John Pedro Schwartz received the MEME award in 2006 for a student project in RHE 309M Spring 2006.

Mobile Composition Project

Project Description

Available at: http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/schwartz/node/37

Pedagogical Assumptions

Instructors who teach writing as a cultural, situated act often craft assignments that presuppose a clean, well-lighted writing space like the library, dorm room, or coffee house. The problem is that these spaces homogenize the same material differences that instructors are trying to underscore. For example, a racial minority student writing at home is far more disembodied than she would be writing in the main hall of an art museum. Conversely, an affluent female student writing at a working-class, male-dominated bowling alley feels her status more poignantly than she would feel it writing in the library or the dorm room. Students can better perceive their social, cultural, and historical locations when they visit places of rhetorical activity (e.g., city parks, waiting rooms, shopping malls) and research, write, and even publish on location.

Pedagogical Ends

The project sought to help students:

• understand the interdependency of agency and material structures by confronting students with the effects of these structures;
• see that writing assignments, spaces, and technologies are mutually determining by separating writing from conventional assignments, spaces, and technologies;
• realize that the material conditions shaping what they write and who they become through writing are fluid and changeable;
• learn to compose using some combination of text, image, audio, and video; and
• observe and interact with a wider range of environments.

Electronic Means

Wired and wireless devices and networks facilitated the mobile composition project, in which students researched, wrote, and even published in places of rhetorical activity. The following examples illustrate this claim.

1. For her digital curation project, one student used a digital camera to take pictures, iPhoto to edit the pictures, iMovie to add effects, transitions, and a song, and iDVD to create a menu page and burn the files onto a DVD.

2. For his soundseeing tour project, one student recorded commentary and ambient sound with a digital voice recorder, transferred the audio to a computer, then used a podcasting program called Audacity to convert raw wave files into MP3 format.
Example: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~schwartz/spring06/johnston/mobile/dragtour.mp3

3. For their digital curation projects, some students created moblogs using camera phones to capture images and video and send the files via MMS (multimedia messaging service) to their moblog accounts, provided free by such sites as Yafro.
Example: http://www.amio.textamerica.com/

4. For their digital curation projects, some students built websites using Dreamweaver.
Example: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~schwartz/spring06/Mosteller/mobile/