Williams and Tollett: Intended Audience

One thing that I think many of us have lost sight of when reading this text (myself included) is its intended audience. We’re reading it in the context of an advanced English course, but I don’t believe it was created for graduate students involved with a writing program that places such a huge emphasis on the training of its instructors in technology and composition (we have a privilege that not many other universities have in terms of the resources we can utilize). Also, many of us have lived the vast majority of our lives co-existing with computers and have been able to achieve some level of novice or semi-pro stature when it comes to notions of visual rhetoric, design, and the Internet. Obviously, some of the concepts might appear to be beneath us, but for many it seems like a valuable resource (I think of my father-in-law who still has a dial-up connection, dated technology, and limited resources, but wants to create a website to share pictures of his grandson with co-workers, distant family, etc, and I feel like we take for granted this little bubble known as the academy with all of its bells, whistles, and blinking lights). Even for me, one of those pesky novice techie-kids, I was able to gain something from the text. For me, the chapter on basic design principles allowed me to critically look at my current website and make note of my “poor design” choices in relation to proximity, alignment, contrast, etc, and have an awareness and a knowledge that (although perhaps intuitive to some degree) can now be considered more concrete. Cheers.

Williams and Tollett: I love the 90's

Much like Nicole, I also had mixed feelings about the Williams and Tollett book. I think the text is a valuable resource for those that have little or no experience building websites, but I designed my first site my sophomore year of high school (circa 1997) using one of the first versions of Microsoft FrontPage and I’ve tried to keep up on various web-authoring tools since then. Granted, way back when I made several poor design choices (one example being that each separate page on the site had a different background color), but as Williams and Tollett note, much of design is trail and error. I did a fair amount of cool things too (at least, they were cool in the mid-90’s) like incorporating MIDI files, web-counters, etc, and I learned quite a bit from just looking at other websites and simply playing around with the program(s). I suppose one key criticism I have of the text is that notion of “play” isn’t emphasized much, instead the reader is given a series of step-by-step mandates (which, again, is wonderful in terms of beginners that need strict guidance to get them started, but I often found myself disconnected because Williams and Tollett were describing procedures to programs that I don’t have in my possession – i.e. Photoshop and Dreamweaver). One other minor irritation was their constant “plugging” of other books (including their own). A few references to useful books on related topics, fine – several references to books published by the same company as Williams and Tollet’s book (Peachpit Press), hmm…

Reproduce more than 10% of this post...go on, I dare you.

Like Elizabeth and Nikki, I have had similar fears regarding fair use, copyright, and students possibly running amuck with images, videos, or music that has not been used with permission. Consequently, as a result of these fears, I have traversed through the three methods of restriction Westbrook outlines pertaining to students and visual production: simple exclusion from creating or using visuals in favor of honing critical reading or viewing abilities through an analytical essay (462); prompts involving hypothetical scenarios and students imagining or describing in alphabetic texts some visual creation that never comes to fruition (462); and the creation of multimedia texts that are purely for the classroom setting and not for dissemination outside of the academy (463). Interestingly enough, I still have students write an analytical essay (I’m actually in the middle of that particular unit right now), and yes I do use the piece to foster critical thinking among the students, but I’m of the disposition that having students view examples of visual rhetoric and engaging with images (whether static or in motion) in a meaningful way will allow them to be more aware of the rhetorical choices they make when constructing the collaborative multi-genre piece at the end of the term (see my February 13th posting for a description of this assignment). Although Westbrook doesn’t seem to demean the analytical essay, he clearly feels it is not enough if it is constructed in isolation (i.e. not tied to future assignments or pedagogical goals)…

But therein lays the paradox Westbrook is trying to illuminate, that the capitalist/consumerist structure of our society forces isolationism upon us and our students, even when we attempt multimedia projects. It is frustrating when I tell my students that what they learn (or hopefully learn) in my classroom can be utilized in their future careers and then have to tell them not to show or post their projects to outside entities. In other words, they know something is rotten. I will say that the BSU library links helped me understand some of the subtleties of using copyrighted materials and fair use (indeed, many of my fears stemmed from receiving various pieces of information and not knowing which tidbits were correct), but even these links seem to reaffirm that the use of copyright materials is restricted to academic settings and secure networks. *Sigh*

Musings from a "Border-dweller"

Of the three articles this week, I found Stephen Westbrook’s “Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear: Impediments to Multimedia Production” to be particularly intriguing, especially since I have been affectionately defined as a “border-dweller” within the academy (also known as a creative writer who enters composition studies and attempts to find how the two fields might inform each other). After Westbrook’s discussion of the conforming nature of creative writing genres, “the big four” (fiction, poetry, drama and creative nonfiction) as it were, I had a sense of absolute déjà vu; I was effectively transplanted back into my undergraduate workshops where we were asked to look at some static image, ascertain some sort of apparent and deeper subject embedded within the image, and then attempt to write metaphorically about what we saw. Westbrook talks about this process extensively when he states that “…most of creative writing’s pedagogical materials, tend to require students to respond to visual art by conforming to the print genres…The dominance of these genres…leads to a positioning of students as primarily readers and interpreters of the visual, who use their writing practices not to combine images and words in their own texts but rather to compose strictly verbal texts” (467 – 468). At the time (and up until about a year ago when I was exposed to “flash poetry”), I didn’t really question this privileging of print; in fact, most (if not all) of my creative writing professors placed a strong emphasis on appearing in print and often snuffed at online periodicals, web-based literary journals, ezines, etc. that published poetry or fiction as the stuff of amateurs or hacks. Like the little lemming that I was back then, I blindly believed them without realizing that many online creative writing outlets are just as stringent (and, in many cases, more so) in terms of their review process and submission guidelines (for example, The Cortland Review), but I digress.

Westbrook has shown me another parallel between composition and creative writing that bears further exploration while simultaneously helping to erode my preconceived notions of what can be considered creative writing, what obstacles students in both fields face in terms of multimedia/multimodal works, and what we as educators have to navigate through – i.e. our fears and expectations in the classroom when we work with visual rhetoric (more on that next time…).

Collaboration and Critical Pedagogy

In Chapter 4, “Collaborating on Multimodal Projects,” Anne-Marie Pedersen and Carolyn Skinner make some valuable and (in retrospect) obvious points about students pooling their resources to complete an assignment that involves multimodal discourse. Two benefits of collaborative work seem to ring particularly true for me are the sharing of knowledge between students (be it technical or otherwise) and the effective use of time and resources. Indeed, the emphasis of students teaching each other (and, in many cases, the instructor) harkens to Paulo Freire and bell hooks notions of critical pedagogy whereby “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire 61). It seems to me that multimodality, or any course with a technological bent, yields the greatest opportunity for a type of problem-posing education simply because of the pace at which technology develops (teachers can’t possibly be expected to have a working knowledge of every new or updated program, nor can students. But collectively, there’s hope).

Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, I teach a multi-genre paper and I recently modified the assignment to be a collaborative work. On the practical level, this change reduced my grading load from twenty-four papers to eight (which is a blessing around finals time if you’re a graduate student), but more importantly it allowed students to draw upon each others academic strengthens and utilizing a variety of technological resources (this was particularly true or groups that had both PC and Mac users). In short, collaborative work is highly recommended from a pedagogical and practical standpoint.

Multi-genre vs. Multimodal

Like many others in the class, I am relatively new to requiring multimodal projects as part of my course. For the past few years my students have had to complete a “multi-genre” paper where they chose a topic and informed, presented, synthesized, etc. the information they found using a variety of different genres (such as print media, visuals with words, a visual display, an informational piece, creative writing, and a structured essay). Despite this multi-genre approach, very few students went so far as to use multimodal discourse, and those that did stuck to relatively familiar programs such as PowerPoint to create slideshows or trivia games (one student, however, did produce a commercial using iMovie). Secretly, I wanted students to generate audio and video essays, but I lacked the necessary technical knowledge (and viable of assessment tools) to facilitate such projects. Selfe’s text provided me with both, a basic technical knowledge of certain programs and techie-speak (particularly in the glossary) and the rubrics. One aspect of the text that I also found inviting was the constant reassurance that what was being outlined (whether it pertained to the types of assignments, evaluation criteria, etc.) could be altered to suit the teacher’s purpose; consequently, such a contention makes me think that, once I noodle with a few programs, I could require one genre of the paper to be completely multimodal or (dare I say) eventually convert the entire paper into a multimodal project.

I will say that, at times, I found the text difficult to read. Not difficult in terms of comprehension, but because (as Casey mentioned in his posting) the sheer repetitiveness of how to utilize multimodality in the classroom. It seems like the type of text that I would pull off of the shelf, thumb through a chapter as a refresher or photocopy certain resources, and then put it back. But I suppose that’s the point…

A short survey

http://FreeOnlineSurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=z0kxujq9nxguwi4393364

Tufte, Complimentary Colors, and Color Psychology

Tufte’s chapter on “Color and Information” really took me back to my undergraduate days in a 3D design class. Though there was more of an artistic bent to that course, many of the principles that Tufte described (such as using colors found in nature and the subtraction of color) were communicated to us, but there was one thing I feel Tufte didn’t really delve into: the use of complimentary colors. Although he alludes to it in a few places, including when he talks about the value scale, there is really no mention of what colors work best together, what colors don’t, and the effect those colors might have on the viewer (if memory serves, the complimentary pairings of colors include orange – blue, yellow – purple, red – green, and black – white). Indeed, Tufte seems relatively unconcerned with notions of color psychology in terms of design, instead favoring how color relates to the presentation of information (ex. maps, charts, etc.). I think this is all well and good and clearly coincides with Tufte’s purpose, but did anyone feel like he should have gone into greater detail about how the combination of certain colors will invariably facilitate a certain emotional response in the viewer?

Tufte, Poetry, and 1+1 = Me?

Like many people in the class, I too had a positive reaction to Tufte’s text Envisioning Information and all of the wonderful pictorial examples that he provided. Although there were several things that I found intriguing, his discussion on “Laying and Separation” seemed particularly interesting. The passage that really stands out to me from that section is when Tufte describes the “Visual activation of negative areas of white space… (and) the endlessly contextual and interactive nature of visual elements…[embodied]…in the fundamental principle of information design: 1 + 1 = 3 or more” (61). It never completely dawned on me until after reading Tufte, but this idea of white space creating a “third visual activity” permeates every possible visual medium (I guess that’s why he refers to it as a “fundamental principle”). Aside from examples that I have seen in advertising (such as the “hidden” arrow in the FedEx logo), I began to think about poetic forms like concrete poetry (a good example being Gregory Corso’s “Bomb” or anything by e.e. cummings), how the use of text in some places and the absence of text in others can create either an astounding visual effect that often mirrors what is being discussed in the poem, or a “…surplus (of)…non-information, noise, and clutter” (61). Personally, it’s been a struggle for me to move my verse around the page (first, transitioning from the center – the place where we all put our crappy, sappy high school poetry – to the left side of the page, and now from the left side to, well, anywhere else). I’m not exactly sure why this is. Any other creative writers have similar experiences?