As we'll see consistently over the course of this class in the wonderfully varied ways you all have approached assignments with the same constraints, approached with different goals and tools, there are myriad locally specific ways to write across media.  The possibilities for our compositions are limited by our imaginations and the resources at our disposal to utilize technical tools.  Given the range of expertise we all have with technological and other craft literacies from our lives beyond this classroom, we have a wonderful opportunity in our workshop-style class to learn from one another's expertise.

 

Throughout the course, we’ll get a chance to learn from one another.  You and a partner or two will be responsible for facilitating a media literacy workshop on a media literacy of your choosing - a composing technique you think your peers might find useful in their current or future efforts to effect change in the world through multimodal composition.  Your media literacy can take any number of forms so long as it’s related to the act of composition. It can be a piece of software like Photoshop, or Garage Band, a technology like a video camera, an app such as Snapchat, or something that doesn’t immediately register as “technological,” like comic paneling or watercolor painting.

 

We’ll pin down teams, topics, and presentation dates early in the semester after you’ve seen a demo workshop facilitated.

 

Here are the concrete things you’ll need to do when you facilitate your workshop:

 

• Discuss the tool’s affordances and constraints. What possibilities for action does it provide and foreclose on?

• Discuss how and why you have/are/will use the tool in your classwork or elsewhere, and help your peers consider how they might use it in their own final projects

• Explicitly teach us some aspect of your tool; think of this as an interactive tutorial or workshop where you engage the class

• Address how it helps us think about “writing across media” at large

 

 

While you should probably research and play with your chosen media tool to understand the kinds of work it does, you need not be an expert in using it yourself. You could very well pick something that you have little experience with, something you've wanted to learn for a while, or just something you find interesting. That's not to say that just playing a how-to video on Youtube is sufficient for this assignment. Do, however, feel free to draw upon existing resources that will help you best present on your media literacy.

 

Remember, the point is not for you to lecture, but for you to gain experience in facilitating discussion and to help us gain a deeper understanding of your literacy of choice. In order to do so, feel free to ask the class to do in-class writing, answer discussion questions, practice analyzing objects, etc.  Most importantly, you need to guide your peers through some kind of hands-on play with your tool.

 

Plan your session to last 30 to 35 minutes.  We'll have to stick tight to these time boundaries, so make sure to thoughtfully structure and practice the components of your workshop beforehand with a stopwatch.

 

**Note: Your discussion should explicitly address some act of composition as opposed to just analyzing a media text. For instance, choosing to solely analyze film clips would miss the point of the assignment. But leading a session on how shooting certain film shots and angles could be thought of as composing would work.  

 

Assessment:

This assignment is worth 10% of your overall course grade, and will be assessed on the degree to which it:

 

• Sufficiently and comprehensively talks through the affordances and constraints of your media literacy and its potential for use in designing social futures

• Demonstrates your general comprehension of your media literacy throughout the session (do you understand it well enough to teach something valuable about it to others?)

• Engages your peers in actively learning how and why to thoughtfully use this media literacy skill

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In case you need a quick refresher on affordances and constraints…

 

What are Affordances? - Possibilities for action, things that a medium, mode, or text enables or grants. What a medium, mode, or text can do (that other media, modes, or texts cannot)?

e.g.) Snapchat! Can better convey emotion and communicate faster, more efficiently through photo than print.

 

What Are Constraints? - Limitations, drawbacks, things that a medium, mode, or text can’t do

e.g.) Snapchat (again)! Relies on other people who have Snapchat (v. something like a letter), requires the Internet to function.