Writing, Speaking and Digital Technologies: Multimodality in the Classroom


Laura J. Gurak


The rapid rise of computer-mediated communication (CMC) from its unfolding in the early 1980s to today’s ubiquitous use of writing technologies has caused a number of shifts in lexical, paralinguistic, and socio-linguistic behaviors and patterns. These shifts have been heightened by the blur that CMC seems to afford (or cause, depending on your perspective) between spoken and written discourse. Much of today’s “writing” often looks and reads like typed speech; researchers (e.g. Baron 1984; 2000) have referred to this as a “mixed register,” with many observers noting that we have entered the world of Ong’s secondary orality--a world where the dominance of written text gives way to a blend of features based in both writing and speech. Add to this the rise of the visual in digital discourse, and, to use Kress and  Van Leeuwen’s (2002) widely cited concept, multi-modality becomes the norm, not the outlier, for most forms of workplace, academic, and of course everyday communication.

The challenge for college and university teaching, where writing undergirds almost every discipline and assignment, is how to engage students--digital natives who were born into and live with world of multimodality--in a manner that leverages their natural abilities and talents rather than forces them into the tightly scripted forms and genres that make up most academic assignments. Even in fields where the form is not the traditional essay but, rather, a discipline-bound form such as lab report, feasibility study, or scientific paper, these modes are rapidly changing to incorporate images, video, and sound. For instance, many scientific journals, such as Nature, now provide digital versions alongside the print/PDF versions, because the digital versions can contain video, animations, interactive graphs and charts, and so forth.

Yet although our students come to college with innate technical abilities, they often lack a critical awareness of the relationship of the form to the affects the form may have on the shape, size, and scope of information. For them, these are not technical abilities, they are just normal behaviors of everyday life. Having grown up with cell phones, Facebook, texting, and Skype, they rarely stop to consider deeply the relationship between these technologies and their professional and everyday interactions with the world. (Elsewhere, I have written about this topic more generally; see Gurak 2001.)

In an upper-division undergraduate class called “Writing with Digital Technologies,” the title implies a focus on the digital. Yet digital does not always mean multimodal. Many forms of digital writing lead only toward electronic versions of print documents, the most familiar being PDF documents that may include some level of interactivity but in the end are designed to resemble printed books, right down to the use of page numbers.

Therefore, my approach in this class was to teach students about the affordances of various communication modes, with a focus on what kind of behaviors each mode inspires. Here, I will describe two assignments that in combination offer a markedly different approach to writing.

Assignment 1: creating instructions in various modes
Modifying a classic activity from technical writing 101, I asked students in teams of three to assemble, photograph, then disassemble some item of their own creation using Tinkertoys. In the typical technical writing activity, the next step would be for students to write an instruction manual (with text and perhaps a few pictures or illustrations); however, for this class, I gave each student a different set of conditions: text only; text with visuals; visuals only; online video with narration; sound only (podcast). Students then returned to class with their bag of Tinkertoys and their document/video/podcast, and we observed as a group of two other students attempted to assemble the item using only the provided instructions.

Set against the backdrop of having read The Victorian Internet and a few other readings on the notions of technological affordance and determinism, students observed the affordances of the five conditions:

All five conditions invoked a discussion about memory. In the case where information is written down, where pages (paper or digital) can be turned and referred to, less is required of human memory. All five conditions also stressed the underlying importance of writing: users do best when the prose, whether written or spoken, is clear, easy to understand, compact, and direct.

Assignment 2: creating podcasts
The next assignment built on the previous one; it involved researching, writing, producing, and publishing a podcast as part of the University of Minnesota’s iTunesU channel. In this assignment, students took the lessons learned about text, images, video, and sound, and used these as the basis for creating a 3-5 minute podcast. Typical long forms of writing, such as essays, legal documents, and the like, are less and less likely to be what one encounters in digital space. Instead, short, compact, modular forms of information are the norm, and as any writer knows, it is more difficult to compress information into a short form than write for dozens of pages.

Besides media affordances and short form, students were also required to learn the art of interviewing a subject-matter expert and writing this information in a manner suitable for a more general audience. Since much of the information one encounters online is read by a wide audience, this assignment also required students to consider this feature as well.

Students began by thinking about a professor they had for a class, someone where the topic caught their attention and raised interesting questions they might wish to explore. Students then worked in teams of four to begin roughing out a topic and some basic interview questions. After the interview, students worked on a script, in which a student would narrate with key portions of the interview inserted. The idea was for the team to shape the information, not simply dump the interview into a sound file.

Students learned how to do the following:

(To listen to a few, go to iTunesU UMN, then look for the series called “U in Focus: Students and Scholars” in the public section.)

The podcasts were the final project in a class called “Writing with digital technologies”--but how much of it was about writing? All of it, I would argue. Writing in this digital age is about multimodality. It is about understanding the relationship between text, speech, images, and sound on the one hand and audience, purpose, scope, medium, and behaviors of digital readers/listeners/users on the other hand. Students always comment on several features of the class:

This activity could easily be modified for any discipline, not just a writing or even writing-intensive class. Students are far more engaged when working across media and not stuck with yet another blank screen demanding that they type and type pure text for hours on end. Today’s students are engaged and active; we should find ways to allow them to take advantage of their natural skill sets while still meeting the course’s learning objectives.

On the importance of writing
Despite all of the above, strong writing skills (audience awareness; genre conventions; concision; coherence; use of transitions; clarity; grammar and style) are key, even if the wording is brief. Both the podcast and the Tinkertoys assignments stress the need for clear, concise, grammatically correct text that focuses on audience and purpose. There is a popular misconception that digital technologies are somehow to blame for poor student writing; that the world as we (faculty) knew it is rapidly coming to an end what with smiley faces being interjected into student essays or, worse yet, the demise of the apostrophe. Yet as a 2008 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhart) demonstrated, students are well aware of the difference between everyday writing and writing for school or work:

“Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.”

Those teens in 2008 are today’s college students; if anything, they have become even smarter about this understanding. What they often lack is a critical framework for harnessing their everyday writing habits into activities that are helpful for school and work. For instance, the kind of free association that takes place with a text message or chat window may be useful for brainstorming; the focus on audience, even if fuzzy, that happens when someone writes a Facebook post, provides a basis for teaching students about audience considerations when choosing ideas, words, or constructs to write about.

In fact, I have found that today’s students are sophisticated writers, simply because they are writing more than ever before. They get excited to talk about topics like writing for particular contexts and particular audiences, and they want to learn about everything from the mundane (the series comma and the apostrophe) to the complex (creating cohesion between ideas; considering word choice and tone in recrafting scientific and technical information for different audiences). They are encountering written language in more places and spaces than ever, and they want to learn. In turn, I learn about their “writing ecologies” by listening deeply to their ideas and observing their behaviors.

Furthermore, language is not static but rather highly adaptive and ever-changing. As Baron (2000, 2008) and others have shown, today’s adaptations are just the latest in a series of changes that have come before and will continue. The book students read in class (Victorian Internet, noted earlier) demonstrates changes in language in relation to the telegraph. In this context, we spend time talking about tone and style: the informal when writing to friends, and the formal or semi-formal when writing to your boss or your professor, and whether/if the technology “causes” you to do one thing or another.

In closing, how do we keep up?
This semester, students suggested that next time, I adapt the assignment to look at the same topic but over a podcast, a video, Twitter, and a Facebook page. My podcasting assignment, cutting-edge four years ago, is already a bit dated for them (at least it’s not email, something that only their parents’ generation uses!) 

That’s the trick with a course like this or with any course with digital media at its core. We as faculty keep getting older, but our students stay the same age (18-25). Today’s digital natives are not the same as next year’s and the year after and the year after that. So, what to do? Do we, as instructors, keep adding new technology, trying to keep up, peddling as fast as we can? In an interesting take on the technological development process known as participatory design, I believe that we need to include student perspectives and input in our course planning, engaging in a kind of co-learning not just while in the classroom but also before the course, to ensure that we are keeping pace with the literacies and practices of each incoming class of students.

Fundamental rhetorical principles about writing and socio-technical theories about technology do not change much, but the tools and stages on which communicative acts play out are changing rapidly, and we have much to learn by working with students in active ways during the course development phase and throughout each semester.


References

Baron, N.S. (1984). Computer mediated communication as a force in language change. Visible Language, 18, 118-141.

Baron, N.S. (2000). Alphabet to email: How written English evolved and where it’s heading. London and New York: Routledge.

Baron, N.S. (2008). Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gurak, L.J. (2001). Cyberliteracy: navigating the Internet with awareness. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kress, G. and Theo Van Leeuwen. (2002). Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Edward Arnold.

Lenhart, A. et al. (2008.) Writing, technology, and teens. A report from the Pew Internet & American Life project. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Writing-Technology-and-Teens.aspx

Ong, W. (2002.) Orality and literacy. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Standage, T. (2004). The Victorian Internet. Berkeley: Berkeley Trade.

  

Laura J. Gurak <gurakl@umn.edu>
Laura J. Gurak, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair in the Department of Writing Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota. In 2008, she worked with the very first group of students to publish student-produced content to the University of Minnesota’s iTunesU site, creating their own syndicated stream called “U in Focus, Students and Scholars.”