Digital Composition
The Theory Behind Digital Composition
We are living in an increasingly digital world and we need to prepare our students for that world. While alphabetic text is still very important to the composition classroom, many of our students will need to be able to translate their arguments and stories for the internet in their future careers. Therefore, the development of webpages, blogs, podcasts and videos are great ways to teach the same ideas from rhetoric and composition (audience, tone, rhetorical appeals, organization and supporting a main point) while also incorporating visual rhetoric, audio appeals (music, sound effects, and vocal tone), visual and audio editing, and scripting. I incorporate digital composition in both my literature and composition classes and have been amazed by the quality of assignments I receive from my students.
Assignments & Approach
I earned my BA in Mass Communications and learned to edit video in an editing bay. For special projects, we were occasionally allowed to use the AVID that belonged to our department. When I was introduced to wevideo and its ease of use, I knew that my students could make just about any video with less than half the effort. However, the concept is pretty terrifying to most of my students. Therefore, I try to ease them into the process.
I introduce them to wevideo and show them how to work it. I show them student projects on the day I introduce the assignment, so they can see what their peers are capable of and, hopefully, find the assignment less intimidating. Then I assign them a practice video - they are asked to recreate a video that I created by following my step-by-step instructions. We then spend the rest of the unit discussing story/script development, intellectual property and fair use laws, visual and audio rhetoric, and storyboarding.
Students are required to include a rhetorical analysis of their choices in creating the digital assignment to accompany their project.
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For my literature classes, I have students pick an excerpt or poem to recite and then create a video showing their emotional relationship to the piece. This encourages them to reflect on the way that literature is relevant to their own lives and culture, and helps them to interpret the literature in their own, unique way.
For my Composition I courses, where we focus on genre, I ask students to take one of their first three papers and translate it into a visual or audio form, either as a photo documentary or a This American Life style radio story. This gives them the leeway to choose their favorite assignment but to incorporate visual and audio elements to make the same argument.
For my CU Boulder freshman composition classes and Composition II courses, my class is designed to focus on one research argument. After writing their research paper, students are then required to translate their academic argument for a general, internet savvy audience.
For my Advanced Composition course, entitled Gender, Sexuality & New Media, we engage in the study of the intersection of gender and the internet. Students write a research paper first, and then create an activist website on the topic of their research paper. The website is required to have a blog and video, as well. These make up 3/4 of the writing assignments in the class.
In keeping with the theme that humor can affect change in society, for my Humor Studies Honor's Colloquium, students were required to create a final project that uses humor to forward an activist agenda. Students were allowed to create a performance, video, infographic, or really anything they wanted to do that incorporated humor, service, and creativity.
In keeping with the theme that humor can affect change in society, for my Humor Studies Honor's Colloquium, students were required to create a final project that uses humor to forward an activist agenda. Students were allowed to create a performance, video, infographic, or really anything they wanted to do that incorporated humor, service, and creativity.
For my Adventures in Podcasting Honor's Colloquium, students divided into groups and had to produce a weekly podcast that was published on Sound Cloud. Students had to write, record, edit and upload their content. We had a variety of topics and genres: personal interest interviews; professional interviews with EDM DJs; A debate show about "who had it worst" at a certain time in history; and an academic discussion about "What if" an important moment in history went a different way.
My Projects
This is my first attempt at creating a video for digital composition. Red Rocks Community College held a full day workshop introducing instructors on how to incorporate digital storytelling into the classroom, including how to create assignments and approaches to teaching methods. We were told to bring a poem or literary excerpt and some pictures. Once they introduced us to wevideo, they gave us the assignment. I chose a monologue from the play 'Night Mother and, as you can see, I decided to juxtapose the sense of loneliness that I sometimes share with the character, with images of my full life, to remind myself that perceptions are not reality.
The Program for Writing & Rhetoric was just beginning to embrace digital composition during my first semester teaching at CU Boulder. The department brought in The Center for Digital Storytelling for a two day workshop to teach us about the theories and practices. At the workshop we were divided into groups and went through brainstorming and script writing. We were then told to find one or two images only and create a video. This is the result. It tells the true story of the way I grew to love Bartleby the Scrivener and eventually named my dog Bartleby.
For my mother's birthday, I decided to create a video where I interviewed all of her friends and family about how much we love her. Some people weren't available for me to interview in person, so I had them send me video tributes to add to the video. This is the final result. It was quite a success.