Teach New Media with Old Texts: Introducing New Media Principles Through Current Assignments

For more than fifteen years now many scholars have been advocating the incorporation of new media literacies into composition classrooms—if not going so far as to prognosticate the disciplines destruction should we fail to do so. At this point alphabetic literacy hasn’t yet gone the way of the eight-track tape or the floppy disk, nor is there yet indication that our 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 digital literacy. Digital literacy has come to mean any number of things, as have other terms like new media, including anything from the use of technologies like blogs and wikis as pedagogical tools 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 and hobbyists. Technology changes at a rapid pace; the emergence of vital literacies moves much more slowly (Who still uses DOS commands?). Rather than devote limited and valuable time with students teaching them the next new technology for producing a viral video, perhaps we should start by acknowledging how principles of new media and digital literacy are already part of any composition. 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, modularity, variability, and other principles or affordances of new media with the texts they already assign through minimal instruction in the desktop design capabilities of the ubiquitous 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 or providing access to software and technology, some of which may become obsolete before the end of the decade.