site; he maps out a suggested (but not required)
schedule of tasks; he specifies equipment check in/out procedures, server
access details, and file-saving protocols; and he hyperlinks to online
tutorials for the digital camera as well as for iMovie. Such attention to
providing the resources students need to teach themselves how to use software
helps them better negotiate the dual demands of the practical and theoretical
aspects of the course.
Consensus
Developing coursework for students is only one piece –
and certainly not the first piece – of a curriculum that supports digital
video or any other multimedia composition. Payne and Honeycutt "recommend a
critical threshold of knowledgeable people (technically, politically,
pedagogically), collaborative planning/implementation, and a solid
communication infrastructure." As an example of building that critical
threshold of experts, Honeycutt points to the recent hiring of Geoff Sauer,
whose knowledge of "back-end" technologies to support multimedia work on a
large scale as well as his expertise in multimedia production is crucial as
they set up a newly dedicated Technical Communications lab and implement the
curricular reform. This new lab is scheduled to open for classroom use in the
spring (a scheduling decision worth remembering since the Mac G5s have been on
back-order for weeks). The lab will have a mixture of Mac G5s and Dell Pentium
4 machines that are optimized for multimedia production (with DVD burners,
non-linear video programs, and audio editors). But, the most exciting part of
the new lab is a server that will run Flash Communication, Darwin Streaming,
and FileMaker simultaneously: more students' multimedia projects as well as
training modules via Flash or Streaming QuickTime can be online. Most
importantly, the new server is a first step toward a "vision of an open
digital space […] like a public commons" that will allow several departments
to have the resources necessary for supporting the ISUComm commitments. But,
this open space is also an administrative nightmare: working out permissions,
ad hoc protocols for procedures, and troubleshooting the technical errors.
Such spaces aren't for the faint of heart, but then again neither were land
grant universities in 1862.
Michigan Technological University
Some of the most powerful and
well-developed resources at MTU are in the humanities department. These
resources enable instructors to incorporate digital video into the classroom
and are what Richard Selfe calls the "culture of support." This well-developed
and cultivated environment consists of a fully staffed computer facility with
two platforms, 30-40 computer consultants, two specialists in system
administration, and one director of administration. In addition to these
resources, instructors and students have access to sessions on Teaching with
Technology, access to a department chair who is committed to this department
using this technology well, access to other faculty members and graduate
students with knowledge about this technology and, finally, the time to play
with it. Moreover, MTU is unique in that it has a summer workshop, Computers
in Writing-Intensive Classrooms (CIWIC), which appeals to faculty and graduate
students.
In
the profiles that follow, Cynthia Selfe, Professor of Humanities, reveals her
introduction to digital video, her approach to learning and incorporating this
new technology, and the attitude she brings with her into the classroom and
shares with her students about learning and literacies. Erin Smith, Assistant
Professor of New Media and Technical Communication, discusses her interest and
thoughts on film studies, and the considerations she carries into the
classroom about the use and place of digital video. Finally, Alison Crocket, a
graduate student in Rhetoric and Technical Communication (RTC), and an
instructor in the Humanities department, explains how her background in film
and video as well as her experiences with visual and written texts influence
how she has incorporated digital video in her classes and in her work.
Cynthia Selfe
Selfe's introduction to
digital video started about two years, when she starting playing around with
video for CIWIC because more and more participants expressed interest.
Additionally, there were just some things that she wanted to do in a classroom
that could not be done without a medium that exceeded the alphabetic. Digital
video, however, is one of those mediums where you can use motion and sound to create new semiotic channels and "text." Two years
later, according to Selfe, she is still "sweating bullets trying to figure out
all this stuff." However, she doubts that she will ever again teach a class
that requires communication activities without using multimodal alternatives.
This semester
Selfe is using iMovie and VideoWave in her undergraduate Adolescent Literature
class to give students a basic introduction to composing in the literacy of
movies. The goal of the class is for her students to create – after a series
of multimodal assignments and readings – enrichment assignments for
adolescents between 11-18 years of age that engage them with books through
alternative multimodal texts.
One of the
ways she introduces students to these alternative texts is by showing movies
that she made herself. The first focus is on sound. Selfe shows these films
first without sound and then with sound. The question that is discussed
afterward is how exactly sound works with images to add and/or subtract from
the meaning of the text. An additional assignment she has used is reading the
poem "Pray for Peace" by Ellen Bass in print, and talking about how this might
look as a video as well as what kind of sounds would contribute to the meaning
of the poem. The goal is to get students playing, thinking, and communicating
in different modes.
In the next
assignment, Selfe combines the various channels in a project that will yield
for her students their first iMovie. The goal is to create a "text" that
includes 10-20 still photographs as well as a sound file working together to
communicate a coherent message using iMovie or VideoWave.
To begin, she asks students to import still photographs, either their own
family photos or ones they can download copyright and royalty free from the American Memories Collection. The goal is to
choose photos that cluster around a theme or topic that they want to
communicate to the class. Then, they also have to download a song, either from
the Apple iTunes or from the
American Memory Collection. The song should contribute to the message they
want to communicate in their movie. After having the students save their
photos and song to a CD, Selfe is ready to teach iMovie and VideoWave. She
walks them through how to import the still images and sound, put in
transitions and titles, and thus create their first movie for the class.
Her underlying
motivation for this multimodal assignment is to get them using the various
modes of composing. She explains that, if she is really expected to educate
students for a world outside her classroom, they should try each mode of
composing and perhaps try combining them. The transition from the various
modes may be slow, she warns, but limiting them to communicating in only
alphabetic text is not enough anymore.
Her advice to
instructors considering or already using digital video is to try and maintain
a great sense of humor. Unless you are un-humanly lucky, things will go wrong.
Part of her success she attributes to her willingness to learn, observe,
practice, and try things out. Additionally, there is a need to respect the
literacy students bring into the classroom – "if you don't respect their
literacies, they aren't going to talk to you about them." It is still
important to remember that alphabetic literacy is primary, so not all
assignments should be an iMovie or sound file, especially since alphabetic
literacy is the prime mode of communication in our culture. Additionally, she
warns not to use cutting edge technology; as Richard Selfe points out, "It is
too bloody on the cutting edge; instead, be on the trailing edge of the
cutting edge." The balance, however, comes in when trying to be in that window
of opportunity with technology: we have to strike a balance between being on
the cutting edge, the trailing edge, or not on the edge at all; after all, the
goal ultimately is to use the technology while it still has the ability to
engage our students in unique ways. This window of opportunity is interesting
to consider given that media generations are getting shorter and shorter and
the window is getting smaller and smaller.
Erin Smith
Smith recalls that, at one
point during her Ph.D. work, she seriously considered switching to her minor,
film studies. Although she finished her Ph.D. in literature as well as that
minor in film studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the specific
disciplines she found compelling in film studies continue to play a
significant role in the work she has done and continues to do. As a graduate
student at Madison, she created and directed the Composition Technology
program, an early adaptation of teaching with technology at their traditional
English department. Currently, Smith is an Assistant Professor of New Media
and Technical Communication at MTU. Her continued interest in film scholarship
is stronger, in part because of the development of digital video technology.
Smith realizes
that most students are alienated from traditional reading practices, but are
very practiced in film and television. When helped to articulate the practices
of film and television, instructors can get students to more quickly
understand the material as well as make connections to their writing. The use
of digital video then is an analogy between editing in film and editing in
writing. However, although Smith has done a lot of work with composition, she
approaches digital video and film a little differently. It is not simply a multimodal experience, combining different media to communicate a message. For
her, film is a specific discipline, and she keeps this disciplinary awareness
constantly in mind when asking her students to make connections between
film-making and writing. The production of digital video needs to be
accountable to some film rhetoric – how people do the kind of editing and
production work they do. Consequently, digital video work is about production
and performance. It is inherently about producing something as well as being
performative in nature. It involves bodies in space, having students move them
around and stage them. The analogy to writing is that skilled writers do that
type of movement and staging in their heads; for beginning writers, it is
easier to move and stage in the real world and capture them in the real world
through digital video technology. Moreover, digital video adds an active
dimension to an assignment. The portability of the digital video product
creates a social dimension to production that you do not have, in the same
way, with a written product. The ability to "show" the product to others, to
display it is different than having someone read a written text.
In the
classroom then, digital video means having students plan, script, shoot and
edit video (although you could just do the editing aspect only). The "newness" of this technology is the digital part, which makes it a classroom-friendly technology. Smith has noticed that it is easier to get students to understand
concepts in film – reasons for the composing choices made, getting them
motivated by the story they are telling, and discussing the effects these
choices have on the viewers/readers – with digital video production work.
Writing
activities are always implied in film (for example, storyboards and
scripting). Composing is always going on, and that type of composing is what
Smith is convinced her students are asked or are going to be asked to do in
their lives at home and at work. "Now that we can and do communicate in other
ways, people are doing it, and it is appropriate for us to do so in the
classroom as well," she says. The gain for students is that they can
appreciate what it takes to put a film together and can begin to gain the
ability to write what they want to say and how they want say it, in order to
get the effect they want. As an instructor, Smith says that it's "easier in
digital video to connect the ‘what' and the ‘how' by having them examine the
‘why.'"
This
semester, Smith is applying her skills and interests in film studies and digital video production to a general requirement course, UN1001- Perspectives. As a general requirement course, Perspectives compares
the assumptions, methodologies, and goals of contrasting intellectual
disciplines as they apply to a model issue or problem.
Smith's "Monsters and Maniacs" course focuses on the strategies of analyzing film using the following perspectives: the language of film production and analysis, an introduction to the concepts of genre and convention, and an overview of various critical approaches to film and film audiences. Specifically, Smith
asks students to look at how and why horror and suspense films create
particular reactions as well as consider theories about the cultural function
of sensational or emotionally-provocative films.
Consequently, her goal is to teach students certain habits of mind that would
allow them to make connections on their own between various modes of
communication – and if they come away with an appreciation of film rhetoric
and production, so much the better.
As for any
words of advice, Smith encourages instructors to have clear goals and be
able to explain to students what is being evaluated when using digital video.
Assessment in this medium can be more challenging since there are a number of
other factors to consider than the "text" itself. For her own classes, she has
students do written assessments of what they did, the choices they made, and
why. She has found that it is easier to assess students if she has other
examples to work from. Moreover, the examples she shows are typically not her
own. Additionally, instructors need to have access to equipment – digital
video cameras, computers that have enough juice to handle multimedia as well
as the necessary programs. Finally, define yourself, the work you do, and your
goals in the classroom, understand the resources at your institution, and "try
this in a class you've already taught before – don't make everything
new, start in a modest way."
Alison Crockett
Alison Crockett, a graduate
student in the RTC program and a humanities instructor at MTU, began her work
in film and video at seventeen, when she started working for a local public
television station. As an undergraduate broadcasting major, she was involved
in "on-air work" and served as an assistant to the producer and director of
"in-house production" at the station. During her junior year in college, she
became involved in documentary film work, particularly in the post-production
and distribution process. This is where she realized that the kind of
storytelling she wanted to do and the way she wanted to do storytelling could
finally coincide. In 2002, she received her masters in documentary film and
video making from Northern Michigan University. During this work on
documentary films, she recalls facing some internal conflicts about what
storytelling meant for her. Although she had always been interested in
stories, she knew that she thought in pictures and not words. Writing,
although it did tell a story in her head, seemed at the same time always
removed from the way the story existed for her.
Film making,
particularly documentary film making and the video production process, was for
her storytelling with a particular medium – video, which allowed for that
distance she felt in the written text to finally be bridged. It is all about
the "process" not the product, she explains. As a film and video maker she
considers the "process" to be very similar to her process as a writer. She
explains both processes in the following steps:
- First, the concept or a thesis/main idea is created.
- Then a treatment or brainstorming occurs – a more developed and detailed idea coming out of the concept.
- Next, an extended treatment or an outline might follow.
- Research or getting your elements – which might include interviews, film and video footage, music, stills, graphics, etc. – is next.
- Then, depending on your elements, storyboarding or a more developed and complete outline follows.
- The script or draft is developed around this time.
- Finally, post-production or possibly a second/final draft occurs where you blend the elements together to tell your story.
Crockett has incorporated this process in the work she is doing currently inside and outside the classroom. Since 1998, Crockett has been visiting elementary school classrooms as a guest and conducting video production workshops. One of the obstacles she often encounters from some of the educators is their lack of acknowledgement about the process involved in the workshop she does. Some consider what she does as simply bringing into the classroom the knowledge of how to use those particular tools – digital video cameras, computer software and hardware, etc. She explains that, "film and video production is no more about using the tools than the pen and paper is about writing."
One of the projects she often does with the students is a video biography of a member of their community. Prior to getting started on the actual project, her plan of attack is to first overwhelm them with all the considerations that are made when creating a film, video or a 30-second commercial. The goal is to get them to appreciate the work done before they start creating their own pieces. "The general public doesn't know what it takes to make a 30-second commercial, especially little kids think it is easy." After she overwhelms them, she begins to take apart for them the various stages involved from beginning to end. Finally, the students begin putting all of these stages together in their own video biography project. Some of the goals that drive Crockett to continue to do these workshops are, first, showing students the possibilities that exist outside their rural area schools, where some do not have access to the resources needed to do such projects. Second, she hopes that they increase their awareness and understanding of what it takes to bring about a story they want others to see, and that there are other medias to do them in. Her objective is not to make all these students film and video makers; instead, she sees value in the exercise of taking things apart and putting them together again, encouraging students to see how the individual pieces of "text" can come together to create a whole in various ways.
Crockett's advice for the budding film-maker inside of some of us is simple: read the instruction manuals of the technology you use. Getting a good grasp of the tools you use allows you to focus more on the process or content instead of the technology.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Although budget
cuts have closed six computer labs across campus and reduced open lab hours in
many others this year, campus computing resources at UNC-CH are impressive.
Two hundred and fifty plus wireless access points, thirty-something smart
classrooms, and a veritable entourage of support staff means instructors don't
face many of the struggles others do. But, navigating the computing resources
and troubleshooting problems is often a mystifying and frustrating man-hunt:
who controls this piece of this system in this classroom and who offers this
piece of equipment? Digital video projects, for instance, require an elaborate
coordination with the Beasley Center in the Johnston Center for Undergraduate
Excellence (which provides four digital video cameras and accessories) and the
Media Resources Lab in the Undergraduate Library (which has four iMacs with
iMovie); these resources, installed in 2002, are available to the
university-at-large. Other labs equipped with Final Cut Pro and Premiere are
reserved for particular courses or organizations. Getting the technology
pieces assembled is less than half the battle, though; developing an
assignment that both fits and extends the traditional course objective of
writing academic essays is the greater challenge.
Four profiles
of UNC-CH instructors reveal the rewards and pitfalls of digital video
projects. Daniel Anderson, Associate Professor and Director of the
Undergraduate Literature Program, discusses his use of digital video with
undergraduate and graduate students and expresses his concerns about the
complexities of implementing digital video as a programmatic requirement.
Heather Ross, a graduate student in 20th Century American and British
Literature as well as an instructor in the Writing Program, explains how she
used a digital video project to establish group solidarity in one of the most
difficult units in the required composition course sequence. Scott Halbritter,
a graduate student in Rhetoric and Composition and Linguistics who is an
instructor in the Writing Program, discusses how he is using digital video in
a course for basic writers to emphasize process. Todd Taylor, Associate
Professor, shares how he developed a video documentary course with a
service-learning component.
Daniel Anderson
Anderson recalls, laughing,
that the first set of instructions he wrote for capturing video in 1994 at the
University of Texas at Austin included the line: "you will need the Power
Tower computer, a VCR and a hat." The hat – really any thick fabric – covered
the infrared eye on the VCR, enabling you to capture video instead of play it.
Those days of postage stamp-sized videos and multiple software applications
for capturing, editing, and exporting video are thankfully a bygone era (embarrassing example);
in fact, video editing software is now more transparent – more intuitive –
than most Web page design packages. This different paradigm for digital video
production makes it an expansive media for thinking "in" and "about"
non-alphabetic literacies.
With
undergraduates, Anderson focuses on teaching students to think "in"
non-alphabetic literacies, making use of rhetorical strategies in multimedia
compositions. In an English Education course for pre-service K-12 teachers,
students explore non-textual arguments by composing short iMovies. This
exercise encourages pre-service teachers to think about ways of incorporating
more than text into their lesson plans as well as their assignments; these
students also gain the technical expertise to use any available equipment in
their schools. Further, students have the option of submitting a movie instead
of an 8-10 page paper for the final project. Even though the movie is at least
twice the work, several students this past fall elected to do so. Videos
created in the course addressed the use of dialect in the Language Arts
classroom, critiqued the 7th Grade writing test in North Carolina, questioned
the standardized testing embedded in "No Child Left Behind," and explored the
difficulties of being a first-year professional educator.
After watching students in the process of video editing and then viewing their
products, Anderson admits that it is easy to see the video as a superficial
treatment of the topic in comparison with an 8-10 page paper whose markers of
analysis and sophistication are more readily apparent to the traditionally
trained scholar. Yet, he trusts the process and scaffolds video editing with
built-in research and reflective writing, requiring students to express the
intellectual work that video sometimes makes invisible. Anderson discussed
this particular project in a conference video presentation entitled "The Warp
and the Weft of Learning to Teach."
In an
undergraduate survey of major American authors this fall, students will use
Tk3 authorware to compose literary analyses of works of literature. Authorware
provides a versatile interface for incorporating text, images, sound, and
video in an electronic "book." Such technology means that students can include
video clips of interviews with professors, of themselves talking, of class
discussion, and of captured video/sound clips in their analysis of a work.
Writing literary analysis in multimedia allows students to put faces and
spoken voices into academic writing, which has the potential to help them
overcome their angst with the disembodied prose of the academy. When asked
about intellectual property concerns in such projects, Anderson describes
students' incorporation of clips from other published media into their own
videos as being similar to effectively incorporating textual quotations into a
paper. Paying attention to fair use guidelines is a consequence of entering a
different discourse, and students will learn the rules of importing another's
intellectual property into their own multimedia compositions in the same ways
that they learned to incorporate quotations with attribution, citation, and
elaboration. By calling attention to the similarities between composing texts
and videos, Anderson hopes that students gain a better understanding of the
strategies available to them in any composing process and a more critical
framework for evaluating compositions.
In Anderson's
graduate courses, students think "in," but mostly "about" non-alphabetic
literacies. Enabling students to wrestle with the tensions between alphabetic
and non-alphabetic literacies and the ideologies in which such literacies are
embedded takes priority. In a graduate seminar about teaching with technology,
students encountered this tension by composing a short video that supported a
thesis selected from a word bank. By selecting a subject, verb, and predicate,
students chose an argumentative thesis like "film coerces reality,"
which they had to engage through a video they edited in about two weeks. This
short, simple assignment taught students the technology and introduced them to
the rhetorical strategies of multimedia composition in a very brief time span.
Building from their experiences, students were better able to articulate their
responses to the seminar readings and to the academic culture at their
institution. This fall, graduate students in a course designed as the
prerequisite for teaching composition in the Writing Program will be composing
a video about a teaching issue; their video assignment encourages them to
interview experienced teachers, to observe classes, and to integrate research.
Students will also assess video as a potential assignment for first-year
composition students. This work with multimedia composition and the teachers
in the Writing Program is ironic because the Staff Manual's description
of each unit in each course suggests a page limit and focuses on texts –
students' writing and the scholars' they cite. Anderson points out that, as an
institutional document, the Staff Manual reveals the historical context
of criteria for first-year composition, but the technology moves much faster
than this culture. Training graduate students who are employed under the
Staff Manual to move beyond its limitations while acknowledging the
corpus of its pedagogy is an important step to changing the institution.
But, change is
amazingly difficult, especially at the programmatic level. And, often the
linchpin decisions are made "through the back door." One of Anderson's
frustrations with the Carolina Computing Initiative (CCI) – which controls the
kind of laptop all incoming students are required to purchase – is that the
computer's configuration still prioritizes alphabetic literacies. His
contention is that CCI could purchase a video editing suite and firewire port
for all laptops just as easily and inexpensively as they purchase the
Microsoft Office suite. CCI's decision about the components of every students'
laptop makes a decision about literacy practices. Such decisions limit
students' multimedia work on their personal laptops to PowerPoint, Microsoft
Word, and Netscape Composer; access to cameras as well as sound and video
editing software in most of the labs is limited to those students who are
registered for courses in which such technology is required. CCI's decision,
however, might not be a bad one considering that the recent university-wide
curriculum revisions remain committed to alphabetic, print literacies, even
though UNC-CH is a well-known ubiquitous computing environment. Still,
Anderson questions the implied university-service ethic by calling attention
to instructors' responsibilities to equip students to be effective
communicators now and in eight to ten years when even more multimedia
technologies have become transparent and widely available. Making a
revolutionary commitment to multimedia composition in the academy is
contingent on these larger curricular decisions … and it's impossible, yet so
vital to serve on all the important committees.
Anderson's
advice to instructors interested in digital video is "just play with it" and
"don't over think it." His own interest and expertise in digital video
developed in much the same way. A long-time user of Macs, Anderson taught
himself to use iMovie by making home movies of his family when the program
became a standard component of the G series. In fact, he has articulated this
phenomenon as a part of an emergent prosumer culture – where the roles of
consumer and producer are merged – in an article for Kairos 8.1. His platform
commitment and collection of Macs enabled him to do video projects in
classrooms long before the campus had such resources: by lugging a Mac cube
from his fifth floor office and moving two Macs from a lab to the third floor
classroom for a couple hours a day several times a week, digital video became
a workable reality. Achieving a workable reality for yourself and your
students is most important, so Anderson encourages instructors to explore the
platform options and find user-friendly movie editing resources; when using
Macs, he suggests introducing the Mac platform (which can be disorienting for
PC users and vice versa). He also recommends orienting students to the
software in terms of rhetorical tips for video composition (e.g., "here's how
you make a transition between clips and these are things you consider as you
evaluate the transition's effectiveness). Ultimately, he says, you have "to be
willing to work at the edge, without a net, with a teaching philosophy that
values students and their learning more than the technology."
Scott Halbritter
Scott Halbritter is
using video for the first time this fall in a most unlikely course for several
very good reasons. At UNC-CH, students who score below 470 on the verbal
section of the SAT are placed in ENGL-10, essentially a remedial writing
course that does not count toward fulfilling the two required composition
courses but cannot be bypassed by those students who place into it. This semester, Halbritter has three Asian exchange students, two native speakers of
Spanish, two African-American football players, one African-American
basketball player, two Caucasian women, one Caucasian man, and two
African-American women – in sum, thirteen basic writers. In groups of four or
five, students will have the opportunity to produce a 5-minute video
expressing their ideas about honor, integrity, and ethics in the university.
The videos will be screened at an Undergraduate Symposium that is part of the
university-wide, year-long emphasis on Honor and Integrity at Carolina. Such
an opportunity allows students whose work would otherwise be considered on the
margins of the academic community to take center-stage.
Halbritter's
rationale for having basic writers compose video is more than the disruption
of the university's hierarchy and even more than the boost for students'
confidence. He says:
- Anyone who has composed a Web site or a film will probably testify that
the composing process can be much more taxing and time consuming than
producing a traditional textual composition. If we are truly concentrating
on process, multimedia compositions can allow us a freedom from traditional
academic products. Academic writing, and academic discourse, may be the very
thing that discourages some students from getting excited about
composing.
In preparation for his first video class project, Halbritter has accepted an important fact:
- [Many] unexpected problems […] are certain to follow projects that use
(1) technologies not germane to most academic work (video cameras, video
production software, Macs in an IBM contract school, music recording), and
(2) products that result from these works that are not germane to most
writing courses (i.e., more than text on electronic or paper pages).
Heather Ross
Heather Ross first used video in
two composition courses during the fall of 2002. In the Writing Program, the final required semester of composition coursework
(ENGL-12) introduces students to the academic discourse conventions of
argument in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. In the
fall semester, this course is populated by students who placed out of ENGL-11
through SAT scores or by taking the voluntary placement exam – usually first
semester, first-year students and few transfer students. This student
population and the complexities of doing natural sciences research toward an
argumentative essay are rarely a winning combination, especially since
students have little to no experience in a workshop environment.
Ross's
approach to the conundrum of her students' lack of experience with research,
with academic writing, and with group work is to introduce them to a media
where the five paragraph essay is no longer an option. Her assignment is a
twist on the analyze a commercial essay; instead of analyzing cultural
artifacts, students produce a cultural artifact. In order to meet the Writing
Program's course objectives, she pairs public service announcements (PSAs)
with natural sciences research. This pairing makes the foray into natural
science journals more relevant and more accessible to students. Composing a
video instead of a paper as the first graded assignment in a college course
also clearly indicates that the expectations for their work have changed.
Ross finds
that the most exciting aspect of the PSA video project is the group bonding
students do around the camera and the computer. The sequence of her
assignments prepares them for collaboration, for the kinds of trust and
initiative required for group work to succeed. Students – arranged in groups
of four or five – are each required to locate and summarize a scholarly
article about an addictive disease that interests them. Students then present
these summaries to their groups, and each group selects an addictive disease
that will be the theme of their PSA. The next step in the assignment sequence
is "the grand plan" or storyboard. Ross requires that students work out not
only what will happen on the screen during the video, but also who will be
doing what during the production process. She guides students by calling
attention to the following typical tasks that happen outside of class: some
folks have to do more research (in natural sciences and for sound or images);
someone has to schedule additional camera and lab time; someone has to
schedule filming sessions and arrange for props and/or actors; someone has to
update the grand plan; and someone has to edit the film clips for integration
in the video. The variety of tasks involved allows students to specialize in
an area of production that most interests them, so that they can participate
in the group on their own terms. This collaborative environment is further
enhanced by a classroom culture where rotation is expected: students alternate
who operates the mouse and who reports on the group's progress each class
period. After five weeks of working together to plan, film, and edit a video,
students have developed a deep sense of group solidarity that gives them
"ownership and pride in the artifact they've produced."
When students
develop the rubric by which they'll evaluate each others' videos, Ross finds
that students become hypercritical of others' videos precisely because they
think theirs is best (even if it is not) since it took so much work. She uses
the videos from other classes as anchors; during her first semester, she used the videos from her first class as anchors for her second and vice-versa. As
students watch these anchors and evaluate these products against the goals
they've identified for themselves through out the process, they "calibrate"
themselves and have derived the rubric Ross would have given them anyway. The
rubric usually specifies that content (use of rhetorical strategies to address
a particular audience in order to convey a message supported by natural
sciences research) counts 60% and artistry (the cool things you can to do to
imitate MTV and commercials) 40%.
Students'
excitement about digital video production, in Ross's view, comes from several
factors. The competitiveness between groups certainly pushes them to do their
best work, but their motivation also comes from knowing that they'll have the
chance to enter the Johnston Center's Multimedia Festival (a campus-wide
event) later in the semester. Nothing beats a real audience as an impetus for
hard work. Another factor is that video fits into their understanding of a
creative act whereas an academic essay doesn't; in video, the things they
insert for flair and stylistic nuance might actually work in their favor,
instead of against them. Perhaps most importantly, a video project gives them
an artifact that they can show-off in ways that are inappropriate and/or
impossible with a paper.
Candidly, Ross
admits that she worries if "video production is worth 5 weeks out of 15 when
their writing skills need so much attention." And, then, she reminds herself
what she sees happen as students work together to compose the PSAs: they
develop a working relationship that fuels an increasing sophistication with
the implementation and recognition of rhetorical strategies. Her article in
Kairos 8.1, "Digital
Video and Composition: Gauging the Promise of a Low-Maintenance High-Reward
Relationship," showcases her students' work, gives practical advice about
attempting a video project, and poses hard questions about new media's place
in undergraduate writing programs.
Todd Taylor
Todd Taylor began using video
assignments in courses for first year honors students in 1999, when it took
three CD-ROMs and a weekend to make 20 edited videos Web-ready. Taylor's
commitment to setting a precedent for using technology in ways that are
consistent with a student-centered, writing-intensive, socially-conscious
pedagogy inspired the first course. Sensing that multimedia was "the next
thing," he wrote grants in spring 1998 to get cameras, microphones, and
other equipment. The important question then became how to use that technology
in the classroom, and the answer came through establishing a relationship with
APPLES – a student-sponsored service learning program. As a condition of
enrollment in his course, students are also committed to 3-5 hours of
community service through APPLES. Students' experiences in the community
become the basis for a multimedia documentary that, in many cases, is then
used by the organization to solicit donors, to train staff, or to educate the
public.
Although the
model documentaries and particular assignments have changed over the years,
four pedagogical moves are consistent. The first move is an introductory
case-study of documentaries, which immerses students in text-and-image print
documentaries, sound documentaries (from NPR), and video documentaries. As
they analyze these documentaries, students work toward a "defining
documentaries" paper that requires them to "challenge and expand upon [common
sense] definitions."
The second move addresses the rhetorical and technical aspects of each of the
following media individually: HTML, texts, photographs, and audio; this
sequence culminates with a consideration of the rhetorical and technical
aspects of video, which combines all of the previous media. This pairing of
technical proficiency and rhetorical savvy prepares students for integrating
media in sophisticated ways. The third move establishes an audience for the
multimedia documentaries. Students propose their documentary project using the
submission guidelines for the John Hope Franklin Student
Documentary Awards, a local competition students may choose to enter.
Students are also aware of the opportunity to enter the annual Johnston Center
Multimedia Festival, which was launched in 2002 by sponsors on-campus and in
the community. Thus, built into the assignment are three potential audiences
beyond the classroom: (a) the organization in which the student has
volunteered; (b) a respected competition with professional judges; and (c) an
on-campus exhibit. The fourth move turns the class into a workshop for
students' multimedia documentaries, giving students time to give and to get
feedback during the long editing process. This sequence of pedagogical moves
means that students have the skills necessary to be composers (documentarians)
instead of collage-makers; they can capture and edit their own texts, images,
audio, and video as well as publish their projects in a variety of public
forums.
In
this course, students gain professional skills, but many also gain
professional experience. Four of Taylor's students have won John Hope Franklin
Student Documentary Awards. Using the skills she learned in ENGL-29 and -42H
(an advanced course created for veterans of 29), one student became the
student director of UNC-TV on-campus; she finished a feature length,
professional quality film (30 minutes) before she graduated. Another student's
video will be used at Orange County's YMCA to promote interest in the Teen
Mothers' Mentoring Program. One student's documentary about the transition in
Rock Hall, Maryland from a commercial fishing town into a tourist town was
shown at the town's festival; townsfolk were so impressed that they asked to
buy copies of her video. Another student composed a documentary using the
research collected and the photographs taken by Bill Bamberger – author of
Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, one of
the documentaries in the case study – of a mobile art gallery in a Habitat for
Humanity neighborhood; her work will be on exhibit at the National Building
Museum later this year. This fall, ENGL-29 students will be working as a
production team on two projects. The first is a short video that features
student leaders discussing the changes in UNC-CH's Honor System; the video
will be shown during Honor and Integrity Week. The second is an hour-long
documentary for Orange County Parks and Recreation Service about several
recently acquired historical sites in the area. These kinds of projects
connect students to the communities and issues they care about and enable them
to "tell creative yet well-researched, carefully crafted, true stories about
intriguing peoples and places" to interested audiences; they move from "being
a student of documentaries to becoming a documentarian."
Despite all
the positive outcomes and experiences he's had with ENGL-29 and -42H, Taylor
urges caution. "Don't try this at home" is his way of acknowledging that
UNC-CH provides many resources and grant opportunities unavailable at other
institutions; it is also a way of acknowledging that teaching multimedia
composition involves a great deal of time spent working with students, working
on machines, and working with students on machines. It is being the "mad
scientist" working feverishly on machines that troubles him most. Nonetheless,
he insists that the kinds of work students are doing in these multimedia
documentaries is the kind of work he couldn't inspire them to do during the
ten years he was teaching the composition of traditional academic – read
"jaded, callous, institutional" – prose. Now, he uses the "bait and switch
trick" to lure students into rhetorical sophistication through multimedia,
reminding them that similar strategies apply in their writing. It's a pedagogy
that, in his words, is "right for me and for my students at my university."
Conclusion
We situated our review as an inquiry into the
pedagogical practices and implications of using digital video in the
composition classrooms of three different universities. The nine instructors
we interviewed echo each other in particular ways.
- Digital video production is a powerful way to engage many literacies at once. Selfe explains the transition from alphabetic to non-alphabetic literacies with an old engineering adage: "If the only tool in your tool belt is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; so, if the tool in your tool belt is the alphabet, then everything looks like an essay." The New London group has enlarged that tool belt to include the aural, oral, textual, gestural, spatial, and multimodal, which means we are only beginning to imagine what else besides essays might exist. "Designing" with such tools means that students' experiences with images, music, and film can become an integral part of their academic work in our classrooms; digital video production, in particular, enables students to put such literacies to work as they make sense of their world.
- Digital video production stimulates collaboration and participation. Convincing students who have most frequently encountered singly authored texts that group work is a great way to write an essay is often a difficult sell. By contrast, students are aware of the eternally scrolling credits of movies, and they recognize that video is a collaboratively achieved product in the "real" world. When confronted with the multimodal demands of video as a medium and with the technological demands of video as technical feat, students can identify multiple, equally important roles. (The instructor's further delineation of these roles is vital.) The variety of tasks involved in producing digital video allows students to specialize according to their own interests; because all of the tasks are necessary to the process of producing the video, students develop a confident sense of interdependency.
- Digital video production involves students in a rich composition process. Working simultaneously in several modes and mediums multiplies the rhetorical strategies students can use to create meaning. Being able to "play" a video enables them to see and hear their composition in ways few can "see and hear" a text-based essay. Revision with an audience's eye and ear thus becomes less of an abstract experience. In digital video production, students seem to revise early and often (and sometimes obsessively) without direct provocation from the instructor, and they come to appreciate revision as a vital part of the composition process – two phenomena that are rare when students write and rewrite essays.
- Digital video production puts students in a variety of social spaces. They film somewhere. They edit somewhere. They show their videos somewhere – maybe on the Internet, on campus, and/or in the community. This mobility puts students into the workflow of the academy and into the world outside the academy in ways that emphasize their membership in larger communities.
- Digital video production takes a village. Digital video production requires more time, energy, and resources than one instructor can provide. Unlike other projects that can be uploaded to server space and then downloaded to any computer station, video editing is limited to one computer or one external hard drive. Students will need access to this equipment well beyond class time, which means that the computer lab must be staffed with knowledgeable consultants for blocks of time during the week. Developing a positive, working relationship with these lab consultants and their supervisor may be the best investment an instructor can make. Unless the computer lab comes well-equipped with cameras, video editing software, and local hard drive space, digital video production may also require partnerships between computer labs and across departmental boundaries: Richard Selfe calls such partnerships a "culture of support." The culture of support, however, isn't just about technology; it is also shaping a curriculum that values multimedia and a building a community of experts who can keep that curriculum responsive to the windows of opportunity that Selfe mentioned. Programmatic initiatives like ISUComm at Iowa State forge the way for more campuses to make aggressive, long-term commitments to teaching communication through multiple modes and media.
- The relationship between digital video and academic discourse is problematic. A video is not an essay, and essays remain an important part of most students' collegiate experience. Ross expressed concern about the amount of time spent on video instead of text. Halbritter emphasizes the importance of finding a legitimate (academic?) audience for video assignments. Smith and Taylor advocate video as a way to help students rethink their strategies for composing academic texts. And then there's the issue of whether academic discourse is even a good standard of what we should be doing in composition anyway. Anderson's advice about having a pedagogy that you can articulate to your superiors as well as to your students seems crucial.
- Knowing rhetoric may not license us to create and critique anything and everything. As Smith and Crocket make clear, film studies and film production have bodies of knowledge and sets of inquiry tools all their own. Though rhetoric can certainly facilitate the effective use of digital video in the classroom, we must begin to be more intentional in our borrowing from the professional programs and academic disciplines that have been using these media longer, with more sophistication.
- Teaching digital video production means learning as you teach. Digital video changes the flow of power in the classroom between people and technology, altering classroom dynamics in ways that can be highly productive. New machines and software change the task environment, initiating a renegotiation of instructor-student and student-student relationships. The shifting distribution of power among instructors, students, and machines brings to the fore critical technology literacy and student-centered pedagogies. Remembering that technology is neither an innocent nor a loyal tool can help everyone avoid slavish attention to making the machines work. Since few instructors are experts in digital video production, students also have the opportunity to watch their teachers learn. By intentionally modeling metacognitive strategies on their feet in a genuine context, instructors can help students learn to learn software, learn to learn rhetoric in multimodal media, and learn to learn shifting power dynamics in institutionally structured relationships. In the kind of environment where instructors are visibly teaching themselves and learning from students, reciprocal teaching doesn't seem so far-fetched.
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