Earlier today I had a meeting at MCC about a multimodal English 101 course I am developing, and we’re building this course specifically in Web 2.0. This is a Freshman Composition course… not necessarily a writing course. It doesn’t say it’s a writing course, and even though we will write in the class, it’s more like Michael Wesch said when students may write 10-20 pages of formal writing for a class, but while taking that class the students may write 500 pages of email alone. Composing artifacts for a course does not denote formalized printed, styled papers waiting for copious red marks. Tonight in my meeting I shared Alan Levine’s 50+ Ways to Tell a Web 2.0 Story which is a list of Web 2.0 tools that a user can use to tell the same story over and over again with different tools and from different perspectives. When we talk about multimodality, this is a large part of that. Now with any move towards new technology, you need to convince the paper and pencil people, so a written analysis that details the rhetoric utilized will be submitted, but what will that look like? During a pilot session, I think it will look more like a paper, but later who knows…

Today the students had to write an AP Prompt, and Mrs Crabtree said that her only real requirement was that it was argumentative. Some of the students are weaker when it comes to choosing a side of a written argument and sticking to it, so I agreed. I found a nice one by Postman where he contrasts 1984 & Brave New World. They wrote for 40 minutes and then took a pop quiz on Twelfth Night. We fear some people didn’t read much of Fast Food Nation, and we wanted to reconfirm the importance of preparation. One of the classes today had about half the people prepared, and that’s never fun. The prompt was great, and I saw some good essays. The kids haven’t peer assessed recently, so I don’t know if we should do that again now. We’ll see.