Living with technology…calls for a retooling of our own means of rhetorical production. One way to accomplish this is through the exploration and experimentation of personal pedagogies.
Jenny Edbauer Rice
The digital age, and the literacies that has since spawned as a result, has given us pause think about what our students need to thrive and flourish. In a age where students can successfully navigate the Internet, compose text messages and chat online but struggle with the traditional 5 part essay, or, on the other hand, have a solid grasp of traditional print literacy as well as an equally grasp various digital literacies, composition professionals like myself are finding that a well-rounded set of multimedia tools extremely helpful.
That’s all fine and good, but finding the time to choose the technology that best fit my needs and finding the time to climb the steep learning curve is a precious commodity. Fortunately as a grad student, I have an opportunity to take advantage of project assignments to cut my teeth on new technology.
The Digital Literacies (DL) project assigned in 2009 was going to be a microdocumentary anthology series that was under development called “Sique is a fan of…” (SiaFo) which in itself became a personal pedagogy. After a several false starts, one lost file and a few bright ideas, I produced a template for the continuation of the series and many transferable tools, including iMovie and YouTube.
The “Sique is a Fan of” Microdoccumentary
Sique is a Fan of… (SiaFo) was intended to be an anthology audio podcast, where I would write essays on a variety of topics. The idea came from the fact that when researching how to create podcasts, Tee Morris advised in his book, Podcasting for Dummies:
Before you can think about putting together a podcast, you need to describe what topic you want to cover… Whether you’ve decided to take on the topic of music, religion or technology, the best way podcast unique is to find an angle you’re comfortable with. The content you bring- regardless of what’s genre it’s in – is unique because it is your podcast.
As many who know me can heartily attest, I had a hard time getting a topic nailed down. So instead, I decided to write an essay about one different thing every show.
During the course of the DL class, we were given the assignment to provide a reading response and to “get out your comfort zone”. For me, this would include dealing with film, using only the footage available on my computer, and using only the editing software native to my computer (iMovie). The result is the 8-minute film named “SiaFo” available on the Multimedia page on generation-beta.com/multimedia.
The first thing I to deal with was working with film. Film is a lifelong love of mine, and I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 12 years old. My collection has nearly 300 pieces of movie and film clips and music on my hard drive but never put them to use. I found it extremely intimidating to crawl through all the footage and find the perfect pieces that would visualize my words. The goal was to illustrate the life that the physical book still has in the face of the annual cries of ‘the book is dead’ that have been coming every since 1978. I finally used a piece from the Warner Bros 1934 cartoon, “Have You Got any Castles?” which almost literally characterized famous works of literature, a video of friends burning a physics book that they couldn’t sell and nearly 50 pictures of my personal library.
I used iMovie, a part of the Apple iWork suite, mainly because this is software that people will have on their computers already. I have a Final Cut Pro on my computer, but at 1500 dollars, many have not used the software.