So, as promised, I am writing to follow up on the experience of incorporating a brief, low stakes, in-class, digital assignment into my first-year composition course today!  Students submitted their final draft of a personal narrative/argumentative essay today that we had been drafting for several weeks, and then we moved into a new unit/major writing assignment, the theme of which is writing processes.  When introducing this unit in the past, I’ve had students draw their process and then we discuss their depictions and experiences of process. So, today in class, I asked that they represent their process visually through some sort of digital media.  I had prepared a visual

My “Model”

representation of my own writing process using Comic Life and provided that for students as an example, and then encouraged them to use ComicLife or whatever program they were familiar with or preferred to visually represent their own processes.  Most of my students used Comic Life, a few of them used Prezi, and one student made a video.

Some successes:

• Students asked a lot of questions about composing, saving, exporting, and sharing their compositions.  We were all able to answer these questions together without any awful, uncomfortable, scary de-centering classroom authority Apocalypses of any kind. Some students had a more difficult time navigating the program than others and a few students expressed a lot of frustration, but approaching the assignment as low stakes and entirely in-class helped to alleviate any full scale freak-outs.
• We were able to discuss a broader range of processes than just “writing” processes and we were able to expand our notions of what constitutes a “text”.  We had briefly discussed this expanded notion of a “text” before in class (with the help of the rhetorical situation), and today’s digital/visual in-class activity helped to reinforce and demonstrate that lots of compositions, not just text based compositions, involve processes, authors/speakers/composers/designers, audiences, and contexts.
  

  We Made Knowledge!!

• Things got real meta real fast.  We first discussed how students were representing process in their visual compositions: what images they had chosen and why (with the help of some terms from Sorapure’s article), what arguments those images they had chosen were making about processes, if their current representation of process had changed at all from an earlier written description of their process composed weeks before.  Then, we discussed the process of composing the visual artifact and compared that process to the one they had hoped to represent (this is where we introduced the expanded notion of “text”).

Some things I would do differently:

• Warn my students to bring their laptops instead of assuming they would have them (only one did not, she used mine) or better still reserve a room on campus with access to campus computers with a wider variety of programs for composing visual texts.
• Devise, ahead of time, a better way for each student to share their composition with the entire class. About halfway through class I realized we would need a way to share and see each others’ visual compositions (a problem I had not anticipated when I was creating my model alone and not needing to share it. Classrooms are social spaces, duh).  So, I had students upload them to shared files on Google Drive that they had used for small group peer review, but this meant that each student could only access three visual compositions instead of everyone seeing everyone’s work. (That too would have been easy to fix in the moment too, but my laptop was being used by a student).
• Assign some out of class reflection or response to carry the assignment and our discussion of it outside of our one hour and twenty minute class meeting.

As you can tell, the successes were more substantive than the mishaps in this instance, and I will probably repeat (and update) this activity for future composition courses. Yay!!

I think Madeleine Sorapure’s “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Composition” has been one of the most accessible, practically useful, and thought provoking readings we’ve done for our Computers and Writing class this semester.  Because I had such a positive experience and reaction to that text, I thought I’d explore it a bit more here.  As I’ve already expressed, one of my most pressing goals for the semester and for this course  is to ease my anxieties about incorporating computers and writing type assignments into my first-year composition classroom. I think this text was so useful in pushing me towards that goal because it offers actual assignments and student compositions. In that way, the text helped me to come down out of the ether of theory and into the equally important, possibly more urgent issues of pedagogy.  It also still helped me to sort out some more theories too.

Basically, Sorapure’s use of metaphor and metonymy to structure her assignment prompts and to evaluate her students’ compositions helped me to sort out a process by which I might incorporate some more new media/multimodal type assignments into my classroom. Not that I will wholly adopt her terms and methods, but in her process of assigning and evaluating, I found some connections to the ways that I already try to teach print based composition (like being consistent and transparent with students about the goals, requirements, and evaluation of the assignment as Sorapure did with the terms metaphor and metonymy).  Turns out that bringing multimodal and new media assignments into the classroom might not be as scary as I’ve been imagining.  I might already have some useful processes and principles to draw off of (although I also recognize that I will need to remain flexible and open to new possibilities, opportunities, and also unforeseen/unpredictable troubleshooting).

I will say I’m still a bit concerned and will now recapitulate some often expressed reservations about incorporating these kinds of assignments into the comp classroom (not simply to beat a dead horse but instead to hopefully get them out of my system and move beyond them):

I guess I’m still concerned about how truly de-centered my classroom will now be. I already feel less authoritative than desirable in the classroom simply because I am so young and new a teacher, so close in age to my students, and generally run my classroom pretty informally/conversationally already.  Introducing technology and assignments based in using technology into the classroom will reveal and expose me as even more of a novice.  And now, to move beyond this anxiety about further de-centering authority in my classroom: my students have always been respectful of me and also sought me out for my guidance/”expertise” when they’ve felt like they’ve needed it. Continuing on in this honest/transparent way that I’ve begun as a teacher will hopefully encourage that kind of dialogue and “learning together” type environment rather than alienating me or undercutting what authority I do have in the classroom. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself as I incorporate a brief, low stakes, in-class, digital assignment into my classroom today! Follow up post coming soon…

This semester I’m taking a course called “Computers and Writing” and using this here blog to do some thinking and writing about those topics.  So, technically I am a “digital native” or so my age and generational identity would seem to suggest. However, I am much more a consumer than a producer of digital media, and that fact makes me feel uncomfortable being labeled as someone who should know how to do things and make things with technology.

The most striking example of my consumery digital habits is that I unapologetically love

My Dog and My Pretty New Purple Computer: Enabling My Consumery, Digital Immigrant Ways

Facebook, and most anything else I’ve found and liked on the interwebs I encountered first through Facebook.  I have a theory rolling around in my head about Facebook being a largely middle class phenomenon. That’s not to say that only people who identify as middle class use Facebook, rather the uses and conventions that have developed on Facebook fulfill some specifically middle class needs and desires.  But I have lots of theories about different things (digital or not) being middle class phenomena.  And that is one of my biggest concerns as I jump headlong into the topics surrounding computers and writing. How do I study these new things without simply cutting and pasting all the ways I’ve been studying print composing and print literacy practices?

I’m also a bit anxious ((and excited)) for how these computers and writing topics may influence my teaching.  I’ve already been encouraging my students to explore these topics whenever possible or whenever they have seemed to take an interest in them.  Last semester I assigned a “Writing Constructs” paper in my first-year composition class and about half of my students chose digital-y type topics to explore, mostly about how Facebook or Twitter or Texting or E-Readers or Word Processing programs have and are influencing writing.  So many of them were interested in these kinds of topics that I sent around this “Myth of Digital Literacies” video, which I’m becoming a bit obsessed with (plus, it’s always good for the soul to get a good visual of Andrea Lunsford).  Where did I first find this video you ask? Why, Facebook of course! So, it seems, I am encouraging my own digital consumer ways in my students.

I would love to encourage my students to instead PRODUCE some sort of digital assignment or argument, but that scares me a lot because I would be relinquishing my authority in the classroom in a very real way.  They’d ask question and I’d have to answer with a lot of “I don’t know”s.  And not the kind of teacherly “I don’t know, why don’t you go explore that for yourself” rhetorical trick where I really do know but don’t want to simply give them the answers. No, in this case, I genuinely would not know how to answer their questions about using and producing digital media.  Also, I would want a digital project for them that could stand on its own and not just be the performative, cherry on top, add on to some traditionally, print-composed argument they had already written.  So these are my goals for the semester: learn some new research and teaching methods that seem fitting to the topics of computers and writing.