"Remediation", revisited

Fulwiler and Middleton’s article about digital storytelling with new media echoes many of the issues we have been discussing in our class, including the potentials of remediation and moving away from privileging the alphabetic mode.

I found it interesting to distinguish between what Fulwiler and Middleton call “translation” between modes and what DeVoss et. al. define as “remediation”. I tend to use the terms interchangeably, understanding that translation between modes necessarily includes re-thinking and re-engaging with our material, as DeVoss et. al. have discussed. Fulwiler and Middleton, however, argue that it is possible to translate without remediating by “mode-matching”. Nevertheless, I wonder if “mode-matching” can have its advantages. After all, presenting the same information in multiple modes can aid understanding and retention – didn’t Womack emphasise redundancy in her article about making texts more accessible? Also, if we all agree that different people work best in different modes, I think we can have some sympathy for Katie, who found it difficult to let go of her dependency on writing. Despite her “commitment to textuality”, Katie seems to have made personal progress and discoveries in her filmmaking process, even if they are not what Fulwiler and Middleton had hoped for.

I found this article useful to read as we begin to create our own videos. (Although I wonder how much of the research on digital storytelling is applicable to non-narrative videos and what additional issues we will engage with.) I am most comfortable with and work best in the visual mode, especially with alphabetic text, so creating a video will be a step outside my comfort zone creatively, intellectually, personally, and technologically. Nevertheless, to be educators who are truly dedicated to supporting multimodal composition, we need to understand the processes and technologies we want our students to use. I am glad that we started our teaching philosophy statements as alphabetic texts and then remediated them into infographics, not so that I have a script to read off and still images to include in my video, but because I have already articulated and wrestled with the ideas I want to convey multiple times and in multiple modes. I am excited to make meaning across more modes than before, and to see what unexpected discoveries we will make in this remediation!

Reimagining my alphabetic teaching statement to identify key ideas in a more visual way... (created with WordArt.com)