Multimodal English 101

Date February 11, 2008

The other evening I participated in a monthly Cyber Salon, which is a group of like minded technophiles who teach in secondary schools and higher education. This meeting held up north included Alan, Shelley, Biray, Alisa and me. I walked into this swanky sports grill after 5pm on a Friday to find these four with their PC laptops and MacBook Pros huddled around screens above a network of wires plugged into any nearby power supply. I added myself to this wonderful foray, and Shelley and I began discussing the English 101 curriculum at Mesa Community College. See the curriculum has been pretty much static since the dawn of time, or at least for several years. Our who philosophy is that “composition” is no longer just a written essay in a style like MLA or APA printed out and submitted to a professor for his or her red inked comments and letter grade. Shelley and I are revamping this program, and we are focusing on the 21st century Student 2.0 who learns and creates in a multimodal world. This means no more focus on the written artifact in a luddite land. Honestly, we’re still working on this idea, and don’t get me wrong, the written language will still play a part on this course although we’re approaching an audience that reads on the screen, through visual media, and by creating artifacts that can include videos on YouTube or Google Video, they blog their responses through Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, et al. But what are these modules they create, if not papers? I appreciate the importance Shelley places on the process rather than the artifact, and do we necessarily need to have completed modules for each step? I suppose so, since even our English 102 sections have some “thing” to turn in at the culmination of the course.

Some tools the students will use is anything deemed Web 2.0, which are those tools online that the user interacts with rather than reacts to. Some of these include twitter & tumblr, but as Shelley points out here, we need to remember our audience. This initial audience includes our peers who teach English 101, some of whom are not as net savvy as others.

Category Posted in eng101, student2.0, technology, web2.0, writing