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)

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.

accompanying materials

• not available

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.

accompanying materials

• The Both/And of Faculty/Undergraduate Scholarship

  View more presentations from s2ceball.

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.

accompanying materials

• proposal (pdf)

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.

accompanying materials

• proposal narrative