viz.

Image: Mildly Amused

For their final paper, students in my Rhetoric of Tragedy class were asked to make a visual argument and write an accompanying reflection explaining, among other things, their use of rhetorical strategies and the relevance of their choice of medium. While I did not require that students use a particular medium, I taught the students how to make narrated slideshows in iMovie with the understanding that it would become the default medium. In this post, I will briefly discuss my experience with using iMovie in the classroom.

"Hey Cafe Magazine St. Uptown NOLA Jan. 2010" by Infrogmation

Via Flickr

This weekend, I visited a friend in New Orleans.  On Sunday, we sat in plastic chairs outside a coffee shop along Magazine Street, with my friend sipping a Diet Dr. Pepper (her addiction) and me indulging a tall glass of latte (my addiction). Let's not mention the almond-butter infused croissant.  As my host surveyed the Times Picayune, I took in the people passing and the variety of businesses and signs.  George Harrison "My Sweet Lord" was echoing from a restaurant across the way, and the morning air was mildly warm and a little smelly. We chatted with some NOLA locals sitting at the table nearby:  a mother and toddler, who was dressed adorably in an orange jack-o-lantern hoodie.  We talked about the Saints game (the toddler could cheer "Who Dat") and about Halloween festivities the coming evening.  When the toddler threw down the plastic lid from his chocolate milk, his mother coached him to one of the over-flowing trash cans on the sidewalk. 

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

Click play, and you're smack in the middle of composing, as Jason Dockter, PhD student at Utah State University, creates a digital ethnography of skateboarding sub-culture. His website Going Multi-Modal documents, as Dockter writes, "the process that I went through creating multimodal composition similar to what I might ask students in my first-year composition course to create in a future semester." You can watch the digital iMovie take shape from the beginning, through several...different...stages of production, and through to the end. (The example piece is embedded after the break.)