While reviewing material for my intro to college writing seminar this semester (topic: modernist fiction and magazines), I came across the handout I prepared for my presentation with the faculty working group on multimodal composition. It was a helpful series of workshops, discussions, and demonstrations coordinated by Deb Breen and Jason Prentice.
My contribution focused on developing a multimodal approach to teaching a typically text-heavy art form: the annotated bibliography. On one hand, the idea was to simply to extend students’ use of annotated bibliography (as a research tool) to a include variety of media. These woud include not just academic articles and monographs but web sites, images, and Youtube videos, or even lectures and presentations delivered during class time. On the other hand, the idea was to experiment with non-textual modes of annotation: compiling images relevant to a piece of scholarship, creating an inforgraphic, summarizing a source in a meme or Tweet, or placing multiple sources on an interactive map and timeline. These forms of multimodal bibliogrpahy activate a range of sensor modalities (aka “learning styles”). Visual annotations, in particular (as visualization studies show), are capable of transmitting large amounts of information in easy-to remember (mnemonic) format.
After surveying a wide range of concepts and practices, I presented a project I assigned my class with Omeka Neatline.