Robert’s Shipka Post

[Robert Greco]

#869

My thoughts, loosely arranged.

For Shipka, “we must also work to make the seemingly strange and unfamiliar aspects of multimodal texts and strategies appear less strange and unfamiliar” (134), a goal wholly in line with our course’s focus on production. I can’t imagine my engagement with questions of digital composition having been greater, or even equal, if we had studied, rather than produced, digital texts. On the contrary, the experience of working with digital tools substantially enhanced my ability to navigate many of the critical questions of digital composition. Moreover, our frequent group reflections pushed me to see our multimodal projects as moving “toward a consideration of that product in relation to the complex processes composers employed while producing that text” (134). Some of the most engaging discussions in our class were driven by honest curiosity about how our peers produced their texts. Our interest in tools, moreover, advanced beyond (mere) technical questions and often into critical inquiries about how creative visions were affected by tool capabilities.

Interestingly, for me, and I suspect others, digital tools facilitated the development of a strong emotional reaction, which in turn prompted discussion and curiosity–Slieveroo, need I say more. Certainly, alphabetic texts can stimulate similar reactions, but I think our multimodal work excelled particularly well at prompting interest and engagement. Pedagogically, an inquiry process driven by genuine interest and engagement produces a highly desirable learning environment, regardless of the definition of text in a given classroom. In our course, this combination produced motivation and facilitated learning, conditions essential in an undergraduate classroom.

While tools empower us to produce texts not practical or possible through analogue means, they also add new time and expertise constraints, potentially channeling broadly creative enterprises into flatter and more sterile constructions–though our classes work hardly demonstrates that. Although I consider this risk minimal, these constraints, or the fear of them, encourage exploration. For me, the most interesting, creative, and exploratory moments occurred in the later projects, where my compositions originated in digital media, rather than being ports of alphabetic texts. My most stimulating experience as a composer in this course revolved around the creation of my group Prezi for our Kairos project. When I conceived the idea of the Prezi that mimicked the appearance and navigation of the Kairos homepage, I had no alphabetic text to fall back on. Composing in a digital space and drawing inspiration from digital models motivated me not only to overcome technical challenges but also to conceive my project through images, sounds, and text in the first place. In this piece, I felt most strongly that our course’s “framework [had] been engineered in ways that expressly resist the isolation and individual treatment of these different modalities” (137). Digitally native composition demands a fluid interplay of visual, aural, and textual rhetorics, and while I make no claim to mastery, having the freedom to explore and experiment with this interplay certainly reinvigorated my interest in new compositional techniques.

[Sondra Perl]

#878

That’s great to hear, Robert. For me the seminar, harkening back to our first session and Giamatti, had a ‘potential,’ ‘a craving of realizations…’ and so on. Your reflection leaves me feeling as if the potential, if not fully reached was at least approached, that there were and are realizations that will continue, and that you are leaving with an enlarged understanding of digital media and composing. Id say that’s a good semester’s work.

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