Final Project Proposal

The ideal composition course would encourage critical thinking about rhetorical strategies and prepare students for work environments for which they need to be adequately prepared to be successful. Unfortunately, most composition courses at both the secondary and college level continue to place value in traditional essays almost exclusively. Educators might be feeding into this for many reasons, including lack of familiarity with digital tools, limited resources for students to use, nostalgia for the traditional transfer of knowledge via paper texts. The institutions themselves are slow to change and reluctant to embrace multimodal texts as valuable in their own right and reliable in content.

This reluctance to engage students with the rhetorical strategies necessary to create and read multimodal texts results in graduates who are woefully underprepared for the work force. Work environments in the 21^st century require the ability to create not only alphabetic texts, but the complex "texts" used by everyone from the average person uploading videos on YouTube to the marketing director who determines the blurb and thumbnail in a sidebar. The traditional composition course does not teach the rhetorical possibilities of multimodal texts simply because it does not recognize that the definition of literacy has changed.

My project will examine the existing pedagogical research on digital tools and suggest immediately applicable strategies for secondary and college composition teachers to begin preparing their students for the work place. Rather than encouraging a complete abandonment of what has been done before in composition instruction, my suggestions will interact with existing assignments to enhance student mastery of the skills necessary to write effectively in any medium.

I am particularly interested in the use of wikis to construct knowledge for the school as a whole. As I mentioned in class when I presented the poetry assignment I had created for use with a wiki, I would like to create an environment like a mini-Wikipedia on academic topics that all students could feed into, use, and revise collectively to share knowledge and to build upon what others have learned, rather than to retread the same information year after year as we seem to do now.

Working collaboratively is a difficult skill to teach, but the more practice students have in a low-stakes setting like a wiki in which content can quickly be revised, the more students (and faculty) will see how valuable collective knowledge can be to the academy. I hope to demonstrate with my research that not only is the inclusion of multimodal texts necessary and relatively simple to do, but that they teach skills that we currently are not able to give students and that are vital for a successful negotiation of career. These networking and collaboration skills can be developed most easily with digital tools. Furthermore, the product of the students' work will continue to influence future students at the school and students around the world who stumble upon the wiki.

Fan Fiction, Affinity Spaces, and Appropriation

In his article on fan fiction sites and the way students are writing despite school, Henry Jenkins writes, "Through online discussions of fan writing, the teen writers develop a vocabulary

for talking about writing and they learn strategies for rewriting and improving their

own work."  Some teachers may feel threatened that students are developing these skills without their guidance or to create something the institution doesn't feel is valuable.  I am grateful that these outlets for creativity and connection exist.  These affinity spaces are much more meaningful learning experiences than any that we can manufacture in school simply because school is an institution and not real life. 

I would enthusiastically encourage students to participate in any of the activities we read about because it would give me as the teacher an authentic context to teach how to interact with others, evaluate what they read for themselves, and determine the rules of the affinity space in which they choose to spend their time.  Jenkins explains that "Certainly, teens may receive harsh critical responses to their more controversial stories when they publish them online, but the teens themselves are deciding what risks they want to take and facing the consequences of those decisions."  In school, teachers cannot force students to publish or even to produce, but if we teach them how to handle the types of criticism from "trolls" and genuine critics we can equip them for the types of responses they can expect in the work environment.

"Misinformation abounds online, but so do mechanisms for self-correction;" this is a truth often overlooked by educators whose contempt for Wikipedia and other sites stems from a lack of knowledge with how such information is constructed and who is constructing it (44).  Instead of being intimidated by the potential for misinformation, teachers should be equipping students to sort through the mixed bag that is the results of a Google search to find the worthwhile pieces of information.  As Jenkins points out, the best sources are not only the ones contributed by the gate-keepers.

Another difficulty that Jenkins points out that has plagued me and my students is the difficulty that the students have in maintaining boundaries between what they have written and what others have contributed.  They also have trouble processing the information that they find in their research and often copy and paste the text from a source into a Word document without ever even reading the material carefully or trying to consider how it fits in the text they are constructing (51).  At the beginning of the semester, I felt that my students were in the wrong and needed to value copyright much more highly than they do currently. Through the readings and discussions we've experienced, I now wonder how useful those ideas about idea ownership are.  It seems that we need new definitions of what it means to create and to "own" something.  The mash-ups our students make are their own creative effort that is a completely new thing that is separate from the original products with which they started.  Documentation, the value of the individual, the results of collaboration: all these concepts have been changed by the rapid development of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of media through which anyone can express him/herself.

As we noted in last week's discussion, no one really knows what we're doing or where it's all going.  Acknowledging that there are changes and that there should be new ways of considering institutions is a valuable place to start, I think.

Assessments, Journals, and Plagiarism

In chapter eight of Multimodal Composition, Selfe describes the use of progress journals for formative assessment. I have often performed formative assessments and conferenced with students mid-project, but it never occurred to me before reading this suggestion to write down what we discuss each time. Doing so would eliminate the preliminary discussion in which the students have to remind me about their topics or the challenges they knew they would have.

I also see great value in having students keep progress journals. This is where they can express frustrations or triumphs, contributions to the group, and questions they have for me when I come to speak with the group. These journals would facilitate the writing of reflective pieces, or "heads up" as Shipka calls it. Students would have notes to pull from and to remember the process they went through and to document their growth.

Another inspiration I took from chapter eight was the example assignment, starting on page 107. Selfe writes that, "The class then uses their understanding of this rhetorical situation to develop a rhetorically informed rubric for the assignment." Students are often tougher on themselves than their instructors would be, so it would be interesting to see what they would prefer to be graded on and why. This is also an excellent way to introduce a discussion of affordances and the differences between different types of text.

The sample assignment itself is a wonderful example of what the traditional research essay should move toward, in my opinion. I would take it one step further, however, and look for an actual contest or grant that students could apply for via video. Many such opportunities exist, including the Project for Awesome on YouTube.com. Can you imagine the work students would put into their projects if there were a realistic possibility that they could change the world in which they live?

Moving on to Teaching Writing, I do have experience using Word's comment features in peer editing. Being able to interact with the text electronically seems to appeal to my students more than trying to revise with pencil and paper in the classroom. They typically write much, much more and the feedback is more useful ("This sentence doesn't make sense" instead of "Good job"). This doesn't happen automatically, though. Modeling and instruction has to happen before peer review does more than draw smiley faces on papers.

David Nunuz' suggestion to have students practice via blog comments is a great way to encourage thoughtful responses. By looking for "interesting, constructive comments," Nunez avoids the bare minimum approach to which students will default if left to their own devices. Since blogs are great reading response tools, these blogs and comments will serve multiple purposes.

Kathleen West's suggestions on methods of grading blogs answered some of the questions I had about blog evaluations. I do believe that at first grading on completion only is important to help students create confidence in the modality. As time goes on, grading of blogs needs to be somehow based on the content of the blog rather than the minimal requirements of timeliness and length. I am intrigued by West's suggestion that a better blog is one that generates more worthwhile discussion.

Regarding the discussion of plagiarism, I agree that although sites like turnitin.com are useful in eliminating hours on Google checking suspicious papers, they do also assume students will plagiarize. I have seen this create a negative environment in my classroom before. As soon as the students find out they must submit their papers, they balk and worry that I, like the university in the example Beach gives, will take the computer's word for it rather than examining papers on a case-by-case basis. My policy is to look for significant finds on turnitin.com, and then to evaluate the offending passages myself. Almost every time it is the computer's misreading of the text and not a student's plagiarism that has been highlighted. Turnitin.com is very useful for situations in which students modify another student's work with their names on it.

Beach makes a vital point, one that is more important than whether or not such services should be used: "teachers need to do their part to provide a context in which it is difficult to plagiarize and in which students are not motivated to do so—for instance, by creating unique, interesting, engaging assignments instead of dull, canned assignments" (203). Who cares really whether students have correctly cited boring, useless information that students have been regurgitating for decades? Critical thinking, collaboration, and meaningful communication are the skills that we are looking for so we may as well eliminate situations in which a reliance on others' work exclusively are available.

Overall, whether multimodal or alphabetic, the texts our students write should not be a repackaging of what has happened before, but a reimagining of ideas, the juxtaposition of thoughts that are surprisingly complimentary or contradictory. When we ask students to write about old topics in the old ways, we are not teaching, but reminiscing.

Podcasts and Vlogs: Reader Response

Chapter 7 of Teaching Writing focuses on "sonic literacies" that can be practiced in many different ways and in diverse contexts.  To me, podcasts and vlogs have great potential in encouraging students to share their responses to what they have read with one another. 

In the past (as inspired by my time in the NWI Writing Project), I have asked a class to collaborate on a Daily Log while reading a novel (just one unit a year).  Each student in the class would be assigned a day for which he/she would be responsible for synthesizing what was discussed and learned that day in class.  These entries were written or typed and shared with the class at the beginning of the next class period before being placed in a binder in chronological order.  This assignment has worked well to keep students attuned to class discussions and provided a convenient resource for students who were absent.  Traditionally, I would assign this during May, also known as "Field Trip Month" when I could expect as much as 3/4 of my juniors to be away on any given day.

I would love to do this assignment as a vlog instead.  The time parameters would have to be adjusted, because it's too much to ask students to create a vlog post in the course of a single evening during which they also have many other academic, athletic, and extracurricular obligations.  Creating the vlog would have several benefits over the old daily log:  1)  students would be much more interested in the videos than in the reading of the log 2) authors of the vlog would have to think carefully about how best to present the previous day's information 3) students would be more invested in making a good vlog and might even compete with one another to be creative and funny 4)  these vlogs could be available online so that absent students could access them 24 hours a day.

It might also be interesting and a good class project for students (in a different unit, of course) record 30-60 second responses to the reading assignment with Audacity prior to coming to class.  The teacher can find "highlights" to share as a warm-up activity for the discussion for the day.  Ultimately, the class could take that vast collection of audio clips and collaborate on a podcast, video, wiki, blog--anything, really--to summarize and synthesize the class' reactions to a novel, collection of short stories, etc.

I appreciated very much that Beach et. al addressed the concerns we all have for students with learning disabilities.  These students are in our classes at all levels, labeled or not, and the suggestions given could really make a difference for a student.  One possibility suggested in the text was that a student could record themselves in an audio essay instead of composing an alphabetic text.  There are many times when this option would have been useful to me in the past, if only I had thought of it!  Sometimes students have the necessary mastery of the content, but are horribly hindered by the act of writing itself.  When the writing itself is not being graded, but instead the focus and purpose of testing is the content, and audio essay is an excellent work-around for those with disabilities. 

For all students, being able to listen to their alphabetic text read aloud could be greatly beneficial in the study of voice.  We often advise students to read their writing aloud to themselves, but they feel foolish doing it and/or do not allow themselves enough time for proper revision.  Depending on the sophistication of these programs, Text to Speech tools could be invaluable in helping students to hear the rhythms their words and sentences create.

All in all, I am encouraged to see new (to me) ways of integrating digital tools in the classroom that will address the ongoing difficulties that traditional approaches have not been able to solve. 

Do me a favor?

Hey, everybody!  Further to my plot to take over the Internet with my juniors next year, it would be very helpful to me to see what Edmodo looks like with actual people interactions.  If you're willing to just join my "class" and tell me what you think, it would help me a lot! 

Edmodo.com
Sign in as a student
umf4q3 is the group code.

it's fast and easy.

Thanks very much!

The Changing Look of Composition

Before I start reacting to the readings for this week, I would like to share two links with everyone.  The first is Edmodo, which looks suspiciously like Facebook, yet alleges that it is completely private and to have access, students must login with a randomly generated code provided to the teacher (much like turnitin.com, which my school already uses).  VERY COOL!  It's way prettier than Moodle, and there's only teeniest of learning curves.  I figured it out in about five minutes.

 
 

Link the second!  This is a news article that I ran across which happens to be talking about the need for social networking tools to become a part of the classroom. Here it is.  Thank you, MaryAnn, for teaching me how to hyperlink in Blogger.

 
 

I would like to start with Shipka's article, "A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing."  If I were only able to give one article to my department head and principal about multimodal composing, this one would probably be it (selectively highlighted of course!).  Shipka is able to articulate in this article that while multimodal composition appears to be an entirely different process from alphabetic text composition, it accomplishes the same goals as traditional writing with better results.  Shipka asserts, "that what students come to understand about potentials for processes, processing, and revision is far richer and more complex when practiced within this kind of goal-directed multimodal task-based framework" (302).  Students generally abhor the concept of revision.  They want to quickly tap out something in a Word document, hit print, and never look at it again.  Students do not typically feel this way about revising multimodal texts, particularly when they are allowed to choose the media for their presentations.  I have had students in the past who have loved making videos so much, that they did asked for permission to create a video instead of the more traditional text requested.  I was more than happy to let them try it and we hashed out what would have to be accomplished in their video.  These students spent hours and hours working on, revising, editing, re-taping, and layering their video and it was amazing.  Now these students had access to these resources and technical knowledge on their own and were able to achieve this. 

 
 

There is a caveat to multimodal success.  Shipka writes, Increasing the range of semiotic resources with which students are allowed to work will not, in and of itself, lead to a greater awareness of the ways systems of delivery, reception, and circulation shape (and take shape from) the means and modes of production. Instead, I argue, composition courses present students with the opportunity to begin structuring the occasions for, as well as the reception and delivery of, the work they produce" (279-80). Just having video, audio, or other resources available does not ensure the types of higher level thinking that could potentially be associated with these types of composition.  Instead, metacognition seems to be the key to Shipka's success with her students' projects.  By requiring students to give her "head's up" about their ideas regarding the choices, execution, and revision of their projects, Shipka creates a learning environment in which it is not enough to simply turn in a finished product, but one in which the process--the minutiae of individual decisions leading to that finished product--are as valuable or more valuable to the instructor in evaluating that student's growth in the understanding of rhetoric. As Shipka puts it, "students must always account for the specific goals they aimed to achieve with their work and then specifically address how the rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices they made contributed to the realization of their goals"(287).

 

As I read Selfe's chapter, "Experimenting with Multimodality," I repeatedly starred various techniques to try next year when I am back in the classroom full-time. All the strategies about helping students take ownership of the technology they will use and teaching their peers to use the equipment are excellent suggestions. Students learn faster when they are teachers, and they rarely listen to any adult explaining how to use equipment. I also believe in the importance of "reading" texts of the type one is planning to compose before diving into the project. Asking students to find multimodal compositions could be an interesting assignment and might—gasp!—result in extra learning, as they will probably need to watch more than one video to find a good one and will want to wow their classmates with the wackiest/funniest video. Again, pre-screening is important for a high school classroom.

 

One interesting thought that Selfe shares is that "the less a teacher confesses to knowing about multimodal composing and digital composing tools, the more completely students feel able to invest their own time" (97). Students enjoy being the experts, and this takes quite a bit of pressure off the teacher. Selfe explained before that it was not necessary for the instructor to know everything about technology to undertake these types of compositions, but the concept that appearing to be an expert can actually be a detriment to student performance diffuses the anxiety a teacher might feel when beginning an experiment with multimodal composition.v

 

Finally, Selfe mentions at the end of chapter five that students benefit from "informal opportunities in which they analyze their own projects" (62). It is very important for students to have this practice time without the pressure of being graded and with time to make changes and adjustments based on peer feedback. Furthermore, peer feedback is more likely to be helpful with these types of assignments. If the fast-paced college schedule allowed time for peer feedback in our first project before presenting, we might have been able to solve problems that individual groups had due to knowledge gaps. My group had trouble with timing our slides and layering sound, which I'm sure others would have been able to assist us with (as they demonstrated competence with these issues in their own videos). Additionally, working on a complex project that requires revision after revision, it can become difficult to see what impression the project leaves on the first-time viewer. Feedback can put the author(s) back in touch with what they have created.

 

 

Pedagogy 2.0

I was very excited to read about wikis this week, as I really have no background in these at all except to deplore my students' reliance on Wikipedia as the ultimate authority on all things academic.  The possibilities for wikis as a tool in the classroom at all levels are great, particularly in the light of the constructivist views with which our class texts are certainly enamored.  As an undergraduate student, I felt that allowing students to construct meaning for themselves with guidance from the teacher was by far to be preferred as a method of teaching to the assembly line approach of spouting interpretations from a podium while students frantically take notes (or doodle in the margins).

My most successful pedagogical experiments have always been those in which students created the contexts for learning themselves.  Collaboration is a completely natural way for today's students to approach learning and they are confused about the concepts of original thought and plagiarism.  They feel that if the information is "out there" it is available to be used as a stepping stone to reach a higher level of understanding and that it is in no way "stealing" to do so.  If schools could just overcome the legal and financial obstacles to make wiki construction widely available and understood by educators, these learning tools could be invaluable to the learning process. 

In the state of Indiana, at least, the emphasis is not on specific content knowledge (in English classes), but on skills and critical thinking.  Wikis provide a natural way to achieve both types of objectives.  Students will, by nature of the medium, spend large amounts of time in the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (synthesis and evaluation), rather than being passively dragged as high up the ladder as their teachers can force them via essay questions and class discussions.  Furthermore, the ownership the students have in their writing will ensure that they contribute, edit, and revise. They will see immediate value in their work for the edification of other students and will be excited when outsiders comment or ask questions.  I agree with Beach et al. in Teaching Writing when they say that "knowledge is constructed through a collaborative sharing of ideas (71).  As a teacher, I cannot take knowledge from myself and put it in students; rather, they have to start with prior knowledge of their own and build connections between texts, discussions, and research to build up that knowledge.

Learning to work collaboratively with peers is a difficult skill to teach and to learn, but one that is absolutely vital for today's students who wish to enter the workforce prepared for what they must do there.  The common complaints that are listed in Teaching Writing on page 72 are ones that I am very familiar with and are voiced by students, parents, counselors, and even teachers.  In particular the distrust of their peers' abilities and senses of responsibility to create good work are difficult to resolve.  Although teachers can do what Beach et al. suggest, to create mixed-ability groups, students recognize these groupings for what they are and often resent their role in the group, whether as high-achiever or struggling learner.  This is a difficult hurdle to jump and assignments must be carefully crafted to ensure fairness and reasonable expectations of all students.

Although students may resent collaborative assignments for the reasons in Teaching Writing just as Jody Shipka's students were flabbergasted by her assignments in "This was NOT an easy assignment," these tasks foster critical thinking at every hyperlink and every sidebar.  As student Josh Hibon noted regarding his wiki assignment, "I would have written a similar paper [to the blog], but it would have one with a biased perspective of what I thought about it, but getting their perspectives led to different conclusions" (Beach 88).  Traditional academic thought would perceive the change in Josh's opinion as the result of plagiarism because the new views would have been expressed as his own, but in reality, Josh has done what we all wish our students to do: he has researched the idea and discovered that his previous opinions were no longer valid given the evidence and was able to articulate the how and why of his changed opinion.

As regards McLoughlin and Lee's article, "Future Learning Landscapes, I found that their opinions are in line with the other authors we have read in terms of subscription to the social constructivist ideology.  On one point I did disagree, however.  I do not believe that students feel that educators who use sites like Facebook lose credibility.  Perhaps this was an attitude at the time of the study in 2007, but I have not encountered that feeling from students at all.  Perhaps it was more true of professors at the college level rather than high school teachers.  I do agree that "students may perceive instructors' attempts to co-opt such social technologies for educational purposes as intrusions into their space."  I would prefer to start with multimodal composition, publishing via YouTube and wikis rather than to jump right into Facebook or MySpace.  Although these tools have potential, there are so many tools available that above all, teachers must keep in mind the goals they are trying to achieve and the skills they wish to teach.  The digital tools must be shaped to fit the instructional objectives, not the other way around.

Overall, this week's readings made me want to get started right away with a wiki!  I can see multiple applications and now that I better understand what they are and how they can be used, I am eager to try!   

Online Discussions and Critical Thinking

This week's readings focused on the use of blogging and online discussions as teaching tools.  Middlebrook  believes that blogs are a useful tool to create an environment for an undergraduate students to create a professional space for him/herself to establish reputation and presence as part of the academic discourse.  I was impressed that his students found their class blogs useful in obtaining employment and that they were sufficiently well-done that the students encouraged prospective employers to observe their blogs. Middlebrook found a way to make college composition more than an introduction to academic discourse, but by no means degraded the level of writing or intellectual performance that one would expect an undergraduate student to demonstrate.   As Middlebrook writes, “As is apparent, a robust linkroll brings important resources to the attention of a blog's readers, and at the same time expresses connections between an undergraduate blogger and web-based entities of merit, which is significant because if one aim is forging at least a formative scholarly and professional identity, familiarity with the players in a given realm is obviously essential.”  By encouraging his students to link to worthwhile blogs, journals, and other websites, he was sending his students straight to the source of great information to become well-read on their area of interest and current on thoughts in their fields.

 

Beach et al. include findings on the formal/informal writing conundrum that worries many teachers regarding the integration of digital tools into their writing courses.  In their research, “Christiana Haas and Pam Takayoshi find that this writing [Facebook walls, etc ] contains complex uses of linguistic features, constituting a new form of language communication.  They also find that these young people can readily switch between informal and more formal language use associated with traditional academic writing” (50).  Teachers and professors may not need to be afraid of students not knowing the difference between academic discourse and texting to the extent that it has been traditionally feared.  I know many teachers who are certain that texting is the downfall of the English language and feel threatened by the abbreviation and familiarity often exhibited on sites such as Facebook or MySpace.  Haas and Takayoshi have found evidence that those fears are not entirely accurate and that students are able to differentiate between the two types of writing and that the more formal style is not necessarily lost to them simply because they prefer the lightning fast speeds of abbreviation.  As the researchers point out, these types of writing are not a bastardization of English, but rather a language of their own with its own rules.

Furthermore, blogs and other online discussions can certainly be part of academic discourse if modeling and instructions are used to shape student responses.  Alison Black’s sample expectations for student online discussions model correct behavior and the types of writing that are expected (Beach 55).  By showing students what is expected of them, they will quickly adapt to the tone and style modeled for them.  I thought Black's list of expectations were an excellent guide for her students and would be very effective in shaping the responses given.  Black's suggestion that reprimands for inappropriate comments be private are also wise.

Beach et al. also share information from Conrad and Donaldson who coined the phrase “phases of engagement” to describe the use scaffolding to introduce students to the world of online collaboration and writing (53).  I felt that these ideas closely corresponded to last week's reading in Selfe when she described the types of scaffolding that could be used to introduce digital tools for composition in the classroom.  Several of us liked that approach last week, and I noticed it in our reading with approval.  Branching out into these new worlds of composition instruction with a "dive right in" approach could result in a tragic drowning and fear of water after such failures.  Instead, teachers must plan carefully for both themselves and their students that neither party is overwhelmed by the newness of what is being attempted.  As Middlebrook stated, “However what may be surprising, and I think positive, are the results from a recent ECAR Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology (Salaway, Caruso, & Nelson, 2007). This research found that students are discriminating and recognize '[t]echnology is an enabler of learning when professors use it effectively' (p. 13), while '[p]oor use of technology ([that is] under use, over use, inappropriate use, or over dependence […]) detracts from the learning experience' (p. 14)."  Technology cannot be part of the classroom just because it is "cool."  There must be some pedagogical purpose behind its inclusion.

I agree with Beach et al. that online discussions, whether synchronous or asynchronous are greatly beneficial in addition to face-to-face discussions (Beach 51).  Although the reading addresses the topic of students who "hog the floor," I find that online discussions even that phenomenon out whereas in class discussions highlight that student's desire to be the center of the conversation (67).  Online discussions allow everyone to speak and force even those who are shy and unsure of themselves to join the conversation at some point.  The only concern that was growing for me was the thought of keeping tabs on 100 students' blogs/discussion boards.  I found Gina Nelson's 5-4-3 grading strategy simple but reasonable as a way to approach evaluation of this type of writing (Beach 57).

Online discussions are probably the strategy I feel most comfortable employing in my classroom, assuming that the district was willing to allow such an activity to take place.

Assignments and Affordances

I felt inspired after reading this weeks’ series of articles and chapters. There were great opportunities for critical and creative thinking provided by the sample assignments and the student feedback confirmed the value of multimodal assignments. One of the things that Selfe was able to clarify for me were the affordances of each type of communication. Obviously there are times when alphabetic, video, or audio texts would be more conducive to the writing task at hand, but I found the chart on page 33 helpful to clarify which tasks would benefit from which modality. A strategy Selfe suggests in chapter two to sequence assignments in multiple modalities (p25) appeals to me because I can see how that could create a successful transition to multimodality for my students and result in critical thinking through reflection on how each modality gave insight to the topic at hand.



Selfe also gives three elements of multimodal composition assignments on page 30: theory, structure and choice, and circulation. I smiled as I read the description of theory that “Faculty need to think not only about why they want to integrate multimodal assignments into their classes, but also about which assignments are amenable to the affordances of different modalities” (30). How many times has a teacher decided to try to use a different mode of composition without a real reason for the modal choice? Instead of beginning with the task and skills they are trying to accomplish, they will begin with a mode that they are interested in but which may or may not be best suited to the assignment itself. Again, Selfe clearly defines whether video or audio texts would be most useful for several types of assignments.


I am attracted to the way Shipka’s assignments for the course forced students to spend more time in the thinking/analyzing/creating stages of writing than in the actual typing/writing of the assignment itself. There was no question that critical thinking was happening and that students were challenged and stretched in ways not often seen in a composition course. The preparation for the composing was more important than the actual composition. The end result was good, but the point of the assignment was the process.


In chapter three, Selfe says that “Teachers who compose the best assignments, then, don’t outline a step-by-step procedure for students to follow; instead, they create assignments that prompt writers to think in new ways” (29). This idea that the student has a role in defining the assignment is exactly what Shipka was accomplishing in her assignments. The absence of the student as a stakeholder in the composition process is the problem that Trupe sees with the traditional types of essays taught in composition courses. Students do not see value in what they are creating and know that it serves no purpose other than to be a trial run in academic writing that no one, not even the teacher, wants to read.


In contrast, in the pdf copies of Shipka’s assignments, I saw a great example of the balance Selfe refers to in the making of a great assignment in chapter three. I appreciated Selfe’s suggestions for “an effective balance of structure and open-endedness,” which is what I immediately was concerned about for myself as a teacher (32). Allowing students to choose the modality/ies for themselves forces students to determine which modalities have affordances that suit their purposes for composition. This choice, coupled with the suggested reflection, would encourage even more critical thinking than the composition itself inspires. Shipka’s students demonstrate that this choice and reflection can be achieved and that students enjoy the challenge, once they recover from the initial shock of the open nature of the assignments.


Trupe’s article, while eight years old, notes that the skills used to create electronic texts are often the opposite of those required for alphabetic texts. According to her, electronic composition allows students to produce more text, understand audience, develop voice, become confident as writers, and require synthesis to collaborate on texts. Since these are several of the goals of the freshman composition course, I can see the validity of an argument that the five paragraph essay (and its attendant variations) have expired in terms of their usefulness in teaching college students the essentials of rhetoric and critical thinking to join the academic world. Trupe might wish to expand her list to include blogs and wikis to encourage collaboration and take advantage of the audio/visual production tools widely available for free to produce multimodal texts.

Technology Narrative

Laura Guill

English 605

Mabrito

September 9, 2010

Technology Narrative

    My earliest encounter with a computer would have to be the Allen Digital Organ at our church. My father was the organist, and he would take me with him to practice. My objective was to pull the stops at the appropriate moments and I was amazed at the way pressing keys could suddenly turn into triumphant trumpets!

    The first computer I ever used was an Apple II-e, and my memories of Number Munchers bring a smile to my face all these years later. Using the arrow keys, I navigated my Muncher around the grid, only eating the correct response to math questions, while avoiding the Troggles wandering the grid trying to eat my Muncher. I was extremely jealous of my classmates, because last year each family had been given an Apple II-e to take home as part of a grant to study the use of the computer in learning reinforcement. My family was not part of the program because I transferred from another elementary in the same district which did not receive the grant. Oregon Trail was the only other game that we played on those computers. Aside from these games, we mostly used the computer to print birthday banners on dot-matrix printers. My first grade teacher saw no value whatsoever in these "toys" and we spent most of our instructional time cutting and pasting manually with paper and paste. Do elementary students even know what paste is anymore—other than ctrl + P?

    By 1989, my teachers were starting to consider rudimentary computer instruction as necessary, if exotic. We learned how to make our computer into a glorified Lite-Brite by making pixilated images. Mine was a Christmas tree, and it took me three sessions to complete. I printed it, cut it out, and glued it on construction paper to hang on the tree with some yarn. We also would write our annual Young Writers Workshop books, first by hand, and then painstakingly and agonizingly typed using only index fingers on the computer and saved on a floppy 5¼" floppy. We then printed our text and physically pasted it into our self-illustrated books, which we were immensely proud of because of the closer resemblance to "real" books.

    In my middle school years, computers were for typing previously written work. We never composed on the computer itself; just as in elementary school, computers were finishing tools, not an instrument in revision. We printed out multiple copies and conducted peer editing with pens and paper, rather with the computer. Nine week long typing classes were a new option at this level, and we tapped out our "asdf asdf asdf" over and over; finally someone was teaching us how to do something other than poke the keys with two fingers. We also discovered that it was endlessly amusing to steal the tracking ball from the mouse.

    In high school, the requisite Keyboarding course was conducted with WordStar and we learned DOS commands. We were instructed to memorize details relating to paper positioning that were surely vital in the glory days of typewriters, but which are a complete waste of time now when a writer can merely select the type of document he/she is planning to compose and the program will set all these parameters effortlessly. We also experienced some of the "Computers are God" types of drill and kill grammar exercises in which we individually had to convince the computer that we did know where to put commas. Even though we found multiple incorrect answers in the program, my freshman English teacher insisted that the program was still better than us!

    Unfortunately, everything I learned in Keyboarding was obsolete by the following year by the introduction of Microsoft Windows and Word at my school. This transition was shockingly simple due to the WYSIWYG interface (I just learned the term "WYSIWYG" today from this website, so I had to use it). With Word, teachers seemed more willing to experiment with allowing the actual writing process and revision to take place on the computer. Although these strategies were employed only sparingly, my classmates and I quickly adopted them as far superior to reading each others' scrawls and having to cross out large portions of text or use arrows to change the position of a sentence on paper.

    My junior year of high school, the Internet arrived in a computer lab. Although there were three labs in the school, only one was connected to the Web. Teachers were terrified of the Internet and saw only the dangers and few of the benefits. Only my French teacher made regular use of the Cyber Lab, lovingly nicknamed the Cyber Bubble due to the windows on all four sides of the classroom. We were able to read Le Figaro, enjoy French cartoon strips, and find pictures of the places we read about in our textbooks. These excursions on the Internet were mostly for entertainment. Although we had work to turn in by the end of the class, the focus was much less on the academic than on the diverting.

    Also in high school, Power Point presentations ruled the earth. Students were asked to make them for all their classes. This was my first taste of the rhetorical properties of multimedia. Never before had I taken a color scheme, pictures from the Internet, and information from research to create a product that was more than what an alphabetic research report could be. I spent hours personalizing my Power Points to my topic and preferences. Unfortunately, the teachers did not seem to know how to instruct us on rhetorical strategies and often violated the medium themselves by creating slides filled with text and reading the text to us while we took notes. The transition was on the horizon, however. At home, I used Hotmail and ICQ to stay connected to friends and in college, AIM became the application every one used to keep in touch.

    I realize now that I experienced the transition to Web 2.0 between high school and college, because the focus of the Internet changed from something that you had to invest time in to find useful information to a resource to stay in touch with others. I didn't have to go down the hall to see what my friend was still working on her paper, because her AIM status told me what I needed to know. If I wanted to get a group together to do something, all I had to do was put up a message saying where and when and everyone would know. I'm lucky that I was in college at the time with the benefit of campus security, etc preventing the majority of creeps from accosting me after brazenly posting my exact whereabouts.

    As a teacher, my favorite technological tools includes ELMO, which at first appears to be merely a glorified overhead projector but is a very powerful tool for the teaching of writing. ELMO makes it possible to project writing without the use of transparencies and markers and it enables modeling and collaboration in a more complex way because of it. My students like to see me writing their assignments along with them, modeling my self-correction and revision as I go along. They make suggestions for alterations to my text, and they can see me processing what they said and incorporate those ideas into the sample. Then the students themselves follow suit.

    At my school, students are not allowed access to many of Web 2.0s resources, but teachers are. I often will pull up a YouTube video to create a tone, inform, prepare, or engage my students in a way that alphabetic texts simply cannot accomplish. Although I love technology and the tools that are available, I wish I knew more about them. My younger brother (born in 1984) knows far more than I do just because he had the advantage of three extra years in the Web 2.0 experience before graduating from college. I eagerly anticipate learning more about digital tools and pedagogy for digital literacy.

    
 

    

    

Digital Tools and Multimodal Composition

I first became familiar with the idea that writing could be more than merely alphabetic text during my undergraduate studies when I read Tom Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multi-Genre Papers (2000) during one of my methods classes. I fell in love with the idea that students could bring together poetry, song, images, receipts, tickets, journal entries, skits, and more to create a comprehensive understanding of a topic than could be achieved by researching and writing a paper alone. My understanding of multimodality is that digital tools can now be used to surpass the multi-genre paper and create a text that is interactive and “living.”


Multimodal compositions are clearly the direction in which meaningful discourse will take place. To see the “driveway effect,” as Selfe calls it, in my classroom more frequently would mean that my students were finally communicating about ideas that have value to not only themselves and are, more unusually, able to bring the rest of the class along in the experience. Whether this happens in presentations live in class or online, this would be powerful writing for a real audience—something students everywhere crave.


Multimodal composition certainly appeals to students far more than the traditional approach, even when drafting is performed on the computer. Students love to demonstrate their proficiency with digital tools and relish in becoming the teacher when fellow students need assistance and particularly when I am stumped by the technology. Much as my classmates and I giggled gleefully in the 90s when the substitute could not work the VCR, contemporary students exult in their superior knowledge of the intricate and sometimes mysterious (at least to me) workings of the web.


I am conflicted about the use of digital tools in the classroom. I see the potential for students to become active participants in learning; they will be delighted to be allowed to speak the language they know best and to be innovative and creative with multimodal compositions. I am eager to learn how to use these digital tools for my own purposes beyond the classroom as well as to foster a broader literacy among my students.


The problem for me is that I love the nearly antiquated pen-and-paper alphabetic writing to which I still cling, even at this very moment, drafting in my notebook before typing. There is a peacefulness and expressiveness that comes from silent thought through the ink which I will miss: something personal about the writer’s voice that I fear will evaporate and be replaced by impersonal hyperlinks. I am anxious to learn more about the tools Web 2.0 provides and how the individual is retained despite the robotic nature of typed words.


Digital tools are undeniably necessary to curriculum; I fully agree with Selfe that, “composition instruction must change if it is to remain relevant and fulfill the goal of preparing effective and literate citizens for the 21st century” (8). If digital tools can create an environment in which my students feel comfortable and encouraged to write, I am excited to learn about it. The “participatory culture” which Henry Jenkins described (as referenced in Beach on page six) is precisely the environment teachers attempt to create in writing workshops to more or less success. The Web 2.0 version of the writing workshop eliminates the face-to-face jitters that many students experience and cultivates an attitude of collaboration and revision.


As far as Prensky’s digital immigrants and natives are concerned, I feel as though there is no place for someone like myself, who was born in 1981 in a relatively rural area. I used computers, but Internet was a foreign concept until my senior year in high school, and even then only the bravest teachers took us to the “Cyber Lab” to conduct research. Through college I quickly picked up certain Web 2.0 features. Now I Facebook, read all my news online, prefer instant messaging to talking on the phone, and listen to my IPod just like other so-called natives, but I am behind my students in this language while still light-years ahead of the decidedly immigrant speakers with many more years teaching experience.


In class we discussed the blurring of lines between one’s independent thought and others’ ideas, and this is where I am concerned about what I perceive to be Prensky’s over-simplification of the issue of the new generation of tech-savvy students. He argues that “They [Digital Natives] thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work” (2). Although the way in which we disseminate and receive information may have changed to be lightning fast and multi-sourced, many aspects of life remain slower-paced and require patience. How many employers are frustrated with new recruits who demand pay increases or promotions without putting in the time and effort to improve their performance or knowledge?


It is negligent to allow students to graduate high school and college without having learned lessons about patience and hard work. Students should not be rewarded merely for showing up and if they wish to belong to a community of scholars, they should use digital tools to reach further than scholars of the past rather than feeling entitled to continuous sources of entertainment even in their learning. Technology can enhance the learning process, but it should not be used as a crutch for weak character.