Richard Selfe tells us to start with small compositions, "5 minutes or less in length." Now, five minutes allows you to read about 3 pages of text, so the most information such a composition could be expected to convey would be the equivalent of a three page paper. Is that academically rigorous?
Do such assignments, given the amount of class time they are likely to consume, drastically reduce the rigor of a class?
Is there really as much critical thinking and analysis involved in a five minute video as a 5–7 page paper?
The Selfes seem to focus almost entirely on audio and video. Why? Does this rule out designing visual texts that mix type and image either in print or online?
Marilyn Cooper's chapter once again raises the idea that students need digital literacies, which seems to be equated in MC with doing multimodal compositions, but when she begins to relate how much of these students' lives require digital literacies, she lists things like email, facebook, blogging, etc. The only activity, which only 1/3 of the students had had to do that involves significant multimodal composing is constructing web-sites (those assignments came up often for the students inability to master the software). Digital literacy seems to conflate the knowledge to use software, employ online communication—most of which are alphabetic text heavy (blogging sites like blogger do not allow for rhetorically sophisticated multimodal composing, dropping pictures or videos into a blog is much like dropping an image into Word, it's always awkward and not conducive to successful visual design), and multimodal composing (which is itself a conflation of videos, graphically designed print texts, scrap book pages, etc., etc. It seems that it is with very broad claims that advocates argue that composition must teach vital digital literacies as if the ability to create and maintain a blog, wiki, or facebook account and the ability to create five minute videos are equally vital literacies for everyone to have. Is this a problem?
If new media advocates are to be taken seriously don't they need to be a little more specific about what literacies are vital and which are superfluous for most students?
Is there evidence to back up the assertion that these are vital literacies?
Journet describes how the students in Cindy Selfe's seminar "became more and more expert," but she does not day at what. Later, she praises the projects for demonstrating "a technological competence"Do these assignments really teach students much more than how to use the technology?
Journet does, of course, discuss what the graduate students made their compositions about, and how the class workshopped to identify problems, and the emphasis on rhetoric (which Rhet. Comp. graduate students would know much better than undergrads), but did the students end up learning to compose good audio/visual texts?
How would they compare to the work of undergrads working in other disciplines?
Do students in composition classes that teach multimodal design end up in other classes, thinking they know what their doing, only to have bad experiences learning how little they really learned?
I've had the experience of learning similar things in an undergrad technical writing class and a graphic design class, and it was an eye-opening experience as far as the quality of the work. Both classes taught the integration of text and visual, but the writing class provided quality information about the text and mediocre information about the visual while the graphic design class provided excellent information about the visual while helping me to see type as a visual element (they didn't really try to teach composition). Of course, this works out well. The tech-writing class was supposed to teach writers the basics of the software technical writers sometimes have to use while emphasizing the writing while the graphic design class was meant to teach visual rhetoric including the rhetoric of type working with image in more ways than just illustrative, which involved a deeper knowledge of the same software.
What is the goal of including multimodal compositions?
Is it to teach things that are better taught elsewhere?
Is it to show how alphabetic texts and other modes are integrated while still focusing primarily on the alphabetic?
Is it to teach students to compose "good" or "effective" multimodal compositions?
If the last, are we deluding ourselves into thinking we're qualified to teach this stuff?
No comments:
Post a Comment