Thinking about rhetoric, writing, and composing from a digital perspective throughout this semester has really encouraged me to expand my established pedagogical practice and theories. Below are some of my “takeaways” from the semester as a whole:

• You not only can use technology in your classroom- you should

Before taking this class, I was the instructor who was afraid to turn on the projector, who relied solely on PowerPoint (and thought Prezi was “high tech”), and always demanded projects in “hard copy”… I now realize just how static it is to ask students to compose physical papers as their final projects all of the time. There are certain types of information that just cannot translate to the written word as effectively and need visuals, sounds, and movement to convey its full potential. I can see this just by looking at some of my fellow students’ final projects—they’re all amazing, and would never exist if we all wrote seminar papers as our final projects

• Online teaching is the future… and it’s not scary

For my own final project, I decided that I would investigate online teaching since it’s growing in popularity and I knew nothing about it. I fully anticipated that what I would learn would interest me, from a scholarly/academic perspective, but that I would walk away still absolutely preferring traditional face-to-face teaching practices- not so. I’m really inspired to try online instruction now (either as a student or a teacher), and I’m amazed by how many multimodal resources can fit into an online classroom- audiobooks, videos, hyperlinks, you name it. It’s a fully textual experience that places an emphasis on written communication, audience, context, and purpose like I’ve never seen before, and it’s really cool.

• Online Textbooks Are Not Evil

So I am largely “that person” who thinks that audiobooks and e-readers are an abomination to the written word and that we cannot fully experience literature/scholarship by “screading” it. Since this was the first class where all of my readings were hyperlinked into the syllabus, let me just say that it was amazing. I could access documents whenever/wherever I needed them and save them to my iPad’s library, or I could print them out to read, highlight, and annotate more closely. This flexibility was great, and really demonstrated the effectiveness of the “digital” in “digital humanities,” allowing scholarship to be freely and widely accessible in the interest of gaining knowledge.

• I like [to analyze] video games!

Before this class, I knew nothing about literary video game culture- I knew that some digital rhet. scholars analyzed video games, but I often dismissed this field as “not for me.” I now appreciate just how diverse this topic can be, and I’m fascinated by the portrayal and reception of minority races and genders within games. Now that I follow “Not Your Mama’s Gamer,” I’m really excited to keep up to date on some of the scholarship surrounding these issues (with the bonus that lots of these articles are written by my Purdue friends who I can ask questions to :).

Overall, I’m really excited to continue interrogating contemporary topics in digital rhetoric. I think that this class did an excellent job of exposing to me to a wide variety of topics related to digital composition- online teaching, research, webtexts, distant reading, infographics, etc.- and I got to create my first blog. I look forward to the opportunity to incorporate this multimodality in future research projects.