Writing in the Digital Age:

Composing Multimodal Documents

Inquiry: Will studying and composing multimodal texts help students create compelling communications?

I. Navigating the Genre: What is a Multimodal Text?

• James Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2003)
• Multimodal texts mix various modes of communication (text, image, sound) into a single document
  
• Each mode of communication may transmit a message independent of the other mode(s)
• Taken together, the modes create effects on their readers that are different than any single mode considered on its own (ch. 2, pp. 12-50)
  
• Seven Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling
  

II. What are the attributes of a digital document? (SOAPS)

• Speaker: Who is the speaker? What do you know (or can you ascertain) about her/his knowledge?
  
• Occasion: Why is s/he speaking? What is the context of the speech?
  
• Audience: Whom is the speaker addressing? Do you feel that you are a member of the audience?
  
• Purpose: What appears to be the speaker's objective?
  
• Subject: What topic(s) are being addressed? In what manner are they being discussed?
• Applying SOAPS:
  
• Watch the digital document composed by NWP tech liaison Jason Shiroff, "Daddy Duty," and consider the SOAPS attributes of the text.
  

III. Finding an Inquiry

• Learning outside school:
• Gee's book repeatedly investigates the ways that learning happens in the virtual worlds of video games, and looks for ways to connect the video game learning principles to school. For example:
  
• Observation: Video games are often played in social contexts, and players' socializing aids their learning.
  
• Principle: Learning is facilitated when there is a social context characterized by shared goals.
  
• Observation: The meaning or significance of certain objects or situations in video games changes as the game progresses, and players learn how to pay attention to such objects based on the game's current state.
• Principle: Meaningful learning occurs when the skills and knowledge being learned appy directly to the learner's current context.
• All 36 principles Gee catalogs are available in a truncated form here.
  
• "What are you learning outside of school? What motivates you to learn it? How well are you learning it?"
  
• This question was the topic for one of the students' weblog entries early in the semester (look around January 24th or so), and attempted to help them begin thinking about how they learn when school isn't involved. Understanding their intrinsic learning behaviors could build bridges to the ideas in Gee's book.
• Write your own response to the question above.
  

IV. Modeling and Co-Learning

• I had to learn alongside my students, since I hadn't done a lot of multimodal composing myself.
• I gave my students access to my own starts and stops in writing the narrative for my document by using Google Documents and sharing access with my students.
• An Evolving Narrative
• We played with storyboards as a way of organizing our work.
  
• I brought in rough cuts of my own project as well, and shared problems and solutions with the class regarding both technological- and non-technological aspects of creating the multimodal document. The students saw the "final" version emerge as their own work was shaping up.
  
• A Question of Balance is the title of my model project, here in its finalized form.
• In their weblogs (look for dates in late February and early March), students recorded some of their attitudes toward the project as it was nearing completion.
  

V. Student Work and Reflections

• Student projects encompassed a wide array of learning situations: from cooking to hunting, money management to kayaking, drink mixing to waitressing.
  
• Student reflections at the completion of the project are found, again, in their weblogs (most posted these around March 8th). I asked them to "anti-reify" the projects--to show me the work that went into the actual production of their final projects.
  

VI. Evaluation and Assessment

• As a class, we brainstormed the attributes we expected to find within the final projects, and collaboratively developed a rubric for evaluation together.
  
• While I filled out a rubric for each project, I also recorded voice comments for students. It seemed fitting that their multimodal documents have multimodal feedback.