Co-Struggling
Sheridan argues for the benefits of co-struggling with their students, particularly in assignments that utilize digital technologies. “I think co-struggling is doubly important when it comes to technology-intensive projects. As Daniel Anderson (2008) observed, it is problematic to assert that ‘students benefit from technical challenges and unfamiliarity without allowing that instructors, too, require skill challenges and will benefit from an ability to experiment with new technologies’ (p. 43)…I believe that going through this process of idea generation and implementation—the continual struggle to achieve a particular compositional vision by means of complex chains of technologies—makes me a better teacher. It allows me to better understand my students' struggles and better positions me to support them in these struggles. It helps me calibrate my expectations for what is achievable in different developmental contexts (a video by students in first-year writing compared to one by students in an advanced media workshop)… Working alongside my students allows me to switch roles in a productive way, from teacher-administrator to composer-user.”
The Difference of Multimodal Composing
“I know that the process of composing an alphabetic text has much in common with the process of composing a multimodal work. Processes of invention, of audience assessment, of rhetorical goal-setting are common to both. At the same time, when I create a multimodal composition, my struggle with technologies is much more salient than when I write a short story or journal article. To get the vision in my head onto the screen, I am forced to navigate—to fight with—a constellation of cameras, lights, microphones, chords, and software interfaces…Many of the segments contained in Click had to be re-done multiple times because of conceptual or technical flaws that crept into the process. For instance, the original stills for one of the stop-motion sequences were improperly lit, resulting in loss of detail. I labored for hours in Photoshop, trying to salvage them through post-production tinkering. In the end, I had to re-shoot everything.”
Key term
- Creative impatience: “when reading becomes a strategy for invention; we immerse ourselves in the compositions of others, and we become eager to compose something ourselves”
**This is a multimodal text in that it utilizes video and animation and articulates the technology that was used to create that text. At the same time, the video is separated from the pages that are solely linguistic text.