Okay, I'm going to come right out and take a stand on this sucker: I'm pretty sure I hate multimodal composition (forgive me, Professor Takayoshi; it's nothing personal).
I have tried my best to be open-minded about the whole proposition. I'm a relatively computer-literate person. Age-wise, I'm a millenial. I have a cell phone and know how to text message; I have an iPod which I love more than I imagine I'll love my children someday; I have two computers (a laptop and a desktop) and use email, the Face Book (did anybody else find that wording/capitalization/spacing in Monday's reading hilarious?), and other internet things regularly. It seems most of us do.
But as far as video/audio-based assignments in my English classes, I just can't convince myself to embrace the idea. Sure, I'll do the multimodal assignments for this class. I'll play my video on the first day of class. I'll do my best to think constructively about the affordances multimodality provides. If I'm perfectly honest, though, unless my mentality changes I'll never voluntarily put multimodal assignments into a class I teach. It's not required in the handbook's course goals (I looked) and, at least with my mentality, I don't think it'll be an effective teaching tool. I'm perfectly willing to admit that's due to a characteristic of my own and not to a larger fault of the concept. But it's how I feel.
My main issue with the idea goes back to an experience I had in seventh grade English class (bear with me). I was required to make a poster about a book, and I picked a challenging sci-fi novel called Creatures of Light and Darkness. When I made my poster, I focused on the content of its written portions (definitions of difficult terms, plot summary, main ideas expressed, and so forth) and didn't do particularly good work on the visuals as I'm not much of an artist. I was given a C- on the project, losing no points on the written materials but failing miserably in the "artistic" segments. I was pissed off. An English class, I reasoned, should be about English and not about my aptitude (or lack thereof) in art. Disciplines do of course cross sometimes, but my lack of ability in one shouldn't preclude my ability to succeed in another.
To my way of thinking, this is the concern in the multimodal concept. Audiovisual materials can present ideas just as alphabetical papers can, but I don't want to deal with them in an English class. It's not a question of time or effectiveness, it's a simple matter of not finding it relevant and constructive to what I want to do in a class. I would much rather use written papers and class discussion to develop ideas. Maybe I'm being close-minded. I'll continue to try to reconcile myself to the idea. But as it stands, I don't like the stuff.
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Ben,
I find your story about seventh grade understandably discouraging when it comes to the idea of multimodal assignments. I think that the experience that you had was simply unacceptable, and I can see why it left a bad taste in your mouth. I don't remember off-hand where I read this, but there was a bit that discussed how as a teacher in first year writing, you wouldn't expect perfection from your students in alphabetic essays and you shouldn't expect it in multimodal texts either. I think this is where your teacher made a mistake. It does seem that you were penalized for not being a great artist in an English class, and I think that is unfair. I'm a little weird about the idea of multimodality too, but I'm doing my best to try to understand where it can be helpful as well as where its limitations are. Maybe it's an approach that just doesn't work for you, or for me for that matter, but I guess this is our opportunity to try it out and think about it in a safe environment where our students won't suffer from failures that we may encounter. I just wanted to let you know that I understand how you feel and I think your seventh grade teacher had his/her priorities all messed up, but maybe that in itself is something from which we can learn how not to evaluate assignments that ask students to go way out of their comfort zones. After all, it should be about learning from the process....not producing perfection. What is perfection anyway?
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