دانلود رایگان مقاله ارزیابی دینامیک ساخت مولتی مودال

Abstract

This article examines the turn toward multimodality by presenting findings from a semester-long ethnographic study of an upperlevel college English course that requires students to compose multimodal Internet texts using Adobe Flash Professional. The analysis of participants’ attributions of value to Flash clarifies why students were motivated to pursue some goals and not others when faced with numerous choices related to the composition of their multimedia projects. The value students attributed to Flash tended to arise from three sources: 1) students’ sense of Flash’s professional potency; 2) students’ interest in creating interactive elements and visual effects; and 3) the technical challenges students faced while learning the program. Students tended to attribute more value to the visual and interactive elements of their multimodal projects than to research and written content. These findings help substantiate scholars’ calls for truly integrated approaches to teaching multimodal composition, approaches that help students develop the nuanced recognition that all elements of their multimodal compositions are crucial and must work together. The author argues that such recognition might be cultivated through the writing of value statements, wherein students reflect on the evaluative dynamics that shape their goals and choices.

7. Discussion

In “A Callfor New Research on New andMulti-Literacies,”ElizabethBirrMoje (2009)suggeststhat the proliferation of digital technology has prompted scholars to call into question “the dominance of print as a communicative and/or expressive form (p. 352). Similarly, many scholars in composition and literacy studies have argued for approaches to teaching writing that integrate “old” and “new” media. As Wysocki (2004) notes, these scholars are “not arguing to do away with books,” but rather asking “what othersorts of arguments are possible when we broaden oursenses of the texts we can make for each other through the possibilities of the digital” (p. 7). As a caveat to these enthusiastic callsforsuch research and teaching, Shipka (2011) warns against “facilitating changesthat result in the substitution of one set ofsign systems, technologies, and limitations for another or that privilege certain ways of knowing, learning, and composing while denigrating or downplaying the value of others” (p. 14). Yet, as this study indicates, the balanced, integrated instruction Shipka and others hope to develop can be compromised by the competitive dynamics that emerge when students interact with novel programs and inscription devices. In this final section, I review these complications and briefly describe categories of reflection for helping teachers maintain balanced and integrated approaches to teaching multimodal composing. Indeed, the most salient pedagogical implication of this study pertains to the way teachers might help students reflect on and interrogate those “value catalysts” that shape their motivations to compose.