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 Post-Secondary English Classrooms at Three Universities
by Melissa Meeks, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alex Ilyasova, Michigan Technological University

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.
          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

"How does the visual both promise and threaten to change the composition course?"
-Diana George

classrooms. In this review, we have tried to pay attention to institutional constraints as well as the nuts-and-bolts of digital video production in a classroom. We have tried to highlight both the similarities and the differences in approaches of the instructors we interviewed at Iowa State University and at our home institutions, Michigan Technological University (Alex) and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Melissa).

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 Payne helps a student. 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.
Like the writing process, the film/video production process is not as linear as it appears. It is recursive: the various stages of pre-production, production, and post-production often overlap, repeat, and develop at different points along the way. Consequently, for Crockett there has to be an acknowledgement of this process in digital video production and in writing. In order to discern the particular benefits of composing a video, we need to acknowledge how inherent and perhaps invisible the production process is in digital video work.
           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 Anderson robs Peter to pay Paul, connecting an IBM monitor to an iMac CPU. 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 Halbritter keeps track (on paper!) of 4 groups doing digital video projects. Photo courtesy of Karen Taylor. 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.
Getting basic writers involved in recording action photography, selecting original and borrowed digital stills, recording sound, selecting music, working with textual language and spoken language infinitely complicates and enlarges the strategies they have learned to ignore when they sit down to compose text. Multimedia composition, as Halbritter suggests, may be a productive way to re-engage students in the dialectical, recursive, metacognitive process we believe helps them gain sophistication. In fact, Halbritter's course moves these basic writers from analyzing and designing Web pages to composing video to writing an academic essay; he has put what many would consider the easiest assignment last because composing text is the hardest assignment for his students. He hopes that, by emphasizing the process of composing Web pages and videos for ten weeks, students will have different and better ways of approaching traditional writing assignments in the final five weeks of the course.
          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).
He also emphasizes the importance of finding a legitimate rhetorical goal for a video assignment. Situated in a legitimate, academic context, "students may find ways to communicate their academic work in film, not just create a one-off [sic] film project – something they will rarely find appropriate in the academy."

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 Ross engages students in conversation about their iMovies. 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.
Despite the seductiveness of digital video production in composition classes, there are also good reasons to hesitate.
  • 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.
These hesitations about digital video merit the attention of reflective practitioners: they are not red flags to keep folks out of the water. As Anderson, Taylor and Smith tell us, we can start slow and try one new mode and its associated media at a time. And, we must "jump in" because we have to be the kind of people who aren't afraid to sink or swim in front of our classes because our students have to be the kind of people who can communicate in many modes and media. See a table listing the teachers featured in this review.


Works Cited

Anderson, Daniel. Personal Interview. 5 September 2003.

_____. Personal Interview. 6-10 September 2003.

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis, eds. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 2000.

Crockett, Alison. Personal Interview. 9 September 2003.

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." CCC 54.1 (Sept. 2002): 11-39.

Halbritter, Scott. "Digital Video Review." Emails to Melissa Meeks. 10-11 September 2003.

_____. Personal Interview. 10 September 2003.

Honeycutt, Lee. "Digital Video Review." Emails to Melissa Meeks. 11-14 September 2003.

_____. Personal Interview. 12 September 2003.

Payne, Don. "Digital Video Review." Emails to Melissa Meeks. 9 September 2003.

Ross, Heather. "Digital Video Review." Emails to Melissa Meeks. 6-11 September 2003.

_____. Personal Interview. 10 September 2003.

Rubin, Michael. Nonlinear4: A field Guide to Digital Video and Film Editing. Gainesville, FL: Triad, 2000.

Selfe, Cynthia. Personal Interview. 5 September 2003.

Selfe, Richard. Personal Interview. 5 September 2003.

Smith, Erin. Personal Interview. 8 September 2003.

Taylor, Todd W. Personal Interview. 4 September 2003.