Kristine and Gary helped us focus on the outcomes and the difficulties of training and teaching with too many options. We also re-discussed the difference between new media and multimodal--a distinction we need to keep in mind as we develop outcomes.
When I debriefed Brett about our discussion, he agreed that the assignment should be simplified. In fact, he suggested we assign everyone to compose either a PPT presentation or a poster, and that's it. We'd have to decide whether these two assignments share common rhetorical principles so that posters could be evaluated just as well as PPT presentations. We should also discuss whether it makes sense to grade a PPT document separate from the presentation that would accompany it.
I'm going to take a stab at some outcomes here to give us some focus.
By working collaboratively on a multimodal assignment, students will
- Recognize the pervasiveness and importance of rhetoric in our society and lives, and understand rhetoric as a means of achieving a purpose through both words and images.
- Appreciate how writing and rhetoric empower them to become influential citizens in a variety of contexts.
- Recognize and assess their onw and others' rhetorical situations.
- Effectively generate and arrange an argument and purposefully address the needs of an audience, using effective ethical, emotional, and logical appeals.
- Learn to compose collaboratively an effective rhetorical message using a presentation medium (like PowerPoint or a poster) and different modes of communication (text, image, graphic, symbol).
- Use design principles like alignment, proximity, repetition, contrast, proportion, and unity to convince a specific audience in a specific rhetorical situation.
Does that sound more manageable to the group?
Jeff & I pointed out that this assignment falls back on old and new media rather than new new media (which is far more user-generated and interactive than these assignments). However, Gary suggested that if we used PPT we could also use something like Slide Share to add a new new media component in the drafting process.
So now what? At this point we may want to work within the boundaries we've set here and see what happens. The assignment is to prepare a PPT (or other form of presentation software?) or poster that responds to one of the three rhetorical situations I set up in the first post (BYU policy change, community advocacy, the class as protopublic for repurposed research). What does everyone want to contribute to the conversation? Should we read something from the presentation zen guy? What specific boundaries do we want to draw, and why? Should we have limited slides, certain kinds of images or data presentation? Kathy & Jeff, If this is the assignment, what do grad students need to prepare them to teach it?
Let's begin by looking together at the Presentation Zen website. Please feel free to volunteer to research some aspect of this assignment.
I think we may have been too hasty in deciding to go either for Powerpoint or a poster.
ReplyDeleteYES, there is a definitional difference between multimodal and new media, and YES, you can do a multimodal project that doesn't involve new media or the Internet. The way I interpret Cynthia Selfe though, that's not what she's advocating. I think she's saying that that's an option if you have conditions where a new media multimodal project isn't possible to do.
I also think by so doing we'd be ignoring Kathleen Yancey's call "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." The key is to incorporate the extracurricular writing students are doing--which is happening in new media online--into the classroom, to teach writing and rhetoric to it. The key is to enable our students to be members of real publics, and that won't happen through posters and will hardly happen through Powerpoints. And as Jeff Rice points out, we could have (and probably should have) made the shift to incorporating visual rhetoric in the writing classroom years ago. The key isn't to do what we should've been doing back in the 1960s, or even in the 1980s and 1990s; it's to do what we should be doing now.
At a certain point, if we're going to do a poster or a Powerpoint, we may as well stick to the brochures we're making now. I truly don't think posters are prevalent in education....now I've found a third college on campus that doesn't use them--the Business School (per several business majors I've talked to). And poster presentations seem to be truly an isolated academic genre.
Further, there are deep ideological problems with Powerpoint that go against the aims of rhetorical education. See this Wired article:
Powerpoint Is Evil
One of the problems with some of the other ideas is that they weren't NEW new media, they weren't Web 2.0. I agree that it's challenging to truly do something Web 2.0 in the last 2 weeks of a semester. I even made a sort of video manifesto answering the question, What is New Media? New new media, the Web 2.0 stuff, is collaboration, it is blogs, it is Wikis, it isn't videos but it is sharing and responding on Youtube. None of those things can be easily done as a final two week project (though it would be possible). Some of them should definitely be incorporated throughout the semester. But even if the Web 2.0 stuff can't be part of a 2 week final project, that doesn't mean that the internet, and new media in a broader sense, should be avoided entirely in the final multimodal project.
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ReplyDeletePowerpoint, really?
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