For my final project in computers and writing, I am beginning to collect multimodal explanations of activities, assignments, and projects that teachers use in the composition classroom. The driving idea behind this project is to take what has been a collection of static documents with teaching information, and contextualize it in the practice of the classroom by giving it a human voice and explanation.
I had heard about QuickTime’s screen capture feature and wanted to try it for a document focused multimodal production. To test it out I navigated three documents and several photos of blackboards for this video. My initial attempts with this project did not include the photos. As I watched the drafts of the video (over and over again), I realized that there was a lot of time that wasn’t visually dynamic. Including the photos was my attempt to both engage the classroom reality of the activity, and justify the use of video, rather than simple text for this particular activity.
While the technology was not complex, the actual recording was harder than expected. I hoped to employ this technology quickly and casually. After testing the software, I decided to make the video without a script as I found it hard to navigate the screens while reading, and hoped that a script-less production would sound more conversational. Though I think the video captures the spirit of the activity, contextualizes the documents for the viewer, I know it could be polished further but my question is… should it?
Digital Musings 