Tuesday, September 1 Synchronous Topic: Introduction to Multimodality and Process
If you miss class: Make sure you've read "What Are Multimodal Projects?" from Writer/Designer and "On Multimodal Composing" by Alvarez et al. The first will give you an overview of the concept of multimodality, and the second gives you an idea of how people compose multimodal projects, which you'll draw on for this week's Multimodal Experiment 2. Let me know if you have questions about either reading, as these concepts will be central to our work this semester. You can also use the chat channels in Zoom to talk with other students about what you missed. Also, make sure that you're signed up for a time to meet with me this week, as we'll be discussing your plan for the course and your portfolio agreement that will be used for assessment this semester. Complete the in-class writing listed below and add it to the shared document where you're compiling in-class writing this semester.
Class Summary: We finished going over the syllabus and course materials today, and went over the plan for the coming weeks briefly. Everyone also took some time to draw representations of their writing process, share them with others, and then we shared observations about the drawings and connected them to the depictions of multimodal process in Alvarez et al.
Materials:
In-Class Writing
Draw a picture of your writing process. Then draw a representation of your writing process, from start to finish, for a recent project.
After sharing process drawings, take a few minutes to write about what you noticed. What commonalities did you see in people's writing processes? What differences? If you were a writing researcher (welcome!), what conclusions might you draw about the way that you and others represented your writing processes?
Thursday, September 3 Asynchronous Topic: Exploring and Revamping Your Process
First, take some time to look through these slides that give you more examples of the modes, and break down the origin of multimodality as well as the concepts of constraints and affordances. Then on your own, consider how you might apply a multimodal framework to a piece of media that you're interested in. Pick a piece of media (game, social media post, video, advertisement, etc.) that you think uses one of the modes of communication particularly well. Upload that piece of media (or a picture representing that piece of media if you can't link to it) to this Miroboard, and add an annotation explaining what mode it's a representation of and how it uses that mode particularly well. Explore other students' media examples as well (feel free to comment on ones you find interesting, but it's not required!)
For the rest of the week, you'll meet with me for conferences to talk about your portfolio agreements and plans for the semester. You can also use our class time on Thursday to work on this week's Multimodal Experiment 2, which asks you to remix and represent your process in a new way, inspired by the different representations of process in "On Multimodal Composing" by Alvarez et al.
Since I'll be holding conferences on Thursday, I won't be available in an open conference call, but you're welcome to bring any questions you run into to your scheduled meeting time, or send me an email.
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