Hello Mother, Hello Father...

...things are great here at summer camp! We had arts and crafts today but if I can't get this audio piece down to 30 seconds, you're all getting lopsided ashtrays and hand-stitched wallets instead.

I wonder then how much of my day today was spent “working” with Audacity and how much was spent “playing” with Audacity. Today certainly didn’t feel like work; the stakes were manageable, the activity was fun and experimental, the rules and constraints imposed by the assignment and tools were reasonable and allowed room for creativity and self-expression. Personally, I find that I accumulate new literacies more easily and retain them with better facility when I first encounter them as toys rather than tools. So, other than the fact that I can harness it as a tool for teaching composition when I get back to Pitt, what about learning to compose with Audacity was work?

This made me think about the role of play in accumulating new literacies. I wonder then how introducing such technologies into the classroom impacts my students’ perception of those technologies. Once they enter the classroom are they any less fun to experiment with? And, if they are “less fun,” what happened that made them that way? Further, what is it about new technologies that allows them to be more readily accepted as objects of play rather than, say, a sheet of paper (although we all know how much fun pen and paper, themselves, can be when incorporated into play)?

I think the answer here is one of positionality. In Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Stephen Johnson discusses how game designers create environments and challenges that lead players to happily perform all manner of mundane, repetitive tasks by positioning those tasks as part of play (which should be fun) and not work. The games Johnson refers to and new multimodal discourse technologies both make familiar process such as composing strange in a way that is difficult to do with print-based monomodal essay writing. Despite my best efforts to position activities like journal writing, drafting, and other kinds of prewriting as low-stakes environments for experimentation and play, those forms still occupy the same spaces as the “work” of the class (assuming that the “work” of the class manifests itself in the final draft of a paper printed and handed in on sheets of paper). In my opinion, part of the exiting potential of multimodal composing is that students, in learning new to use new digital tools, will hopefully learn new critical and theoretical tools as well, accumulating a new set of literacies that can benefit them in their work outside of the classroom. I wonder, however, how effective an pedagogy that makes the work of composing strange will be as students increasingly come to our FYC classes already equipped with skills such as audio production that have had the fun drained from them by the new work of the classroom.

On another note, we have our very own DMAC Facebook group! Join us!