My daughter sings in the closing song with me (I lost that piece of text in the film edit).

REFLECTION

In this revisiting of assignment one, my priority was to incorporate modalities to the best of my ability using the contents of the backpack itself. It soon took me into strange new territory that was creative, experimental and marked by tensions between modalities. I started with what amounted to material for the cutting floor to reflect this process of blurring the line between my private self as a person and my (traditionally) more public identity as a student in an online course (Cazden et al, 1996). I had to learn (and re-learn) several skills to construct this, and the process of designing was radically different than for task 1—most notably in the nonlinear approach I took of acquiring, assembling, and editing each piece. The result was a much more immersive metacognitive and metalinguistic experience (Cazden et al, 1996, p. 96). While recording I was aware of the expectations I have of video from YouTube, but I was also aware of the need to conform to academic expectations of appropriate scholarship. The former destabilized the latter in this sense, as the literacy required for it is cross-modal, while the literacy of typing ideas on a document remains the stuff of traditional literacy (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009). It was an experience of what Postman (1992) describes as an “evolution of literacy”.

I admittedly sacrificed depth of stated thought for richness of modalities in my attempt to emulate a form of video that was suitably layered with visual, textual, and audio elements in a way that communicated by showing as well as telling. This designing process is more accurately described as “redesigning” of information into a product that engages intellectually and emotionally (Cazden, 1996, p. 76). It bears a risk of not communicating ideas of substance to its intended audience, or ideas of relevance to an unintended one. The feedback over time I might receive from an unintended audience may inform the quality of the product’s design, while the instructor’s feedback is more likely to address the quality of the ideas and supporting evidence. I thought about what would happen if I were to assign something like this to one of my students: how would I convey the need for quality of ideas, unity of form, and clarity of communication without first establishing context, audience, and an overall standard of complexity? It challenges what would be my impulse to compare it directly against a written assignment and see it as merely a verbalized form of that. This would be a terrible mistake, because I would not be transforming my own pedagogy and practice (Cazden et al, 1996).

References

Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., et al (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In Harvard educational review; Spring 66(1), 60–93. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge University Press.

Postman, N. (1992) Technolopoly: the surrender of culture to technology. New York: Knopf.