m2h blogs by Marcia Hansen

June 7, 2006
Talking to Colleagues and Administrators
Gail Hawisher (or here) and Kris Blair (or here or here) led this first session of the morning.
Kris talked about electronic thesis and dissertations at Bowling Green. Gail talked about a writing with video course.
Kris assumes that everyone agrees that we want to integrate multimodal composing [...]

Brian Huot and Cindy were the next speakers of the day. They spoke about Assessing Digital and Multimodal Texts.
Wow! Already I’m thinking Huot is a good speaker. He is moving throughout the room and making eye contact with everyone. Cool!
They began with a 5-minute activity where they asked us [...]

The first speaker this morning spoke about accessibility. He had a webpage demonstration that illustrated the problems that some users might have with websites and applications. For example, movies that don’t have adequate sound, text displayed with inappropriate background and text colors, text that scrolled too fast, text that is too small, etc. [...]

The following are my notes from this morning.
In class discussion this morning, Mary Hocks and Scott DeWitt both emphasized that it would be easier if we add one digital assignment to our classes rather than change them completely all at once.
Where to start with Multimodal Composing and Where to Go
Mary Hocks
During her talk, various people [...]

Give students a handout with just key terms on it. Leave space for students to write their own definitions in their own language. If the instructor also puts the terms in the order they want to explain and discuss, then it also serves as the session’s lesson plan.
Don’t you just love [...]

I wanted to capture some of the quick notes that I’ve taken and haven’t been able to blog yet. Sorry if it is a little disjointed.
Books/Authors mentioned:
Manuel Castels, V1, 2, & 3
Gunther Kress, New London Group
Margaret Mead, Culture & Commitment – talks about rate of change post-figurative, pre-figurative, and co-figurative
Documentaries Mentioned:
Common Threads: Stories from [...]

This evening, I learned a little about Flash. It was fun, fun, fun! I was one of those people who hadn’t ever found much Flash that I liked on websites. I admit, I hadn’t looked too hard because the way that some website designers use it to serve no special purposes whatsoever [...]

We’ve learned how to:
use minidiscs to record audio
use Audacity to edit audio
operate video cameras
edit video and sound with iMovie
So, now, guess what?!? They’re turning us lose to do individual work this morning. Cindy will be here in Deney to answer questions. If we want to talk about our projects, we’re to be [...]

Scott had a party for everyone at his house tonight. He was cooking beef and vegetarian burgers on the grill for everyone. Plus, everyone that lives here in Columbus brought all this delicious food to eat.
After dinner, we viewed all of the iMovies we made yesterday and today. I think everyone’s [...]

Here are this morning’s notes:
If using head phones with students, it might be good to purchase headphone splitters so that all can listen to sound. Also, if you have poor hearing, professional headphones are a must for hearing low audio levels, such as that recorded in a library.
Interesting Quotes
Scott says, “I’m going to talk [...]