The Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) institute is designed to encourage faculty consider the multimodal literacy practices and values that people are now bringing into contemporary composition classrooms.  By way of accomplishing this task, we’ll be asking each of you to create a final DMAC project that explores and enacts these literacy practices in some way

Your final DMAC project will be a Sophie Book (http://www.sophieproject.org/) .  Sophie is a multimedia authoring program that allows users to create electronic books that combine words, images, video clips, audio files, photographs, and Flash animations.  The goal of the project is to assemble a set of elements that demonstrates the value of multimodal composing.  You could address the rationale behind such work, describe the nature of new multimodal literacy practices, or create a project that demonstrates the power of multimodality. Also, you can work collaboratively or individually on this project, depending on your personal inclinations. 

You can take many different approaches with your Sophie Book.  You can create a text written for administrators that makes a case for multimodal learning.  You can write a multimodal syllabus for a class you would like to teach, or you can compose a multimodal sample response to an assignment that you might ask your students to complete.  Perhaps you’d like to work on an article about multimodal literacy for publication.  Your Sophie Book can explore different sites, texts, or genres of composing (‘zines, altered novels, blogs, graffiti, student-made video and audio projects, graphic novels, comics, podcasting). You could repurpose a project that needs new direction, one you have already begun but haven’t finished.  You might choose to conduct interviews and record conversations with students or colleagues that document their attitudes toward learning and teaching, or you can tell stories about students, about yourself, about someone you know.  As you think about a specific audience for this project, consider composing for your colleagues, your writing program administrators, your department chairs, the broader public, or the students in your courses.

You may also be interested, at this point, to know what we mean by multimodal literacy.  For the purposes of DMAC, we mean being able to deploy—successfully, appropriately, and responsibly—multiple semiotic modalities (words, visual images, aural elements) in the process of reading, interpreting, and composing meaning for various audiences and purposes.   Multimodal literacy involves the ability to understand the power of images and sounds and written words; to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform messages within and among various media; to distribute messages widely, to recognize the constraints and limitations of various media and modalities, to adapt information to new mediated forms; and to understand the social, cultural, ideological, and material implications of mediation

Here are some preparations you can make for your project—even before you get to Columbus and DMAC:

• Look around you (on your campus, in a computer lab, in the subway or on a bus, in newspapers and magazines, on bulletin boards, in a coffee shop, in bookstores, in your own or others personal notebooks) and start cataloguing instances in which people (authors, students, teachers, artists, people with disabilities, mathematicians, engineers, members of the public) are effectively combining written words, visual, and/or aural elements as they communicate or approach a rhetorical task.  What do these texts looks like?  What do they sound like?  What specific work is done by the visual elements of these texts?  The aural elements?  The written elements?
  
  
• Ask various people (students, teachers, artists, people with disabilities, mathematicians, engineers, members of the public) how they respond to texts that effectively combine written words, visual, and/or aural elements.  How would you describe their response?
  
  
• Consider that your own focus on print literacy may lead you to overlook, inadvertently, other modalities of composing.  From your perspective as a teacher of the written word, these other modalities might, at first glance, appear less significant than writing, less precise, less rigorous, less intellectual.  But the goal for this project is to observe how these modalities work alone and in combination—their particular affordances (capabilities), their provenance (historical and cultural contexts and associations).  The goal is to better understand and appreciate the specific semiotic work each modality can do for communicators in various rhetorical contexts.

Between now and DMAC, collect different kinds of multimodal texts (illustrated letters, altered novels, scrapbooks, ‘zines, blogs, web sites, gaming sites, word art, student-made videos or audio essays).  Consider taking digital images or snapshots of people engaged in multimodal literacy practices.  Consider interviewing students or colleagues.  Get a big project envelope, place it next to your desk at home or at the office, and drop everything you can possibly think of into it. If you anticipate needing any specific materials or media assets (texts, document, images, video footage, in-progress research, found object), you’ll want to put them on a portable storage device and bring them along.  All of these things will be useful—they will all become design resources for you to employ in your project.