it’s alive

I have just decided to revive this blog which was originally something I had to do for a class. So, since I no longer have to use it, I think I might want to. So, my thesis is something to do with the use of dictionaries in fiction. On the one hand, I’m looking at a bunch of novels in which dictionaries function as metaphors, serve as means of characterization or as a means for emphasizing language issues and such (the main ones so far is Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket, Janet Frame’s Scented Gardens for the Blind, Milan Kundera’a The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and partly Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things). On the other hand, I’m looking at novels organized as dictionaries, and so here the dictionary is I guess a theme by virtue of being the form of the text, and so in a way, they raises a number of the same issues as the novels I had up there on the first hand (the novels on this hand are so far Milorad Pavich’s The Dictionary of the Khazars (male and female version), Ambrose Pierce Devil’s Dictionary and Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa). Both hands of novels obviously deal with language issues, especially the issue of codification and authoritative / conventional definitions. So theory-wise, I´ve been thinking about Foucault and Derrida alike (reading them is another matter…). I’ve also thought about Julia Kristeva (specifically in relation to Janet Frame).

I intend to post my thoughts about the individual novels, the theory and secondary material I read, my general thoughts about dictionaries, and hopefully there will be a bibliography at some point too. I invite comments and questions and criticisms, and I’ll acknowledge anything I take from these comments in my thesis once it materializes.

Overview of Pedagogical Approaches

Process Pedagogy:

Focus on the writing process which is brought this into the classroom

Class time is spent on writing, exploring, prewriting and discovery techniques rather than on the teacher lecturing

Students’ own experience is a primary source

The students are encouraged to think of themselves as writers

There are different and sometimes opposing strands within the process movement.

Process pedagogy was developed in the 1970s, inspired by the changing attitude to education that the 1960s fostered. It was a reaction against the dominant current-traditional approach to teaching composition, and it gained popularity throughout the eighties.

 

Expressive Pedagogy:

Focus on developing authentic voice

Puts the student writer in the center of the writing process

Focuses on the student’s development as an individual and on developing the student’s ability to assert her-/himself and become an active citizen.

Expressivism shares roots with process pedagogy and the particularly the ideas voiced by such scholars as Donald Murray and Peter Elbow

 

Rhetorical Pedagogy:

Focus on the relative usefulness of the history of rhetoric and composition

Focus on the ideologies inherent in the teaching of rhetoric and composition – or teaching as such

Also includes the application of rhetorical analysis to other kinds of texts than written ones

 

Cultural Studies and Composition:

Reflects the increased attention to the mass media and pop culture in the teaching of composition

Concerned with the breaking down the dichotomies of high and low art within class structures

Furthers such aspects of composition as ideological awareness and critique, attention to cultural codes, literacy, and issues of race and gender, connected to liberatory pedagogy and interdisciplinary/collaborative pedagogies

 

Critical Pedagogy:

Focuses on power relations, critical awareness, critical examination of dominant discourses, developing students as citizens, often linked to liberatory pedagogies

Origin: 60s process movement, resurfaced in the 70s because of the political climate

 

Feminist Pedagogy:

Uses gender as a starting point for discussing subjectivity

Asks what’s not there in standard text/student writing to bring out neglected aspect of a story

Investigates ideas about gender critically

Focus on investigate ideology and culture

 

Collaborative Pedagogy:

Sees knowledge as a social construction

Questions traditional notions of authorship

Emphasizes the relevance of cooperation outside the university

 

Basic Writing Pedagogy:

Critically reflects on what basic writing means and whether it should be taught separately from other writing courses

Concerned with ensuring that everyone who wants to has access to college

 

Service Learning Pedagogy:

Calls for a closer relationship between community and classroom

Emphasizes the benefits of service learning for student and community

 

WAC Pedagogy:

Puts academic conventions in a cross disciplinary perspective

Tries to teach students basic skills they can transfer to discipline specific writing

Focus on writing as an integral part of all disciplines

 

Writing Center Pedagogy:

Looks at the individual student instead of the finished product

Discusses the settings of tutoring and what challenges virtual learning environments pose

Discusses the place of the writing center at the university and the perception professors have of it

 

Multimodal Pedagogy:

Focus on teaching with technology/new media/internet resources

Focus in the importance of developing students’ technological literacies

Discusses differences and similarities between the composition process in different media

 

Sustainable Teaching Pedagogy:

Focus on establishing practices/assignments/institutional structures that will support teaching beyond the span of a single semester

Things I didn’t expect to find on the blogs…

I didn’t have any specific expectations when I started, but I guess one thing that did kind of strike me was the overt criticism of specific institutional practices or organizations. Also, although I had expected the blogs to be relatively informal in tone and to contain a mixture of personal and professional entries, I was still occasionally suprised at the proximity of politics, professional concerns, recipes, and baby pictures. I don’t know if I would like to have by different selves so closely aligned in a site that could be quoted… Yet, as Krause remarked this might have something to do with status and job security, and I can see that keeping them together is a statement of the personal-professional dichotomy itself.

And here are some “not so official” things I didn’t expect (but enjoyed):

Krause provided this quote in a response to an article on declining student moral:

[Krause] I never tire of this passage from Isocrates’ Antidosis written 2400 years ago:

Yes, and you have brought it about that the most promising of our young men are wasting their youth in drinking-bouts, in parties, in soft living and childish folly, to the neglect of all efforts to improve themselves; while those of grosser nature are engaged from morning until night in extremes of dissipation which in former days an honest slave would have despised. You see some of them chilling their wine at the “Nine-fountains”; others, drinking in taverns; others, tossing dice in gambling dens; and many, hanging about the training-schools of the flute-girls.And as for those who encourage them in these things, no one of those who profess to be concerned for our youth has ever haled them before you for trial, but instead they persecute me, who, whatever else I may deserve, do at any rate deserve thanks for this, that I discourage such habits in my pupils.

http://stevendkrause.com/

And I particularly enjoyed this comment from Ratliff which I take to be a comment on election rhetoric (tags: “supposedly rhetoric” and “supposedly politics”):

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

sarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarah

palinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalinsarahpalin

http://culturecat.net/node?page=1

Pros and Cons of Steven Krause’s and Clancy Ratliff’s blogs as Professional Development Events

Shared pros: they shoved the human side of academia and academics that department people profiles leave out. I particularly appreciated reading Krause’s entry on skimming where he uses his own experience as an undergraduate who occasionally failed to get through all the reading for a course as a way to argue that skimming was an established study (mis)habit before the internet. Both blogs also revealed snippets of the process of developing a course and the considerations that go into assignment choices, and that I found where interesting and helpful.

Shared cons: some entries were very institution or course specific, and therefore didn’t had little interest to the field in general. 

Additional Krause pro/con: the danger of following link after link after link into the land of neverending Youtube and College Humor procrastination.

Clancy Ratliff (Blog Review)

http://culturecat.net/

Surveyed October-November 2008

Clancy Ratliff’s blog has no direct purpose statement, but it seems to function as an outlet for personal as well as academic developments/concerns with the added function of serving as a kind of database and discussion forum for scholars who share Ratliff’s scholarly interests. It has an online portfolio of posts related to rhetoric, digital media, and feminist theory. The posts range from exam responses to exam questions to drafts for encyclopedia entries and conference notes. The portal tab on CultureCat furthermore provides links to academic articles, wikis, podcasts, and websites on a multitude of different topics related to rhetoric and composition, some of which echo Ratliff’s interests in gender, computers and composition, Kenneth Burke, and the ethics of publication. The blog also contains a list of citations for scholarly articles in the form of a link to Ratliff’s citeulike account. Finally, the blog accumulate news from various news services on anything from dvd releases to upcoming courses in areas related to Ratliff’s scholarly interests.

 Clancy Ratliff, author of CultureCat, got her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication with a minor in Feminist Studies in 2006. Her dissertation was entitled “Where Are the Women?” Rhetoric and Gender in Weblog Discourse, and it indicates the joint interest in technology and ethics that can be seen throughout her research. Her publications deal with topics such as feminist theory, Kenneth Burke, postmodernism, computers and composition, intellectual property, especially challenges to conventional copyright law such as social commons, technical writing, and knowledge construction in online networking. Her latest publications are focused on feminist theory as well as questions of gender in the blogosphere. Ratliff is currently an Assistant Professor and Director of the First-Year Writing in the Department of English at University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she teaches a wide range of composition courses.

The blog entries on CultureCat are organized according a number of different tags such as personal, miscellany, food and cooking, composition pedagogy, what passes for politics/rhetoric, feminism, academia, rhetoric, technology and culture and so forth. The personal and miscellaneous entries are the most frequent in the period I have surveyed the blog, but academia and composition pedagogy are close rivals. Personal and miscellaneous entries deal primarily with Ratliff’s son, ironic comments on news items and youtube videos, and bullet points on ideas and thoughts. Entries on composition pedagogy deal with such things as assignments in first-year composition, the main example being a list of reasons for using personal narratives as the first assignment in first-year composition inspired by a lecture by Bruce Horner which Ratliff attended. One of Horner’s argument was that individual and social are not “uniform and monolithic” and that therefore the use of personal narratives should not be seen as something that excluded social issues. The comments on this entry deal with the difference between personal narrative and essays that use personal experience as a starting point for discussion, examples of how personal narratives/essays can be used in class or what the alternatives are, and people who attended the lecture expand on Ratliff’s comments. Most entries in academia are calls for papers or job openings, but they often include a little commentary of varying levels of formality. For example, a post which advertises the opening of a web editing position at CCCC also comments on CCCC’s webpage and use of Blogger and this entry in turn spawns a small discussion of the development on the CCCC webpage.

The tone of the entries is relatively informal and naturally more so in the personal entries than the academic ones. This also goes for the comments to the academic entries which probably have to do with the fact that you need an account to in order to post comments. The debate generally appears to be one among people who are familiar with each other and who are associated with some of the same organizations such as CCCC or journals such as Kairos. Also, the topics under discussion, while touching on theory, have more to do with pedagogy and organizational issues in the field which might also account for the relatively informal tone.

 Ratliff’s interests and the resources she makes available on her blog align her with some of the theory we have dealt with in our sections on feminism, multimodal composition, and rhetoric (specifically Kenneth Burke). Her attention to the question of gender in the blogosphere recalls the arguments made by a number of scholars that the internet does not necessarily erase offline inequalities. This argument was made, for example, by Samantha Blackmon in her treatment of issues of access to technology according to social position and representation of different cultures and social groups on the internet. Ratliff would most like be in line with Blackmon’s call for teaching that aims to make students able to assume a measure of control over representations on the internet and feel more comfortable using it. Ratliff’s scholarly work on postmodernism and feminism also indicates that she is engaging with the changing challenges to feminism outline in Susan C. Jarret’s “Feminist Pedagogy.” Ratliff’s entry on personal narratives furthermore reveals her concern with writing as empowerment, something which is central to feminist as well as critical and expressivist pedagogy.  Her interest in Kenneth Burke would furthermore suggest that she is concerned with language as a social act and with the ideology that underpins it. In terms of multimodal composition, Ratliff is obviously part of the group of scholars who do not merely call for, but also engage with and enact teaching with technology.

Resources and Announcements

Conferences

Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, which follows below. Bravo to Michigan State for taking out the parentheses — as in feminism(s), rhetoric(s). If we’re going to use the plural, let’s use the plural.

Webpages/blogs/journals

The Louisiana Association for College Composition, http://la-cc.org/

 http://giovannamaria.typepad.com/

 http://www.vitia.org/

 Enculturation and The Writing Instructor, http://enculturation.gmu.edu/

Job Openings

Web Editor, CCCC (posted on 30 Sept – link no longer functional)

Assistant professor position in emerging communication technologies and digital media, including video and gaming, and with emphasis on production, University of Texas in Austin.  Application deadline is October 31, 2008. Email a letter of application, curriculum vita, dissertation abstract, and statement of teaching philosophy (no longer than one page) to Search Committee Chair Clay Spinuzzi at clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu.

 

Full-time, nine-month faculty position beginning fall semester 2009 (August 31, 2009) at the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

http://www2.cla.umn.edu/admin/faculty-research/CLAFacultySearchesFY09.html (scroll down to Writing Studies and click on the link)

 

 

Steven Krause (Blog Review)

  http://stevendkrause.com/

 

Surveyed October-November 2008 

Steven Krause describes his website in the following way “This is the blog/homepage/portal for one Steven D. Krause, aka Professor Steven D. Krause, aka Steve, aka sitedad, aka a host of names not repeatable here. It used to be two different blogs, but now it is one. Why? Read more here if you really want to know.” Briefly, the decision to put the two blogs – the official (academic, school related) and unofficial (politics, family, etc.) – together was taken after Krause realized that most people who read one, read the other too. Krause maintains that the two are different and should be kept so and therefore keeps them separate on the blog through tagging, and the link sections are divided into academic and non-academic as well. Even the About section features both a “professional” and a “not so professional biography.”

 

Steven Krause has a Phd in rhetoric and writing and is currently a Professor at the Department of English and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. His research interests are in the area of computers and composition, specifically the use of online communication technology in teaching. He is currently working on a book about blogs as writerly spaces. In addition to his scholarly publications, he has also published a number of short stories. He courses deal with the intersections of writing and technology and currently include the courses: Writing, Style, and Technology and Rhetoric of Science and Technology.

 

Steven Krause is a very prolific and varied blogger (and entertaining), so in order to be able to say something that is somewhat focused I’ve chosen to focus on those of his entries during the last eight weeks that had academically related tags. The majority of these posts were devoted to “reminders” of and links to articles that Krause thought might be useful for future and present courses. The courses most frequently referred to are 516 and 328, which, research shows, are code names for Krause’s current and future course in Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice and Writing, Style, and Technology respectively. The texts and sites Krause links to and briefly comments on are most often related to such issues as copyright/creative commons, social networking sites and their usefulness or lack thereof to teaching, the effect of internet usage on study habits, and so forth. As his research interests and courses indicate, Krause is openly supportive of the need to investigate and make use of social networking and internet searching in teaching, but he also critically reflect on this usages and the risks they entail both inside and outside the classroom, particularly when it comes to privacy issues.  Krause also adds perspectives such as the fact that concerns about the effect of new technologies on learning go back to the invention of writing. Another recurrent feature is Krause’s commentary on his own workload and the life of an academic. While some of these entries are humorous and remark on his tendency to procrastinate, some of them remark on the institutional structures that shape the work load of academics and occasionally incorporate points from discussions with non-academics (often relatives) about their perspective on academic work loads and tenure systems. 

The tone is very informal and self-conscious of that fact. Krause will occasional begin an entry with a disclaimer about the non-pc nature of the material. The informality of the tone probably stems partly from the fact that Krause’s interest in social networking sites and video composition in classrooms often overlap with his affinity for youtube videos that comment on these things humorously. Krause also openly acknowledges in his about section that he can allow himself to take a lot of liberties on his blog because “the fact of the matter is I do have the protection of academic freedom and tenure and the union. So I think I would have post something pretty crazy to even get noticed by some administrator, let alone get fired.” Also, while Krause’s entries to get occasional comments (which seem to be mostly from friends and colleagues), it appears as though many of his entries, at least the ones relating to the development of his courses, work to a large extent as a kind of note-to-self.  This might also explain the relatively informal tone.

 

The one essay we’ve read by Krause in the course, “When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Interaction,” had led me to expect a more conservative or cautionary approach to teaching with technology than what is been my impression from reading the blog. There is definitely a critical edge to Krause’s engagement with technology and the usage of internet sites, but the enthusiasm definitely seems to have the upper hand. We read Krause’s essay as part of the unit on collaboration, and it is clear from his course descriptions that this is something he actively implements. It is also clear from his entries and course descriptions that he engages with video composition as well as blogging and list servs. Furthermore, his entries on copyright and social commons recall the views on copyright expressed in some of the texts we dealt with in our multimodal section of the course such as WIDE, “Why Teach Digital Writing.”

 

Resources and Announcements 

Websites

Power Moby-Dick

Working Through Screens

Center for Social Media at American University

Digital Culture Books

A Scott McCloud page about his work on the comic book to explain Google’s browser

Articles/reports/studies

Timothy McSweeney, “Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?”

Review of “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video”

“The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education”

Inside Higher Education, “Taking Facebook Back to Campus”

“Brave New Classroom 2.0 (New Blog Forum)”

“New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development”

Nick Carr,“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Meris Stansbury,“Rethinking research in the Google era”

David Carr,“Mourning Old Media’s Decline”

James Harkin,“Net prophets”  

Video Interview

Sustainable Students?

sustainable teaching

WPA Outcomes for First-Year Composition

The expected outcome of first year composition courses in postsecondary education cover five main areas. First year composition is one step in the long process toward mastering the skill of composition, and the teachers should continue to help the students built on their basic level of mastery and making the knowledge of their students specific to their field. After completing a first year composition course, students should: 1) be conscious of purpose and be able to adapt their writing to a certain audience as well as be familiar with a variety of genres, 2) have acquired critical thinking, writing, and reading skills that will enable them to understand and carry out assignments and make them aware of the relationship between language, meaning, and power, 3) have an understanding of writing as a process that allows them to engage with revision and invention at any stage of the process and have been trained in the judicious practice and use of peer reviewing, 4) have acquired a knowledge the formal and intellectual conventions of different kinds of texts and be competent in grammar and spelling conventions, 5) have acquired experience with digital composition, with digital information retrieval, and be aware of and able to utilize rhetorical differences between writing and other media.

Selfe, D., “Techno-Pedagogical Explorations: Toward Sustainable Technology-Rich Instruction”

There are many things to keep in mind before you embark on teaching with technology. Teaching with technology continues to be experimental in nature not only because technological development, but because of the changing competences and needs of the students. This experimental nature can be embraced and integrated into the course while making sure that to accommodate each student according to their technological literacy. Among the things to consider are pedagogical concerns, logistic concerns, and how to make create sustainable teaching practices. There are many technologies to choose from and they should be chosen to match the pedagogical aims of the course if teaching with technology is to be a meaningful experience to the students as well as the instructor. Communication technologies such as chat forums or listservs have the advantage that discussions are kept on record and can be integrated in other aspects of the course, but the use of should be accompanied by a set of rules of good conduct developed by the class, a clear agenda of the purpose of their usage and what will be expected of the participants. Still, as the field is in itself experimental, experimental usage can be part of the class as long as students are made aware of its experimental nature and are allowed to evaluate the usage at the end of the course. Also, students should be invited to reflect critically on each individual technology used. Furthermore, while the internet potentially provides students with an audience for their work, an active effort has to be made to specify and determine a certain audience and reach out to such an audience to attract them to the publications of the students; otherwise, the audience remains largely illusionary. Teaching with technology requires attention to logistics: do all students have access to the necessary technology? Does your institution provide support for the necessary technology? Are the classrooms adequately equipped? Etc. Creating sustainable teaching practices means carefully considering the choice of technology in courses. Choose something that can be worked with over several courses so that you become increasingly comfortable with it, but also make an effort to accumulate new ideas from other instructors and technologically advanced students. Make sure that you know your students’ level of competence and draw on their expertise in class in a way that benefits both them and the other students. Sustainable teaching also depends on building up a collaborative environment at your institution that can reach across disciplines and help out instructors new to teaching with technology.

Informal response to: Hesse, “Portfolio Standards for English 101″ (TC)

The idea behind using a portfolio as the basis of grading is that it will give a more accurate and fair evaluation of the student’s writing because it encompasses multiple assignments and thus can take the writer’s competence in different rhetorical situations into account.

The grading rubric for portfolios at ISU has changed since Hesse was employed here. I think the rubric we have now is better in the sense that it allows for evaluate some stages of the writing process, such as peer review and revision for example, as supposed to just evaluating the final project. Yet, I still think the rubric is problematic.  In the discussions about the rubric the adjectives that are meant to tell A from B, B from C, and so forth, often come up. Many people argue that they do not represent an intelligible hierarchy but rather that they are arbitrary terms that do little in terms of guiding either student or instructor. This is not my main objection, however, not because I don’t agree with it, but because I think this will be the case no matter what words you choose to distinguish one grade from another. They will always be defined subjectively by the instructor or the student. I think the rubric fails because it becomes too specific in an unhelpful way. By demanding the instructor to evaluate adaption to forum and audience, the use of sources, the use of resources such as the internet, and other such things for every single paper, the rubric forces a certain kind of assignments on instructors and students in that it makes alternative assignments more difficult to fit into it.

Spellmeyer, “Can Teaching, of all Things, Prove to be our Salvation?”

Teaching in the humanities needs to undergo a fundamental change if it is to close the gap in students’ knowledge about the major challenges that face the world they’ll inherit. The humanities are caught up with teaching or changing traditions; they insist on teaching history for its own sake not because of its usage or relevance. Rutgers University tried to initiate this change by developing interdisciplinary dialogue-based courses that were meant to exist alongside traditional courses but whose focus would be issues of consequence to society at large. The new courses, however, failed to materialize, except in the composition classroom, because faculty was reluctant to teach outside their own field, because of the university’s focus on specialized research, and because of the university’s failure to reward teachers who undertook developing the new courses. The dialogue form that was integrated into the composition class shifted the focus to application of academic knowledge to pressing real-world problems. Teaching, if it is to prepare students for the world they are going to live in, has to have as its primary purpose to train them to be informed citizens.  

Multimodal Composition

Multimodal Composition

NCTE Guideline on Multimodal Literacies

The definition of multimodal literacies consider how multimodal compositions affect meaning production, how multimodal pedagogy can build on the learning pattern of children, how multimodal media can effectively be integrated in courses without compromising other media, how multimodal projects often requires collaboration, how multimodal media is already part of students’ everyday lives, how it must be ensured that both teachers and students can acquire critical literacy in all the media engaged with. Engaging with digital forms requires frameworks and methods for developing critical literacy adapted to this form, it requires an active effort to bridge the gap between teacher and student in terms of level of familiarity with digital forms, digital forms offers a extra-educational audience, they offer creative possibilities to the students, but they also necessitate that student learn to evaluate them critically and use them ethically.

Kress’s, “Multimodalities”  

The centrality of the written text is increasingly challenged by other media in most Western societies, visual media, in particular, has begun to dominate much public communication. Yet, theories of, for example, visual media and music are often left out of school curricula. One of the implications of this shift is that we need to move away from language-based theories of communication and representation in order to properly investigate these new media and the effect of their increasing application.  Re-seeing that field suggests that no text is monomodal, language itself can be seen as multimodal. All texts, in the broad sense of the word, are made up of a mode and a media and these must both be considered when texts are analyzed. It is important to consider these aspects and to think critically about our privileging of the written text since doing so is limiting the number of ways we can engage with the world. We use all our senses when we perceive something and our philosophy of semiosis should reflect this rather than privilege language over other aspects of perception. Critical reading of semiotic codes, of texts and objects, is culturally determined and can thus offer insight about the assumptions underpinning our culture.

Palmeri’s “Prologue” and “Openings” [from his 2007 OSU dissertation, Multimodality and Composition Studies, 1960 - Present]  

It is possible to see multimodal composition as part of the composing tradition as many theories of composition from the past – particularly expressivist, cognitive and social approaches – touch on issues that are pertinent to multimodal composition. It is important to explore these connections between new media and traditional composition because it will help compositionists envision multimodal composition as part of composition courses as supposed to something which should be taught separately. In this way, rewriting the tradition to show its relevance to new developments in the field becomes essential to holding the discipline together. Multimodal composition keeps the discipline relevant because it reflects the development in society, the multilayered texts that students are faced with everyday and need critical tools to engage with. Yet, many instructors are not convinced of the importance of teaching multimodal composition, and therefore, these reservations must be addressed in order for multimodal composition to become a fully incorporated element of the discipline. Multimodal composition should be envisioned not as a threat to written composition, but as a skill that can compliment traditional composition. Also, the ways in which multimodal composition makes use of the expertise that compositionists already have must be highlighted in order to address the concern expressed by many compositionists that they are not competent to teach composition in other media than writing. Finally, it is important to note that multimodal should not replace written composition; rather, students and instructors should make informed choices about which mode would be suitable for each rhetorical situation, and composing in different modes can offer students a new perspective on written media.

 

WIDE, “Why Teach Digital Writing?”

Teaching digital writing comes with a number of opportunities as well as a number of challenges. An initial challenge is convincing instructors and administrators that digital writing should be taught. Teaching digital writing requires a re-thinking and expansion of the approach we take to writing, but it also entails logistic challenges since successful teaching depend on having access to the right kind of equipment. It also hinges on the training of instructors which again requires that individual departments prioritize training and development within this area. Yet, there are good reasons to face these challenges. Re-thinking and expanding our approach to writing enhances and deepens the understanding of writing in traditional settings as well digital writing of both teachers and students. Digital writing influences the question of audience as networks offer students a more readily available and authentic audience than a traditional classroom setting. It also increases their own access to texts and other productions which makes it essential to consider the new challenges to the issue of copyright and hence of plagiarism that network pose. The increasingly digital environment that students have to navigate in their daily lives make digital writing essential to their education as active and empowered citizens.

Lovett et al “Writing with Video”

In recognition of the need for students to be literate and competent in composition in more than the written media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a course in video composing, but tying this new development to written composing is a central part of the course. Creating a video and writing an essay are not two completely distinct processes. A lot of writing goes into the process of creating a video, and the analytical process of these two modes also have a lot in common. The four main stages of video production all incorporate writing to some extent as well as they rely on the critical thinking skills that composition entails no matter the mode. Process pedagogy is particularly well suited to composing with video because this mode requires much more attention to individual steps in the process than is the case with writing where these steps have often been internalized. Thus, writing with video can help sharpen the awareness of process for students and teachers and therefore can positively influence written composition as well. The process is at the heart of this course, not the final product, and this focus is meant to ensure that students and teachers are not inhibited by lack of technical skill since the focus of course are on the rhetoric of the video. Creating videos thus entail both being able to gather and organize information and to adapt these to a given rhetorical situation. Finally, video production is collaborative in nature and therefore offers both possibilities and challenges to students and teachers who undertake to teach it.