This article picks up, literally, where another one leaves off: “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre-Studies Approach” in Technical Communication Quarterly (Ball, 2012). In that article, I describe how I have brought my editorial-mentoring work with Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes “born digital” media-rich scholarship, into undergraduate and graduate writing classes. This article describes how the process of editorial peer-review translates into students’ peer-review workshops in those same writing classes.
Ball, Cheryl E. (2012) Assessing scholarly multimedia: A rhetorical genre studies approach. Technical Communication Quarterly, 21(1), 1-17.
abstract
This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.
(2010, October 23). Making multimodal projects: Integrating digital rhetorics and literacies across the curriculum. Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference, Las Cruces, NM.
description (from proposal) A collaborative session with two of my textbook co-authors (Kristin Arola and Jennifer Sheppard).
I will discuss the practicalities of writing a collaborative textbook project with authors who share a theoretical and pedagogical approach but who haven’t collaborated as a group and are not co-located. This presentation will discuss how the authors modeled their own textbook’s approach to designing multimodal projects, following the same mistakes and having the same successes our students have when writing. This speaker will provide a meta-narrative of the book’s coming to fruition (even as it is still a work in progress, and we invite feedback on its current iteration, to be shown in the panel). We will detail, for instance, some of the collaborative techniques and technological programs we used, our internal and editorial negotiations to determine the *kind* of textbook we wanted (materially, theoretically, and practically), and the realizations we made about our assumptions in teaching writing to English majors (even in new media ways, as we do), but how we mistakenly dismissed first-year students taking Writing 101 as a possible audience for our book in the quest of creating a book useful to our colleagues teaching multimodal projects in their business, politics, and biology classes. We will provide examples from our writing process, to show the book-in-progress, and to show how this narrative of writing for students is formed on the idea that, as teachers of rhetoric and writing, we can never divorce our theoretical understanding of writing and the research of writing from our pedagogical approaches, either in the classroom or in writing for the classroom.
Ball, Cheryl E., & Arola, Kristin L. (2010). visualizing composition (2nd ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. http://ix.bedfordstmartins.com [password required]
description [the 'cover' blurb]
ix visualizing composition is a concrete introduction to the fundamentals of multimodal composition. Each tutorial moves through the following three steps:
Define. Illustrated definitions help you visualize principles of layout, design and composition: element, contrast, purpose, text, framing, audience, alignment, context, emphasis, color, proximity, organization, and sequence.
Analyze. Guided readings of real-world texts—such as photographs, movie clips, comics, and animation—model how writers of different texts put theory into practice.
Respond. Interactive assignments invite you to make your own rhetorical choices—determining font face or color, image hue, and the placement and organizational of visual and textual elements—and to write about the impact those choices have.
Note: This is the second edition of ix, the CD-ROM Arola and I co-authored in 2004. In this version, 9 of 13 tutorials (broken down by terms associated with rhetorical design choices) have been completely revised, with new and more multimodal examples and analyses.
(2010, September 4). Teaching undergraduates to compose and assess scholarly multimedia. Colloque Littéracies Universitaires/Academic Literacies Conference, Lille3, Lille, France.
description
I discuss an undergraduate writing class where students learn to read, peer review, and write their own digital scholarship that draws on multiple media and modes of production (audio, video, graphics, written text, HTML, etc.) to enact their arguments. I describe how students transfer their alphabetic writing processes to multimedia, using example projects and reflections to show their learning.
Multimodal Composition is an upper-division writing elective for all majors at Illinois State University. As of Fall 2009, I have taught this course four times.
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.
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, October 13). The role of new media in student narratives. Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY.
abstract In this presentation, I discuss some student-produced new media texts from a class I taught called Perspective on Writing and Rhetoric: Multimodal Composition, in which the students created a series of progressively more multimodal projects (written text, audio, static image, vog, video documentary). I discussed how students transformed the idea of “narrative” through unexpected visual techniques, especially in their filmic projects.
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, January 7). The both/and of faculty, undergraduate digital scholarship. Conference for the Center of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Normal, IL.
abstract
This presentation tracks two ecologies: (1) an undergraduate multimodal composition class producing digital scholarship for a digital book collection, and (2) the teacher’s work on that digital collection alongside the production of her tenure e-portfolio. Both students and teacher have asked the following questions in and about their research: What can students teach teachers? What can teachers learn from students? What does digital scholarship look like for undergraduates and faculty? These are ubiquitous questions in our field, and I will show examples from both ecologies to discuss possible answers to these questions, from which larger questions arise: How can a multimodal composition class contribute to the sustainability of academic writing? How can the obstacles of low-access computing promote digital scholarship in which undergraduate students talk back to the scholars who are often talking *at*, not with, them? In answering these questions (in light of the class’s scholarly project and the teacher’s current work in digital scholarship), I argue that teaching, learning, and composing digital scholarship across student–teacher barriers provides sustainable ways for digital media scholars to connect their undergraduate curricula with their research lives.
citation
Ball, Cheryl E.; Ellison, Katherine; Thompson, Torri; Justice, Hilary; Neuleib, Janice; & Kalmbach, James. (2009). Assessing faculty & student multimodal teaching and learning practices across campus. Department/School Initiative in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University. $10,000. [not funded]
abstract This grant proposal was intended to fund a series of surveys and workshops to assess how teachers across the curriculum at Illinois State University implemented student-based projects using multiple media.
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, October 1). Creating sustainable teaching practices for multimodal scholarship. NEH Teaching Development Fellowship. $21,000. [under review]
abstract I am requesting funding of $21,000 over the five-month period August–December 2010 to complete a teaching development project aimed at creating templates for multimodal scholarship, which I will use as the basis for my English 239: Multimodal Composition course at Illinois State University. These templates will use a selection of open-source software created in partial conjunction with University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The release time this stipend provides will allow me to travel to USC to work with these designers and to create three templates and three tutorials (on how to use those templates) so that my students can practice more cutting-edge and more sustainable digital humanities scholarly practices.
citation
Ball, Cheryl E., & et al. [12 undergraduates]. (2008). Teaching The new work of composing: Undergraduate research in digital scholarship. Teaching-Learning Development Grant, Illinois State University. $2,000.
abstract A unique opportunity has arisen for the students in my English 239 (Multimodal Composition) class; they have been invited to the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville this October, where they will collect research to complete their major class projects. The students will interview conference presenters, film and audio-record sessions, and, from that data collection, produce a digital, multimedia-based book chapter for submission to the first “born-digital” scholarly book in English studies, The New Work of Composing. This book is set to be published by the first all-digital, academic press in the humanities, Computers and Composition Digital Press.
outcomes The students collected digital assets from the conference and produced 3 digital media texts for a chapter called “Talking Back: Undergraduates and Digital Media Research,” which has been editorially reviewed by the two other editors of The New Work of Composing and accepted for publication.
citation
McCorkle, Ben [Producer]. (2007, June 5). Visiting scholars in digital media: Cheryl Ball [Video]. Ohio State University. http://tinyurl.com/dmac-interview-ball
abstract
Short interview (12:29) with Cheryl Ball (Illinois State University), part of the ongoing series featuring Visiting Scholars in Digital Media and Composition at the OSU Department of English. Outline: I. On a digital tenure portfolio. II. Defining the terms in digital writing studies. III. Explaining this work to students. IV. Why I attend the DMAC institute. V. Advice for new multimedia teacher-scholars.
citation
Bemer, Amanda; Moeller, Ryan M.; & Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, September). Designing collaborative learning spaces: Where material culture meets mobile writing processes. Programmatic Perspectives: Journal of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, 1(2). http://www.cptsc.org/pp/vol1-2/bemer_moeller_ball1-2.pdf
abstract In May 2007, the Department of English at Utah State University (USU) redesigned its computer lab to increase mobility and collaboration during writing projects. Our study shows that despite the Professional and Technical Communication (PTC) field’s efforts to promote writing as a socially active, collaborative practice, many students view computer labs as spaces for conducting isolated, single-authored work. In this article, we discuss how a combination of movable furniture and mobile technology, including wireless access and laptops, can enhance student collaboration in group-based writing assignments. The lab included both desktop and laptop seating areas, so the authors created a modified worksite analysis designed to evaluate team collaboration in this new layout. These material changes in the lab allow students to configure the space according to their needs, offering them some measure of control over three crucial elements of successful collaboration: formality, presence, and confidentiality.
citation
Ball, Cheryl E.; Fenn, Tyrell; & Scoffield, Tia. (under contract). Genre and transfer in a multimodal composition class. In Carl Whithaus & Tracey Bowen (Eds.) Multimodal literacies and emerging genres in student compositions. University of Pittsburgh Press.
status
Update 6/08: Collection received advanced contract from Utah State University Press.
Update 4/09: Utah State Univ Press downsized; asked to send mss elsewhere.
Update 10/09: Collection reviewed by Pittsburgh University Press; co-editors responding to reviews.
Update 11/28/09: Email notification by editors for new revision deadline of Feb. 1, 2010, to be reviewed again by Pittsburgh UP.
Update 2/2/11: Email notification of contract by U of Pittsburgh Press. Ours is the lead chapter in the book. We had no revisions.
abstract This chapter is about a teacher’s progression through three iterations of a class (at two universities) in multimodal composition, with a focus on how two students brought previous multiliteracy practices into the classroom, how that knowledge shaped instruction, and how the instructor learned to not assign texts by modes in a multimodal class so as to avoid a-generic production of wowless, “five-paragraph” videos.
Old abstract: In this chapter, we overview an individual-classroom implementation (i.e., non-programmatic) of multimodal, multimedia, and multigenre composition, in which the distinctions between those terms will be discussed by the instructor–author. The second and third authors (who were students in the class) took on teacher-roles in class based on their histories of composing with multiple modes and media; they reflect on those histories and how prior experiences played a role in the designs of their final projects, which included a video documentary and several supplementary texts designed with different media and different rhetorical situations in mind. Our purpose in this chapter is threefold: (1) to outline and discuss problems with a new media composition syllabus with sequenced assignments that step students through composing in different modes, media, and genres; (2) provide narratives of students’ experiences composing texts in such a course, with a focus on their transferable critical literacies; and (3) offer lessons learned whereby teachers can help students produce more interesting, relevant, and powerful texts than the original syllabus inspires.