For fifteen years many scholars (see Lanham, Selfe, Sirc) have advocated incorporating new media literacies into composition. But, alphabetic literacy still hasn’t gone the way of the the floppy disk, nor is there yet indication that students’ ability to succeed in life might depend on their video editing skills. However, even the most stalwart defender of the alphabetic tradition has begun to feel pressure to address new media literacies. New media literacy has come to mean any number of things from the use of technologies like blogs and wikis as to the ability to produce and edit digital videos. While it is becoming clearer that composition will need to address digital literacy, it is far from clear which literacies are becoming truly vital for composition and which remain the domains of specialists. Technology changes at a rapid pace; the emergence of vital literacies moves much more slowly. Rather than devote limited and valuable time with students teaching them the next new technology for producing a video, perhaps we should start by acknowledging how principles of new media and digital literacy are already part of any composition (See Wysocki). Nearly all texts are produced as digital texts so all texts can be tools for demonstrating properties of digital literacies and new media. This presentation will discuss how instructors can begin to teach visual design and rhetoric, Lev Monovich’s concepts of modularity and variability (30–45), and other principles or affordances of new media using the assignments they already teach and minimal instruction about ubiquitous software programs like Microsoft Office. By teaching students to design texts rather than just write them, instructors can teach important principles relevant to whatever digital literacies students may have to develop without having to devote the majority of a semester or quarter to teaching software and technology.
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