BLSF 2016 & Jay Bolter
I presented on Jay Bolter's 1992 speech in class today. In order to demonstrate and experience the communal, multilinear narrative he encourages with technology, I asked my peers to write a brief blog entry on our BLSF 2016 summer. Nothing fancy, and multimedia encouraged. After a few minutes of individual blogging on their respective sites, students then accessed a shared Google doc wherein they were to write a brief summary or excerpt of their blog entry, embedding a hyperlink into the text of one of their words and/or images.
Once all individual summaries were present in the document, we collaboratively (all 8 of us, professor included) worked to reorder/remix the given individual narratives into one collective narrative-- a story we could claim as our story, multilinear, multivoiced, and also multimodal. The process was messy for a lot of reasons: I'd never led something like this before, nor had I experienced such as assignment as a student. There wasn't really one way to proceed through editing and revising the document. It took lots of talking over each other, lots of questions, listening, designating one or 2 people to be the editor of the document. It also took some follow-up questions as we listened to each other make sense of the cohesive narrative present; many saw it different ways, and to ask the authors about some of their word choices enlightened and enriched our communal understanding of where we all fit.
One moment in particular stands out as worthy of recall: our professor's brief summary had language that indicated to some, upon first reading, his distinct position as a professor rather than student in the BLSF experience. One classmate suggested we delete the phrase in favor of creating more continuity of voice-- so that it sounded like it came from the same general kind of perspective. I stopped us for a moment to consider the question at hand: In the creation of multilinear narratives, how much do we seek to preserve the original authorial intent? How much "revising" is permissible? It seems to me the question and its answer(s) have ramifications for not just for writing pedagogy-- but also for cultural narratives.
Though I've not been a part of this kind of compositional process, I had anticipated a moment like this arising, and I was glad to face it, though it does create some discomfort. I asked the professor for his reasoning in word choice, and upon his explanation, we found it did not isolate his experience from ours; rather, the word ("instructor" as it were)-- intentionally on his part-- accounted for not just his experience but ours as well as fellow educators at different levels. We kept the word, but more importantly to me, we stopped to ask, listen, and process before making an editorial decision.
We could have edited and stylized and remixed that Google doc for quite some time (one peer even suggested it could be interesting to see how each of us would remix it on our own and bring it back to class for comparison and contrast), but my goal wasn't to finish the narrative. My goal was to experience the collaboration, the communal authorship, the multilinearity. The process itself, messy as it was, was so enlightening and fruitful and rewarding for me.
And isn't that a great life-lesson takeaway as well?
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Here's my original brief post I used to complete the individual blogging part of the assignment described above. If you want to see our [unfinished, work-in-progress] Google document, click here.
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BLSF 2016 is about exploring new heights, dispelling "I can't", and doing so in community with like-minded individuals. Going on a morning hike at 6 am has started each of my days with a conviction that come what may, I can take it. Ascending in elevation both intellectually and physically empowers me to face this new school year-- my 8th as a teacher. It also infuses a zest for more adventure-- both physically and intellectually. I want to teach better, differently, new materials; I want to traverse higher ground, new landscapes.
