Response # 11: "After Digital Story Storytelling: Video Composing the New Media Age"

In "After Digital Story Storytelling: Video Composing the New Media Age" Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton argues against a prescriptive process for composing digital stories. Claiming that the "Creation of digital video can [should] become much more than an act of 'translation' or transcription. In same way that writing generates new thought rather than merely transcribes existing ideas, so too can the modalities of image and sound. Composition and new recursivity, we argue, are not only processes inherent in the world of digital video, but are also critical cognitive experiences that require space and attention as we imagine a pedagogy for the new media form" (44).

This article helped me better understand the root cause for much of my anxiety during my Multimodal Digital Literacy course this summer. When given a new multimodal assignment, I often wondered things like:Why won't my professor just tell me which site to use for my blog? Or which site I should create my infographic on?or How long my script or digital teaching philosophy should be? But using this article to reflect on my experience this summer, I see that the messiness was required in order to discover new meaning.

For example, near the end of my alphabetic teaching philosphy, I quote one of my students work on a multimodal project. She was exploring the question: Is there a ethical way to control the growing population of wild horses? and states "I went into this project thinking there would be a simple answer to my question. I thought all I would have to do was Google my question and be done with it. I see now that I was far from right. Every article that read had a different opinion, and I learned that some questions don’t have a right or wrong answer. After doing this project, I see that I have grown in a different way than the way I thought I would grow. I learned to be less narrow-minded and to always put myself in the other people’s shoes, even if they share a different opinion than me." This quote initially spoke to me when I read her essay because I admired how the project actually brought her to be more socially concious. I knew I wanted to highlight this in my video. Since the student's mother is a colleague of mine, I asked her if she had any video or pictures of her daughter with a horse. She sent me a picture and three seperate video after I had already created the rough draft, which was already far too long. I was in such a rush to craft a literal translation of the meaning of this text, I almost didn't watch all of the videos. However, I watched each one while listening to the quote from her paper, and saw how the videos spliced together could tell a story. The student starts out slowly riding her but by the third video, she was cantering. As I watched this and listened to the recording of the quote, I realized that her words were not just about being more socially considerate. Her words, actually spoke to her persistence in the composing process; her willingness to bring new meaning to her question, and accept the chaos and remixing required as we learn in this multimodal age. It was not the literal translation of her being by a horse that brought this new meaning, but the watching of her at a distance begin to canter on her own. This shows how I, like Candice, a student exampled in the article, was able "to discover new meaning in the visual mode and arrive at insights that exceeded the written script" (48).