Welcome. This project reflects on a course that focused on digital composing and performance. You'll find here a collection of materials composed during and after the course.
The project includes the creative work of many people. It serves as a kind of portfolio for an entire class.
We're calling it Casting Learning into Flowing Streams or This is what we did in our class.
[00:30]
These screencasts capture performances as they record activities and include overviews and discussions performance, portfolios, composing and creativity.
These pieces at the top provide the insights of the authors about some of the projects created in the course.
The videos reflect on student work. It's possible to move from left to right among these, though certainly not necessary.
[00:60]
The videos below include pieces referred to in the discussion above. Screencasts by Austin Cooper, Sarah Brady, Sean Mattio, Katie Meyer, Jackclyn Ngo, Austin Shaw, Sydney Stegall, Hannah Easley, and Kelly Wollman are of two types: sample projects that represent digital compositions exploring course texts; and reflective videos created for course portfolios.
[01:28]
The next segment of this video provides an overview of the teaching philosophies associated with the course. It was recorded as a live performance, with this voiceover added now. I've opened a browser window with a video by Ronnie Tucker capturing some digital painting. And I want a soundtrack for the performance. This is String Cheese Incident doing "River Under African Trance."
I'm going to transform these bits to bring into view a teaching philosophy. It's linked with digital composing, creativity, and a studio model of the classroom.
[02:08]
This is some pottery making by Charles Smith. I'm bringing in some archive footage. It's called Big Trains Rolling.
And this is one of my videos. It looks at student reflections on projects created for an undergraduate class. When you finish with all of these materials you may wonder about the course title, Introduction to Literary Studies. Both lower and upper division students, many English majors made up the group. The class is mostly about digital composing.
[02:45]
Austin points out the way the class treats words as one among many composing materials. He reflects on a shared sense of accomplishment, and on digital projects leading to a "holistic understanding of what it means to compose."
[03:05]
The class assignments call for shifts among modes. Opening the channels of sound and image and word and motion allows new stories to be heard. And moving among these materials creates rhetorical fluencies, spillovers, strategies, techniques, and questions.
Austin asks, "Shouldn't an English class teach us how to utilize words more effectively? What can a video mashup teach me about composition?"
[03:40]
He discovers that mashups reveal familiar facets of composing. We find brainstorming, focusing, authors, purposes: "What [do] I [want] to say?" So old currents blend with new through digital projects.
The teaching philosophy pushes this blending. We practice with tools, play with genres, extend words with images or music, and discover a fluid sense of materials and messages.
[04:10]
And shifting modes does much more. It mixes up the educational elixir of motivation and engagement.
We know that writing with its risks and publics can bring a sense of authenticity. And authenticity is linked with engagement. And both are amplified through social spaces. When shifting modes, projects aren't crafted for some imagined reader. They are cast out into the world.
[04:48]
I'm going to bring another video into this piece. This one looks at performance, processes, and some of the portfolio elements of the course. And let me interrupt the flow here to prepare you for a skip--a small gap in the song. In her portfolio, Michela reflects on the way the class was configured as an ongoing conversation, an image speaking to the organic nature of composing and the emergent qualities of projects in the course. The conversation is captured in part through portfolios. Here, Sydney reflects on composing a Web essay. The portfolio captures processes and learning that comes from happenstance or less-than-perfect projects.
[05:42]
The Web essay raised particular challenges with its one foot firmly planted in written essay mode, and the other pushing students to "compose with media." Video, image, and sound meet words--but in their native space of the composing window.
Let me bring in my third video. This one touches on affect and creativity. One of the claims we are making is that digital composing opens new channels for sharing stories. These channels bring new voices into scholarly conversations. Jackclyn reports on her tactile approach to ideas. Modes of composing both enable and limit participation. Broadening the available means makes possible the creation and sharing of knowledge by those who otherwise might be filtered out.
[06:34]
Channels open when shifting modes. When students moved from Web essays to mashups, they switched gears, discovering what Jackclyn calls "a more auditory and emotional mode." Jackclyn moves through these channels to create knowledge. Her reflection speaks to her engagement with texts, ideas, and cultural connections, and her willingness to share this engagment.
[07:02]
These shifts in affordances beg for revisions in teaching. Hannah notes the ability to move forward once given license to make her screencast "more about a feeling and less like an essay." We find new channels for connecting and affective modes of communicating, allowing Hannah "to engage with [her] tangled feelings."
[07:28]
Classrooms become studio-like environments, productive spaces where students manipulate materials and have their say.
[07:43]
Reflecting and speaking generates rhetorical knowledge. "Dear reader," Hannah says, "this note to you is the last piece of writing I will ever do as an undergraduate. Wow. Maybe I should say the last composition, actually, since it's more than writing. . . ."
[08:05]
Michela notes how projects strayed from expectations. Here we begin to recognize signs of creativity. Where we see gratification and pride mixed with frustrations we find assignments that move beyond boredom. The projects introduce unfamiliarity and challenges. There is a heightened sense of working with technologies and materials, of rhetorical resistance. But the challenges and activities emerge in a collaborative, productive space and through the ongoing composing supported by portfolios.
[08:42]
The result is the kind of balance between frustration and accomplishment often associated with creative endeavors--the mythical flow state. As Katie puts it, "I got into the zone . . . I didn't even notice I'd been sitting there for hours."
[09:06]
We see this creative state often when working with digital modes. Fixing a mismatched sound or struggling with a technical jam provides a kind of material pushback that helps induce heightened engagement (and sometimes frustration). Hannah notes how this messiness became the focus of her composition, pointing out the freedom that comes from "[adapting] to what [is] happening."
[09:34]
An improvisational current flows through the teaching philosophy. Drafts, activities, and performances become heuristic, leading to new knowledge and furthering the development of projects.
[09:54]
Such ongoing composing also calls for new modes of reading and assessment. Again portfolios fit well and help voices emerge. In fact, the portfolios themselves become digital compositions developed through shifting modes. Katie explains that she "[has] not received a single grade on any of [her] projects." Instead, the portfolio--itself "revised many times"--becomes the "representation of . . . work and learning."
[10:26]
And the philosophy redraws the boundaries of the classroom through a collaborative, emergent, and widely public approach to composing. Works in progress are posted. Readers respond. Writers revise. The openness and shared sense of composing transforms relationships.
Public composing amplifies investment and authenticity. Jacklcyn sees her screencast as akin to other class texts, calls herself a "creator," crossing the boundary between consumer and producer of knowledge .
[11:02]
Digital composing is here layered with authenticity and engagement, collaborative spaces, new channels and modes We're shifting. Austin started us off asking about composing. Let's watch some.
[11:20]
Serendipitous, really, these clips flowing together. Austin and Hannah thinking about feeling and voice.
I'm talking about what we did in our class. We're listening while reading pictures of audio rolling like waves.
Our "idea[s] of composition [have] changed." It has taken attention, time, and help.
The sound track has stopped but extensions of the performance are beginning to build. We see them pixelated here. They echo. In motion they continue having their say. They should never stop.