Let's Be Creative For Hours and Hours

After reading the chapter two assignments in Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers, I found myself wondering about the dedication students would have to make to a multimodial class. The first sample assignment even says on the assignment sheet, “Schedule more time than you think you need for editing with Audacity—it always takes much much longer than the original recording!! Before you begin editing, be sure to go through the Audacity tutorial on the SourceForge web site…” (21).

Most classes require, what? Eight to 12 hours of studying outside of class each week? The idea of working with equipment and programs that continually break, crash, or take frustrating amounts of time could only extend this number.

Is this reasonable of educators to require this much devotion of their students?

I wouldn’t mind, but I always liked school. It just seems like requiring so much from students could lead to troublesome consequences if the student is taking a heavy course load. I am not saying we should lighten the load—goodness, the students DO need a challenge!—but when I think about locked up Ellis on the weekends or classes constantly in the computer lab, it frightens me for my hypothetical students.

I would go on about resources and necessary materials (helllllllo, look at page 27!) but I’m so over against-the-graining about these elaborate assignments.

All this new media talk inspired me to give my students the chance to compose without forming paragraphs. The problem was--and Dickie Selfe addresses this in his article--I did not think it through, and I was not aware of the "critical component" that drove my lesson.

I assigned my students a creative, non-traditional essay. There were five rules their projects had to follow:

1. No paragraphs

2. Must have a purpose

3. Must be aware of its audience

4. Must tell a story

5. Must be creative.

The students hated it. I thought one student was going to cry. But as I "graded" the essays/projects today, I was impressed with their ability to use different mediums (and what I'm assuming were unconscious rhetorical decisions.) Now I realize we need to discuss these decisions in class so others are aware of the various ways to communicate without paragraphs.

I'm thinking about asking my students for permission to show you their projects. Then I want to hear what YOU all have to say about them and if our readings are actually hitting on something we're too immediately against to understand, or if we're right to request words on a page in paragraph form.

Flotsam and Jetsam: The Story of Chaos

Can I get two things off my chest?

1. I will never abandon the idea that students should learn how to write an essay in the composition classroom.

2. Are these authors ever going to explain why they do funky things with the text? Sirc’s font changes and marginal neglect were obviously done for a purpose—but it’s oblivious to my information-only oriented mind why.

For once, I found a reading that made sense, that I reacted both positively and negatively to, and thought about implementing in a future class: Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box-Logic.”

First, let me reveal my support for this idea.

· Duchamp’s Green Box of chaos in which “it was up to the reader to shuffle these cards as he or she pleased” create possibilities for creativity and a new kind of meaning-making (112).

· “Text as box = author as collector” seems a little fourth-grade art project, but the idea that students “work with lived texts of desire” makes me feel feverish again (117). If it brings passion back into the classroom, bring it on. Imagine students passionately working on this project, remembering it, and remembering the lesson it taught. It may not be the creation of an essay, but—as Matt reminded me last week—we also teach rhetoric. Capturing “a mood or vision” and “renewing existence” are a bit whimsically put, but think of the off-shoot lessons, free writes, and smaller assignments you could pair with the making of a box…communicating effectively requires skills that do not HAVE to be taught with words (121).

· Even if collecting objects in a box disgusts you, Sirc offers Thomas C. Buell’s “Notes on Keeping a Journal” to show other possibilities (125). Asking students to create their place in time creates a multitude of options. Think of the prompts you could give them and the critical thinking on current issues it would foster.

GAH. I get as giddy as Sirc does. But not to the point where I think this will make my classroom “the poignant mix of poverty and desire, laced with an aesthetic of the cool” (118). There’s too many hipsters in this town to make this idea..erm…unique.

Now. Here are my stick-in-the-mud thoughts (I want English folk to have paper-cut-on-the-hand as their idiom!):

· What if students are not passionate about this idea? What is to stop them from throwing together scraps in their dorm room the day the project is due?

· That said, carrying around a shoebox or any other box IS fourth-grade crafts level.

· As with all new media, I wonder how evaluation will occur. Although grading essays is subjective, at least we have rubrics. When composing turns into art, how is it fair to judge?

· There is no way an entire composition and rhetoric class should be entirely based on the box. When Sirc says one of the goals of his classroom is “to show [his] students how their compositional future is assured if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic,” I almost died a little bit. There is no way this lesson will transfer into every other discipline—think doctors, office workers, or plumbers. No. It’s loony.

· The example of Greg’s email is all I needed to convince me a traditional composition class should still be implemented in some way. He has a voice and stories to tell; I get it. But I am aware that my class might be the only writing course a student takes in college. It is therefore my duty to do what I can to prepare them for college writing and writing outside of academia. Greg’s lack of punctuation and grammar issues would hold him back in the so-called “real world.” Whimsy aside, there are bigger fish to fry in some cases. (Bigger books to bind? I will write a coffee table book called English Major Idioms.)

Don’t judge me for my love of this idea. There is a fear that I will become like Cornell, with boxes full of junk and “treasures” that will land me on hoarders someday.

I used to call it sentimentality. Now I’ll call it ART!

I'll take "Grad School Luddites" for 500, Alex

When I opened Ball and Moeller’s site, I was pumped. What an interesting sight (very punny) for my eyes: neon yellow, a cuckoo clock, and an easy to navigate alphabetic menu.

And then I started reading. I started wondering about time—the Golden Globes were coming on soon, you know—and the lack of page numbers left me wondering how much devotion the reading would require.

And then I got bored. So I looked at Twitter to see what E!News and Kelly Oxford were saying about Christian Bale’s doppelganger Jesus look and Lea Michelle’s pathetic weeping. The browser made me do it, I swear.

And then I felt a migraine coming on, like always, when I stare at a computer screen for too long.

Meanwhile, my notebook filled with scribblings of topoi and textual anthropology.

And then I thought: WAIT. Ryan and Cheryl (first name basis because of their colloquial tones and Cheryl's frustrated, borderline bitter voice made me feel like we were fighting on the same team) worked so hard to make this interactive lesson for me and how do I respond? By getting all ironic on them with my pen and paper.

New media is a duel between convenience of the old and the innovation of the new. The lack of page numbers, an unknown end product, and distractions that are only a click away have the potential to change reading habits, citation methods, retention, and meaning making as a whole. If this way of communication draws from “art, graphic design, film, poetics, linguistics, education, communication” and of course, composition, does this type of meaning making belong in the English department?

Cheryl argues that new media texts are “designed using a range of materials and media to create something that doesn’t rest on the laurels of written text to convey meaning." I, for the first time in the two-week period that has been our class, agree this is valuable for students to learn. But—and there is always a but—it then lies outside the realm of English composition studies and evolves into its own major, especially if we are going to change writer to designer and paragraph to element. I can’t imagine my students telling their parents they have a lot of homework that weekend, like they have to design for their English class. Maybe that will forever remain my flaw in this course—I can’t imagine the change from traditional composition classes to new media composition.

Between celebrity gossip updates and Excederin migraine binges, I found two take-away messages from Ryan and Cheryl’s site:

1. English studies need to get with the times and integrate more work with digital rhetorics and multimedia composition and

2. Written text is so 1980, especially the school kind that only means anything to the “academic elite.”

I get it, Ball and Moeller. Despite picking on the naysayers of new media (bad rhetoric), you convinced me through example it is worthwhile.

My take-away message then, is that this type of composition might need its own field instead of falling on the laps of composition teachers who might not be ready to neglect the power of the written word.

P.S. Cheryl LOL-ed . . . as if I needed another reason to keep internet culture out of the composition classroom . . .

Typing Essays on Her Smartphone

Wysocki’s definition of new media requires the reader to think beyond words and to question every aspect of a text. She then wants readers, consumers, or viewers to consider why and how those decisions about the text were made.

How exhausting, right? Sometimes I just want to read the story on the side of my Starbucks cup, gag at the cheesiness of it, and move on with my day.

I wish Wysocki could walk me through her definition a little bit more. The irony is that I cannot understand what she means through text alone. New media technologies, she says, are ones "that break away from or ask us to think and act differently than print technologies" (19). But what does this mean?

What are we to consider about everything we read? Do I really need to focus on the layout of my textbook? Fine! Then I scold Wysocki (or her editors or the layout design person) for having an entire page of text (16) with no new paragraphs, no headings, and no pictures. It is not appealing to my brain. When I enter “materialities” into Dictionary.com am I supposed to ponder why the homepage is blue? Why is Thesaurus.com yellow? Does anybody actually READ greeting cards or just hope to see the green of a check or money on the inside? If a pop-up ad on the internet has noise, am I more likely to look at it or more likely to be aggravated beyond interest? Are these the type of questions I should be asking?

I feel as if these questions we are supposed to be asking ourselves any time we “read” something are moot—at least in the terms of teaching our students. They grew up with the attack of internet navigation, television advertisements, and smart phones. They can already “read” these things. They know television commercials are louder than the program they are watching to grab attention. They know Courier or Times New Roman are acceptable fonts for the classroom. (Why? Because Curlz is aesthetically displeasing to the eye, used only for advertising cheerleading tryouts. Trust me…I know…)

What bothers me about new media is that imagination and comprehension are neglected for other sensory appeals. Selfe says new media brings pathos back into a classroom. But words—and only words—can still have this effect. Because students are pelted by color and sound and attention/information overload every second of every day, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to keep the composition classroom mostly—not entirely—classical. Students don’t like reading and writing, and new media, in some forms, allows them to get away with that.

Right? RIGHT? Sigh. Someone help me see the light.

These Are My Confessions

My name is Ashley Evans. I am a graduate student at Ohio University, currently taking a class called Computers and Composition Pedagogy.

Using technology in the classroom has always seemed so daunting. Can I prevent computers from blowing up, projectors with attitudes, or volume buttons that refuse to work?

Perhaps it is because I am a millennial that social networking sites intrigue me so much. How is writing changing because of Twitter’s 140-character limit? How has communication morphed as a result of Facebook? And should we cater to our students’ slight social networking and internet addictions in a composition classroom?

Outside of school I’d rather have books than a Kindle, loathe the status iPhones/iPads give people, and still own a VCR.

Change—-including new forms of technology—-makes me nervous. So do big words.