I attended the Colloquium on Writing Assessment/Mid-America Writing Program Administrators conferece on Thursday in St. Louis at Saint Louis University. Gail Hawisher gave the keynote, “The Challenge of Multimodal Composing.” Gail HawisherI enjoyed her talk and I went up afterwards to talk with her and mentioned that I had met her this summer at the Computers and Writing Conference at Stanford. Of course, she was gracious enough to say she remembered me and also gracious enough to let me take this picture. I also ran into John who was also kind enough to check to see if I could access slunet, which I couldn’t, and which is why this blog post is a little delayed from Thursday’s conference.

Gail Hawisher, University of Illinois
“The Challenge of Multimodal Composing”
October 27, 2005
1:20 p.m.

GH began with Wysoki’s definition of multi-modal composing that “highlight(s) materiality”. She said that she sent a query to the WPA List for news on WPA programs and got a lot of responses. This made me wonder if there is a list anywhere of any WPAs who blog??

She mentioned Todd Taylor at UNC who has been teaching a multimodal composing class as part of a first-year writing program since 1998. (Side note: I clicked on the link for ENGL 06 First-year Seminar: Multimedia North Carolina, but it didn’t have any sound or text associated with the file. The images were nice, but I was expecting something more. Maybe it’s my system??
She also mentioned Jeff Rice at Wayne State who is working on a project to move all first-year writing to digital and the program also includes training TAs.

Note: While some individual instructors may include multimodal composing into their courses, few programs yet require multimodal composing.

At UIUC, they are working to pass a course on video projects. As GH sees it, the challenges are:
1. get course to be accepted as general education (this acceptance brings necessary funds).
2. train TAs to teach course. TAs have started a Writing With Media Group towards this initiative.
3. need technology infrastructure to support initiative. They have I think she said 8 video cameras and laptops from Apple.
4. need a system to check out video cameras, manuals, tripods, etc. This is challenging. Provost has given funds, but they need the funds that come with acceptance as general education course.
5. finally, pedagogical challenges because they don’t yet have a language for what makes good video. Have asked UGs for help defining.

Questions to audience…What are people doing?

Person at DePauw doing public-service announcements and independent students doing ethnographies.

Man from East Missouri State said that he used to use it, but has stopped because of some students’ limited tech knowledge and questions practical use of especially AG students. GH responded along the lines of ‘practical knowledge may change in the future and it might not be apparent now what is needed…’

GH showed some student digital video projects that were really great. They were montages and voice overs of movies that were really good. These evidence that students are creating arguments when they create these videos. She thinks that they’re teaching them more about media criticism than ever. Seems to me like turning TV watching and movie watching from passive to active activity, which in today’s culture would be a huge positive.
Question from audience about assessing, and also about plagiarizing. Concerns about making arguments and plagiarism could be handled by self-reflection assignments that ask students to explain why they are using the montages they do.
Response to plagiarism from John Walter: Our notions of plagiarism are changing. Plagiarism is tied to 19th century technologies and new modes require new definitions of what is acceptable.

Another man wonders about writing being moved from center stage to side. According to syllabus students still “write a 3-5 page microanalysis of a documentary film, video or television program of your choice. Present your paper with selected clips in a ten minute presentation to the class.” Also students complete journal entries that correspond to readings. Also, during the video essay composition process, part of the process includes “writing down everything you think of while listening–images, emotions, ideas…at least two pages in your journal, (as well as) create a shot list and storyboard”. Note: This syllabus was for a Summer 2005 course taught by Maria Lovett: Writing with Video Class. Course also being taught Fall 2005. If you check out that link, you can watch nadia jassim’s clip. Also, the syllabus has more links to projects.

When Gail Hawsisher said something about writing instructors needing to learn technologies, Marty Townsend asked whether we as writing instructors are mucking around in other disciplines where we shouldn’t be. I’m not sure whether she said this because she doesn’t believe in technology initiatives or whether she is playing devil’s advodate. GH says it depends on how we state our goals.

Rebecca Dingo asked about how to integrate technology. GH says writing needs to be mixed in, but doesn’t have a good answer because it changes the writing and need to have many different goals for writing. I read something just the other day that argued that integration doesn’t mean figuring out lesson plans without technology and then adding technology on top of traditional plans, but actually starting with technology and using that to craft new plans. Oh, yes, it was in Teaching Writing With Computers, the article by Eldred/Toner, “Technology as Teacher.” They write, “technology never merely augments teaching practices: It transforms them” (35).

One of the most provocative observations that we didn’t have time to talk about was that we may move from being writing instructors to being literacy instructors. Wouldn’t that open things up?! Yeah, that’s the ticket!! I want to write more about this idea in the future.
I wish we could have spent more time talking about these issues!