Story Board

Set up a wiki page with scholarly conversation about integrating new media instruction into composition classrooms:

Discuss:

·      access

·      technology

·      software

·      teacher resistance

·      using visual design capabilities to teach students to start seeing texts (Bernhardt, Wysocki) and designing the assignments they are already producing instead of just writing them

·      How this small shift toward document design represents an available step towards teaching new media because many of the same principles students learn by designing for print apply to designing in other modes and for digital media

Create the video:

Teaching new media with old texts: enabling student designers

Establishing Shot: Me working at my IMac

Turn to camera, Open with greeting and reference to the need for simple and accessible ways to make the assignments teachers already use sync with principles of new media and our digital environment. Discuss how nearly all texts are composed digitally, but teachers and students still treat computers like type-writers when computers allow for texts to be designed rather than simply typed.

With minimal effort, we can help students learn to think rhetorically about the materiality of their texts.

What a text looks like affects its rhetoric just as much as what it says, and the standard school paper doesn’t say good things. (Discuss interfaces-Wysocki) Interfaces like genres, or like texts themselves establish relationships and subjectivities, the school paper interface establishes students as perpetually erring trainees whose work is prepared for correction, and teachers as correctors and evaluators. How can we begin to change that?

Discuss: most designing done through high-powered desktop publishing programs like Adobe InDesign or Quark, but few students have access to these expensive large programs. Wordprocessing programs like Microsoft Word, however, have come a long way since the days when they were essentially digital typewriters. I’m going to show how Word’s publishing view feature can be used to design any standard assignment.

Video adjustments to MLA formatted school paper, going through the following subjects:

Typography—type as image, rhetoric of type, principles of choosing typefaces

Layout—Focal point, hierarchy, emphasis (size, weight, style, color, indent, outdent), whitespace, grids, margins, chunking, line-length, etc.

Adding Visuals

Visuals that explain type, 

Visuals explained by type,

Visuals that work with type to create something more than the sum of their parts.

Does size matter?

Thinking in Spreads/Making a magazine.