Reading Response: Interaction of Author, Audience, and Purpose in Multimodal Texts

This study drew me in immediately after looking through our readings as the subtitle, "students' discovery of their role as composer," represents a key element of the digital pedagogy that I'm beginning to conceptualize and, inshallah, grow into.

Though conveying an overall goal of developing effective multimodal projects for college level composition courses, this study represents an excellent tale of warning against the expectation that multimodal assignments are guaranteed to succeed as a result of most students' excitement toward and familiarity with designing multimodal text. In studying 24 students' responses to related print essay and multimodal projects, the contributors for this study found that, despite their students' expressed enthusiasm for the project, many were unable to successfully make the leap from creating a standard academic paper to recreating that project in a new medium.

Two issues discovered by the contributors that stood out to me were 1.) students may be unnerved be a requirement "to use [new technologies] in a composition course where they may assume that writing has nothing to do with technology" and 2.) viewing writing in terms of these new technologies "requires [students] to reconsider the rhetorical situation (the relationship between the audience, purpose, content, and author) for texts that do not adhere to their preconceived notions of academic writing."

In closing, the contributors offered several potential solutions to address these, and other, issues with the assignment that were illuminated by the study. Paraphrased, these solutions include the following:

• Increase student awareness of compositional choices and modal affordances by talking about the relationships between modes, genre, and rhetorical situation.
  
• Aid students in the process of determining audiences for their multimodal projects and, as a result, their print projects.
  
• Encourage research of potential genres for multimodal projects.
  

First, I firmly agree with the solutions presented above as sound adjustments for easing students into writing using new technologies/mediums. Researching a particular genre (website, PPT, etc.) can help a student learn about its particular affordances and disaffordances and whether it can be readily applied to a given project. Guiding students to determine the audience they wish to address can directly influence the students' choices of writing environment by pushing them to consider which environment's affordances are most readily applied toward reaching a desired audience. Finally, discussing the compositional choices afforded by a particular technology/genre can certainly help make students aware of how their writing will be affected by the mode in which their project is created and help them choose a writing environment that will enhance their desired compositional choices rather than limit them.

With the assignment's problems and these potential solutions as a basis for reflection, I'd like to posit a few ideas for discussion.

1. Power Point Presentation: It seems that the students may have chosen this format, not because it was a format that would particularly suit the needs of the assignment or that the student was even particularly skilled or familiar with, but because it was a format that students may have been comfortable associating with an academic environment. From personal experience, PPTs have often been used by teachers to enhance a lecture and creating a PPT as part of a computer class in middle school was probably my first introduction to creating multimodal projects. Students may have chosen a PPT simply because, they didn't believe that other mediums they may have been more comfortable with outside the classroom, such as social network pages or youtube posts, actually constituted writing in an academic sense. I think that, before students can explore new technologies and mediums, they need to be convinced that these alternative texts actually constitute writing and feel encouraged to experiment in these environments. The pre-assignment discussion could therefor include some sessions exploring examples of these nontraditional writing environments and how they use rhetorical devices we associate with writing, for example, reaching a chosen audience.

2. In thinking about the concepts of scaffolding from other readings, it seems like the students may have needed more structure in developing the assignment. Students who are not entirely comfortable in considering non-traditional modes of composition as legitimate writing may need a stronger guideline for their project than simply defining a multimodal essay as "one that combines two or more mediums of composing, such as audio, video, photography, printed text, magazine cut-outs, a hypertext web document, a website, poster board, video game, etc." and giving them free range. In trying to provide the students with an open environment to explore any possibilities, students who did not yet have the skills to make these explorations may have felt anxious and frustrated and ended up just choosing mediums that still seemed academic enough to get them a good grade.

An option here may be for the teacher to determine five composing mediums that might be a slight stretch for students but whose affordances seem particularly suited to the assignment, introducing students to these five composing mediums, and instructing them to choose at least two of the five for the assignment. This "structure" would still provide choices, but limited enough that students are assured that these five options are equally valid and supported for the project, allowing them to explore and hopefully build skills that will later allow them to tackle more open-ended, self-driven assignments. Students who are frustrated by a new technology could seek the teachers help in using one of the five new mediums, or create study groups that focused on discussing particular suggested mediums. More advanced students could have the option to approach the teacher with a variant on the project.