On Multimodality
New Media in Composition Studies
Published on 18. March 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
232 pages
978-0-8141-3412-2 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 2015 CCCC Outstanding Book Award
As our field of composition studies invites students to compose with new media and multimedia, we need to ask about other possibilities for communication, representation, and making knowledge-including possibilities that may exceed those of the letter, the text based, the composed.
In this provocative look at how composition incorporates new forms of media into actual classrooms, Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes argue persuasively that composition's embrace of new media and multimedia often makes those media serve the rhetorical ends of writing and composition, as opposed to exploring the rhetorical capabilities of those media. Practical employment of new media often ignores their rich contexts, which contain examples of the distinct logics and different affordances of those media, wasting the very characteristics that make them most effective and potentially revolutionary for pedagogy. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies urges composition scholars and teachers to become aware of the rich histories and rhetorical capabilities of new media so that students' work with those media is enlivened and made substantive.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Urbana, IL
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
317 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8141-3412-2 (9780814134122)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jonathan Alexander is professor of English, campus writing coordinator, and director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication at the University of California, Irvine. He has authored or edited eight books, including Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies and the coauthored Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Best Article in the field of computers and composition studies. Alexander also works on several editorial boards and has been named one of the founding editorial board members for Computers and Composition Digital Press. His work focuses on the use of emerging communications technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. He also works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literate practice in pluralistic democracies. In 2011, Alexander received the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Composition.