Wysocki's general approach to composition resonates with me insofar as she treats "conventionalized design" in more nuanced ways, I feel, than some of the other theorists we have read up to this point. While theorists like Shipka and Alexander & Rhodes hark to compelling and important opportunities for granting "analytic primacy" to mediated action and resisting the ways in which composing has been effectively hijacked or "colonized" by traditional compositional frameworks, respectively, these approaches in some ways (inadvertently, of course) remain so committed to interrogating and problematizing text-based composing that they perhaps underestimate the extent to which all modalities (not just technologies of print technology) are fundamentally prescriptive according to the ways in which "available designs" have been socially, culturally, and historically constructed.
That being said, this raises questions about the sort of responsibility we assume as instructors in pushing back against the infrastructures of all or some of the modalities in which our students are composing. In composing my own final project, I will have to really consider not just the relationship between and among the modalities I am using, but also the specific ways in which I may or may not be altering the proverbial landscape of each of said modalities through my purportedly unique and personalized applications or practices.
2) In "The Rhetorical Work of Multimedia Production Practices: It's More than Just Technical Skill," Jennifer Shappard juxtaposes the prospects for imparting technical skills to students engaging in multimedia production against helping to facilitate the development of diverse and significant literacies. In so doing, Sheppard seeks to showcase the ways in which multimedia production is a meaningful, dynamic, and iterative process through which students (as composers) learn to be sensitive to and aware of "technological rhetorical considerations," considerations that must be navigated carefully and consciously, in order to participate in and "interact with the world in thoughtful, informative, and persuasive ways" (403).
Sheppard's efforts to expand (and honor) the scope of what constitutes multimedia production beyond the realm of mere "technical skills" interest me immensely because they begin to drive at the sorts of challenges and obstacles that inhere in activities, assignments, and major inquiry projects that ask students to not only navigate a particular rhetorical situation but to do so in genres and media that exacerbate the rhetorical demands and expectations that are placed on them as composers.
By design, all of the theorists we have read up to this point share Sheppard's philosophy in terms of honoring the rich and rigorous set of rhetorical choices that students (as composers) make in the course of multimedia production. What distinguishes Sheppard, though, is her commitment to sharing the theoretical promise of multimedia production and its "technological rhetorical considerations" with administrators and colleagues.
My final project is predicated on surveying the landscape of students' previous experiences and preference with regard to being required to use mobile devices to complete in- and out-of-class course activities, so Sheppard's approach to multimedia production will likely play an important role in how I represent my findings from the questionnaire I am distributing to students in writing-intensive courses. Indeed, the questionnaire is designed in some ways to better understand how students are internalizing the instructions and technologies instructors are explicitly (or implicitly) prescribing to students in their activities, assignments, and major inquiry projects, which will hopefully help speculate about the role that both "technical skills" and "technological rhetorical considerations" play in terms of the work that they compose.
3) In "Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery," Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss explore the extent to which considerations of delivery have infiltrated conversations and practices of rhetoric in digital spaces. Ridolfo and DeVoss are particularly interested in what they dub, "rhetorical velocity," a term that drives at the speed at which content that is delivered digitally is actually re-mixed and appropriated in many ways by users in their efforts to communicate their own compositions, compositions that re-work components of existing compositions and extend them to new (and perhaps unintended) contexts or communicative landscapes. "Rhetorical velocity" is significant, they argue, because composers are responding in particular ways to the prospect of such re-mixing and appropriating.
Ridolfo and DeVoss' ideas are important to keep in mind in terms of the ways in which we theorize and define production and composition. I was reminded in many ways of Kress and van Leuwen's attempt to articulate a schema for multimodality in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Kress and van Leuwen design their schema to speak to the unique and personalized ways that composers actually enrich existing debates and conversations about communicative action in the ways that they navigate and acknowledge matters of discourse, design, production, and distribution, in the course of developing and delivering content. Yet, as we discussed issues of distribution in class, it was difficult not to gesture to the prospects for re-mixing and/or appropriating in varying degrees of heavy-handedness. Which is to say, militating (and/or guarding) against efforts to extend existing content into new (and perhaps unintended) contexts can only go so far, even if these efforts include severe legal implications.
Ridolfo and DeVoss' notion of "rhetorical velocity" was incredibly interesting to me in terms of considering ways in which I might invite re-mixing and/or appropriation in the content I compose for my final project. I wonder, too, whether calling direct attention to these opportunities will cheapen or somehow delimit the transgressive potential embedded in users' efforts to extend existing content into new (and perhaps unintended) contexts of their own choosing.
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