poster for talk, designed by Michele Melanie

abstract
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy has been publishing digital media scholarship since 1996, and each new medium and digital technology offers authors changing ways that they can make meaning through visual, aural, linguistic, and other modes of communication. As editor of Kairos, it is my responsibility to understand the often cutting-edge and genre-bending moves authors make in their submissions to this rhetoric and composition journal. I will present a few examples of submissions (historical and recent) that required the staff and editorial board members to re-negotiate the ever-changing boundaries between ‘typical’ digital scholarship and “new media scholarship,” exemplified by the relationship between the visual and the linguistic (i.e., written).

accompanying materials

• Prezi presentation

abstract
This chapter is composed of 14 voices—12 undergraduates, 1 graduate student, and 1 faculty member (Cheryl E. Ball, contact author) from a multimodal composition class at Illinois State University. In a three-part chapter, we speak to the perceptions of undergraduate students’ technology use presented by scholarship, attendees at the Watson conference, and on our campus. The first section, presented as a video, reflects on conference attendees’ discussions of students who weren’t representative of the majority audience (professors and graduate students) at the conference. The second section, also presented as a video, asks how pedagogy needs to change to accommodate an increase in digital technology and what kind of cooperation is necessary between students and their teachers so both parties can effectively communicate to and learn from each other. The third section, presented as a MySpace page, argues that educators should incorporate social networks into their pedagogies because they offer a different way of composing. The sections will be presented together on the class blog, http://www.ceball.com/classes/239, where the index page will become a static Introduction to the chapter and each section will be presented as a page off the index. The benefit of hosting the site (for now) on the 239 class blog is so that readers can explore behind the scenes of our learning experience as we produced digital scholarship this semester.

status

• 12/08: proposal accepted for the collection
• 07/09: student projects revised
• 10/09: collection accepted by press
• 11/09: final chapter draft being readied for editors

accompanying materials

• chapter proposal
• chapter acceptance email from editors
  

see also

• English 239: Multimodal Composition (Fall 2008 syllabus) (under Classes Taught)
• The New Work of Composing (under Edited Volumes)
• “A Case Study of Revision Processes…” (under Honors)

semesters & syllabi

• Spring 2008: Audio Essays

description
I taught English 246 as an Audio Essay class, in the spirit of radio stories and documentaries like those heard on This American Life. We started by making playlists of favorite songs to introduce each other through musical choices (in order to discuss the rhetoric of music and other forms of audio). We then worked on audio poems for Poetry Radio on WGLT (the local NPR station), moved onto 5-7 minute audio documentary-like stories, and concluded with This I Believe reflections about the class and learning experience.

teaching innovations

• I installed Moodle, an open-source content-management system, for the first time on my personal server for students to use as a place to hold online discussions and to upload their audio files. I used about half the features in Moodle, students preferred it to Blackboard/WebCT, and so I may use it again, although the freely available ning platform, which was not available at the time, may be easier.
• This semester was the first time I used a blog platform for an entire syllabus. All schedules, policies, readings, resource links, and class news was posted to the class blog, which students seemed to like. (Still, however, I did not have students using their own blog; there wasn’t a purpose for that kind of blog-portfolio for this class.)

teaching challenge
A challenge I faced in teaching this course had to do with the available hardware in my classroom. Because this course isn’t always taught in a computer lab, I had originally been assigned a “dumb” classroom, which is what my field calls a classroom with no technology, as opposed to a “smart” classroom, a common term in instructional technology that refers to a classroom with at least a teacher’s computer station and projection equipment. So I switched into a computer classroom with 27 older stations and furniture that was literally falling apart. (Given that the building was currently undergoing life-safety renovations and this particular classroom was being phased out for the following year, I was happy to have it.) Although the machines did not have CD burners, which would normally be a must for an audio essay class, we made do. (It turns out that despite students’ lack of technical production in multimodal composition, they know how to burn CDs on their home computers. :) However, I had another challenge with this room, which was both technological and ideological: It was built to house a large seminar instead of a smaller-sectioned writing class, but the room layout was too long and narrow to conduct discussions. Each of the 3 classes assigned to that room that last semester of its existence had less than 22 students, so (with permission) I removed 5 computer stations and the worst of the broken desks, which made the room feel more cozy and condusive to discussion.

accompanying materials

• student’s audio poem from class, published in Euphemism

semesters & syllabi

• Fall 2007 (as English 289.22: Multimedia Writing Workshop): 18 students
• Fall 2008 (hereafter as English 239: Multimodal Composition): 12 students
• Spring 2009: 9 students (7 undergraduates & 2 graduate students, as independent studies)
• Fall 2009: 14 students (11 undergraduates & 3 graduate students, as independent studies)

description
Started as English 289.33: Multimedia Writing Workshop. I wrote the course proposal to turn it into a permanent class. During Fall 2007, I taught the course similarly to how I taught English 3040: Perspectives in Writing & Rhetoric the previous year as a faculty member at Utah State University; its topic was an open-assignment video course where students progressed from smaller, monomodal exercises to 5-minute multimodal videos of various genres. I didn’t like the organization for the course (as described in my teaching development plan under Teaching), so I changed the syllabus the next fall. For Fall 08, Spring 09, and Fall 09, the course focused on having students compose digital media scholarship for a peer-reviewed publication in English Studies. The publication venue changed for different semesters, as students responded to real calls for papers in the field of digital writing studies.

teaching innovations

• Fall 2007, I implemented a teaching innovation of showcasing the student’s work at the local, historic cinema. I was nominated for the department’s innovative teaching award for this effort, although it turned out I was ineligible because I had not been at ISU long enough to meet the award criteria of two years.
• Fall 2008 came a different innovation as I changed the syllabus — having students compose texts for peer-reviewed publications provided them with the elusive “authentic audience” while giving them a specific rhetorical situation in which to work. Also innovative this semester was taking as many of these students who could go to a national conference about multimodal composition. From this event, which they filmed, they built several digital media projects and proposed their inclusion into the digital conference proceedings. Their proposals were accepted, and as of Fall 2009, I am working with one student from that class to revise the student projects for publication.

accompanying materials

• original 239 course proposal
• current 239 syllabi (links to website index of all available semesters)

see also

• “Who Needs YouTube?!” (under Research Designs)
• “Talking Back to Teachers: Undergraduate Research in Multimodal Composition” (under Chapters)
• “A Case Study in Revision Processes in Student-Authored Digital Media Scholarship” (under Honors)