A blog post that's trying to do too many things at once

Ok, so this week we were urged to try to include some multimedia stuff in our blog posts and also to respond to one of our classmates' blog entries, and finally to respond to the "Building a Mystery" article. In order to accomplish all of these things, I'm going to step away from the usual formal response format that my blog entries usually take and just sort of wing it.

First, regarding the Robert Davis and Mark Shadle's article, I think the thing that interested me most was the idea of multimedia/multigenre research essay. One of the student examples listed, the biography of John Lennon that was tied together through poetry and written in the form of a play seemed like an interesting, unique, and original approach to a genre that students undoubtedly find stale and boring by now. I'm interested in doing more of these sorts of assignments with my students. Another example listed in the article is allowing students to write a sort of 'what-if' biography, particularly useful for those students with troubled backgrounds that they may not be comfortable sharing. I wonder if maybe the next time I teach a 101 class, it might be beneficial to modify the personal narrative photo-essay. Say, have the students bring in three photos and tell them that they're going to use it in a personal essay about an event from their past, and then after they've chosen their photos, turn the assignment on its head by telling the students that they're going to instead write about an imaginary event in their history. The benefits to this, I think, would be that it would eliminate many of the 'my grandfather died and it sucked' essays that seem to be the tried and true fallback for most freshman comp students. Also, it would allow students to use their imaginations in potentially wonderful ways, while also alleviating some of the boredom they might otherwise feel with this assignment. And finally, rather than having to find a way to relate what the learned - the moral of the story, if you will - to a general audience, the student is faced with the potentially more challenging rhetorical task of formulating a 'so what?' for an event that they haven't experienced. Rather than moralizing, they'd have to speculate.

Davis and Shadle also mention multimedia essays, which sort of makes me think back to last week's article on multimodality, one that particularly interested me because I'm interested in introducing multimodality more fully into my classes. For the second part of 102, the rhetorical analysis, I had my students read and analyze a Ray Bradbury short story entitled "There Will Come Soft Rains." One of the things that I had students do is watch a Youtube cartoon version of the story, which has some pretty obvious plot deviations from the original story, and I had them analyze how the different media affect the narrative, why they affect it in that way, and what the two forms allow their respective authors to do differently. Below is the video:



But I wonder if there's some way to have students do more than merely view and respond to video posts. I wonder if there's some way to actually have students get more involved in these sorts of multimodal assignments by recording their own audio media or integrating video into classroom presentations or even, somehow, their papers. Sure, maybe this would only complicate things, and I don't see how this could be accomplished without making the papers a primarily web-based assignment, but with so much of our culture going digital anyway, is that necessarily a bad thing? I also found this video of a student-produced live action version of "There Will Come Soft Rains":



Now, I'm sure that most college freshmen would turn their noses up at the thought of being involved in something this amateurish and silly, but there are a host of other avenues they could explore. Even merely finding one of these videos on Youtube and finding a way to integrate them into their papers requires an additional level of thought and consideration that can only benefit the students.

And finally, the last part of my blog post (yes, I know, bad transition. If I were grading my own response I'd write 'Work on transitions/organization!" in the margins) is to respond to a posting by another student. Emily, I read your recent post on your students not bringing rough drafts to class, and allow me to say that I feel your pain. I had the exact same thing happen this past Thursday. I told my students on Tuesday that we were going to be workshopping rough drafts on the next class meeting, and that they should not come if they were unprepared (basically the same scenario you described). In my 8:00 class, only 5 people showed up. Now, the good news is we had one hell of a good workshopping session for their papers, because we were able to all participate in one group, help each other brainstorm, and give each other hands-on guidance. Still, I have to admit that it's so annoying to think that the other 10 or 15 students in that class were simply too lazy, too unmotivated, or too whatever to even bother with an attempt. Or maybe they didn't know how to begin and were afraid to ask for help, which I guess is another problem altogether. Still, for whatever reason you and I experienced this situation, at least you can rest assured you're not alone.