DeVoss, Cushman & Grabill “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 14-44.

New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996).

Bishop-Clark, Cathy and Beth Dietz-Uhler. Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2012. Chapters 1-4.

3D Game Lab & Brain Rules Chapter 5

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This week's readings on multiliteracies brought to mind many of our recent readings, and in particular Haas (materiality) and Selfe & Selfe (politics of the interface). I had read the New London Group's article on pedagogy and multiliteracies once before, and it's certainly no wonder that the ideology I sensed embedded in this article is reminiscent of that explored in the recent chapter I read in New Learning (Chapter 4, Learning Civics) -- especially in terms of the four dimensions. Specifically, the links they point to that exist between multiliteracies and the "changing social environment" of teachers and learners today are the basis of their call to change our definition of literacy to better fit the diverse means of communication in today's work, educational, and personal environments (8).

The New London group argues a number of points towards this call for redefinition, pointing to the way we currently inhabit multiple communities, engage in multiple discourses, and education is right in the middle of the effects upon meaning making. They promote the idea of "pedagogy as design" (19) as a way of advancing this multiliteracy emphasis, as "designing transforms knowledge" (22). Teachers, they argue, are the "designers of learning processes" (19) and, operating within this design concept, design a learning environment that emphasizes meaning making as "active" and "dynamic".

What I found most interesting about this article was the four factors of this new pedagogy, which they describe as:

1.  Situated Practice -- immersion in a community of learners and their practices),
   
2. Overt Instruction -- scaffolding,
   
3. Critical Framing -- to help students learn to make the connections between what they're learning and "the historical ... social .. value-centered relations of particular systems of knowledge and social practice" (34), and
4. Transformed Practice -- when students get the chance to demonstrate new practices that result from this learning, or transfer (34).

While filled with new possibilities for framing multiliteracies (especially when exploring new media composition), the New London article made me question the practicality of their suggestions, recalling an earlier comment I had made about the utopianism of the New Learning book. My primary question was on the subject of outcomes and standards (since we just finished discussing Assessment) -- if this new pedagogy is meant to develop the differences, how then would we measure learning?

DeVoss, Cushman and Grabill move the week's readings from the more theoretical into the pragmatics of the classroom, using a classroom experience with multimedia to demonstrate the varied infrastructures that impact not only teaching but learning. They present this article -- and specifically their use of the term "infrastructure" -- as an alternative to the well-trodden scholarly path of studying space and place of the classroom. They use this term to account for more than physical structures; it must also, they argue, include such elements as institutional policies, budgets, etc....things that are often invisible to both student and teacher until "something breaks." They offer this infrastructure as a framework for exploring multimedia and multiliteracy learning opportunities, calling it an "analytical tool" (19). Their article recounts a classroom experience in which the infrastructure (including software protocols, network access, and IT limitations) failed, revealing the pressures these limits place upon the learning and the teaching in a multimedia classroom.  Interestingly, they also point to the very considerations of working with multimedia we have all faced thus far this term in our Reading / Note Taking challenge: how the program itself creates the very structure for our composing choices -- the policies (politics?) of the interface (23). As they observe, the writer/composer must deal with "questions tht force writers to consider the material and rhetorical realities in which they will compose and through which their final products will be produced and viewed" (23).

Their main point seems to be the need to make such infrastructures "transparent" (34) in an effort to better assess their impact and influences on pedagogy as well as student learning / writing. By doing so, new learning experiences are afforded by overtly taking into consideration "the complex interrelationships of material, technical, discursive, institutional, and cultural systems" in play (37).   

While on the subject of affordances of multimedia and multiliteracy, The 3D Game Lab experience this week took a little getting used to (I'm not a gamer, by any stretch of the imagination, so "reading" the site is presenting a bit of a learning curve for me. I have only recently (in the last 3 - 4 years) become aware of the OER, primarily texts like Writing Spaces and Writing Commons.  So, much of the preliminary information was not new to me, but after reading the aforementioned texts, I was acutely reminded of the materiality of this experience (as I already mentioned). Conveniently, for the past week or so, a colleague of mine has been posting links to OER resources, including this resource: a site called Open Culture, which has announced the availability of an exciting number of historical films made by the British documentarians of Pathe.  I am excited to (some day, when there's time) dig through this resource and others for possible teaching resources for my own composition classrooms!

Finally, and aside from my notes on the 5th chapter of Brain Rules, there is the 800-assigned text, Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I really appreciate the very practical approach of this book, especially the suggested readings! The worksheets are a great resource as well.

The chapters progress from a brief history / overview of "what is SoTL" and the premise of SoTL as a "framework with which to think about their own teaching and their students' learning" (5). Not surprisingly, Boyer's work and Glassick et al.'s follow-up make a prominent appearance in Chapter 2. Probably the most valuable "nugget" I gleaned from the reading were the suggestions on how to identify a productive research question and study design tips in Chapters 3 and 4. Specifically, I found the suggestion to design a research question based on those "experiences" in our classrooms that we "find intriguing" (31) to be a "light bulb" moment for me, especially when they break such questions down into types:

(1) what works: the "effectiveness of some new approach" in the classroom;

(2) what is: or an analysis of the "teaching and learning experiences" happening in the classroom;

(3) "visions of the possible"

(4) "formulating new conceptual frameworks for shaping thought about the practice of SoTL" (32).

Overall, a very practical guide to entering the field of SoTL!

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