I decided to take a minute and try and answer some of the questions posed by Dr. D. Selfe on page 177. What he provides us in figure 12.4 is a sort of brainstorming exercise to prepare ourselves to (persuasively) plead our case to administrators of the university—people whose resources we are likely to need in order to be accomplished educators in multimodal composition.

“Why does the teacher consider multimodal composition important in terms of students’ education?

For me, it comes down to affordances and heuristics.

As an instructor I am especially interested in how language is used to construct meaning (identities, morals, values, geographies, memes, etc). We are surrounded by new media. We are consumers and producers of multimodal composition. To keep this freight train from running away with us, Rhetoric and Compositon should be aware of genre conventions and how mediums and modalitites both express and construct meaning—perpetuating memes and representative heuristics.

With heuristics we are grounding the work in trial and error. We do not have to waste time convincing a student of what is valuable or proper or right, we can use technology to allow our students to test their “meaning making” in real time, by engaging each other withing the classroom and engaging beyond the classroom.

“What does the teacher expect students to accomplish in multimodal compostions?”

By building a knowledge base around technology, students learn the value of relationship building and collaboration. This new relationship breaks down the hyperbolic sense of individuality in learning and composing and favors the more practical approach of people coming together to build knowledge. We are social beings, our pedagogy should reflect this in the way we constuct the environment of the classroom.

By engaging each other in constant revision and planning, students are able to learn valuable skills for revising their work, therby learning about the recursive nature of writing. And we collaborate at all stages of the project, including the way it is graded, insuring that the evaluation matches the pedagogy.

“How are teacher’s efforts to integrate digital technology into classes connected to various scholarly interests?”

This question can also be grounded in affordances heuristics when pared with an awareness of audience and purpose as well as genre. Whatever the discipline, we can identify the kind of composition/communication that is customary for a particular field, which undoubtedly uses some form of digital technology to communicate. The medium of the computer, I think is safe to say, is a staple in nearly every home and business in the United States. Genre is tied to professions. Affordances allow us to consider how different digital modalities are utilized within different genre’s for rhetorical affects. Not only can students gain familiarity with the tools that they will likely use in their field, but they can also learn by constant revision and interaction how to use modialities and mediums affectively within their genre/profession/interest of choice. The test is in the way their multimodal compositions can influence each other, the teacher, and even (in some cases) maybe tested against individuals already in the students' field of interest.