Mahon, Wade. (2011). Multimodal composition & the rhetoric of teaching: A conversation with Cheryl Ball. Issues in Writing 18(2).

abstract

Cheryl Ball is an Associate Professor of New Media Studies at Illinois State University where she teaches courses on multimodal composition as well as digital media, composition theory, and digital publishing. She gives talks and workshops on these topics around the country and has published and collaborated on a number of articles, edited collections, book chapters, and webtexts as well. She has also co-authored with Kristin Arola a textbook, Visualizing Composition. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the editor of the electronic journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. IW editor Wade Mahon spoke with Ball by phone on June 23, 2011.

accompanying materials

• pre-print interview transcript

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.

accompanying materials

• final page-proof (pdf)

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

description
Interviewed by renowned graphic designer and teacher, Ellen Lupton, on the role of design in first-year writing classes. Voice is the online newsletter of the professional association for design.

accompanying materials

• Lupton’s article

description

A partial screenshot of my tweet-based editorial column

This editorial column, written as a series of tweets (i.e., 140-character Twitter updates), describes the major discussion threads from the 2009 Computers & Writing conference at UC-Davis. One of the keynote speakers at C&W asked audience members to tweet her presentation, which started a large backchannel discussion, so the form of this column is in honor of that session. This column also lists the Kairos award winners presented at C&W (as well as that Kairos design staffers won another award for their redesign efforts), and introduces the webtexts in this issue.

accompanying materials

• column