DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 

Digication Updates

  • New comment/feedback/response feature: currently in development and should be ready by the Winter Quarter; it's usable now, but has some bugs and oddities that need to be worked out for the next version
  • New submission process: the FYW Digital Portfolio assignment is the same — optional mid-term portfolio and required final portfolio — but the visual interface is different
  • FYW FAQ: your submissions
  • We need some additional examples that do not emphasize higher-end design and sophisticated use of CSS
  • We need some additional examples of teaching portfolios, pretty please
D-WRD Working Group Updates

  • Digital WRD Working Group: how you can participate
  • High-quality professional development requires collaboration and an active sharing of knowledge
  • Collective expertise and fostering an environment of mutual support
  • Meetings & workshops
  • Mailing list
  • One-on-one followups and support
  • Opportunities for research, publishing, and conferences
  • Nate Silver and truth-seeking behavior
  • A brief moment for Everyone's an Author

Toward Some Shared Vocabulary and Assumptions:
Literacy & Technology

 

Relationships and tensions between academic essays, academic literacies, social literacies, and multimodal composing.

 

Claims for teaching conventional, traditional academic essays:

 

  • Excellent genre for critical thinking and exposition [SMH 8b]
  • Supports writing-to-learn and iterative processes [SMH 2c]
  • Integrates organizational and structural ways of thinking [SMH 3e]
  • Fosters extended writing, persuasion, analysis, and reflection  [SMH 5c]
  • Supports disciplinary, institutional, and cultural expectations and demands [SMH 1a-f]
  • Can serve as a buffer from the noise and demands of a consumer culture and an administered, managed world [SMH 24a-c]

Claims for teaching with technology in general, and multimodal composing in particular:

 

  • In an increasingly technological world, students need to be experienced and skilled not only in reading (consuming) texts employing multiple modalities, but also in composing in multiple modalities, if they hope to communicate successfully within the digital communication networks that characterize workplaces, schools, civic life, and span traditional cultural, national, and geopolitical borders [SMH 22c]
  • If composition instruction is to remain relevant, the definition of “composition” and “texts” needs to grow and change to reflect peoples’ literacy practices in new digital communication environments [SMH it's the subtitle: "The Handbook of the Literacy Revolution"]
  • The authoring of compositions that include still images, animations, video, and audio—although intellectually demanding and time consuming—is also engaging [SMH 22c?]
  • Audio and visual composing requires attention to rhetorical principles of communication [22c]
  • Teaching multimodality is one pathway to accomplishing long-valued pedagogical goals. (Selfe & Takayoshi, "Thinking about Multimodality," 2007)

 How Can You Use this Monday Morning?

 

  • Student assignments and projects can focus on researching and writing about multimodality without having to move from the essay form to video, the WWW, etc.; one possible angle is to provide students with the above claims about academic essays and multimodal composing and ask them to take positions. Teach the conflict. 
  • Compose an original essay that informs your audience of the reading, writing, and technological activities that you will participate in once you leave college and join the workforce. Consider all forms of communication that happens in the progression you choose: words, images, video, audio, art, etc. 
  • Consider revising an existing assignment or project that asks for a multimodal outcome 
  • Compose an argument without using alphabetic text
  • Compose a multimodal literacy narrative
  • Compose an audio essay using Soundcloud

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.