Assignment: Multimodal Essay

For this assignment, you will remediate your Fairy Tale Analysis essay into a multimodal essay to be presented on Medium.com. Given the changing nature of writing and the role that technology plays in shaping how we share and consume information, it is important that we take time to experiment with multimedia composition so that we are able to participate in the sharing of knowledge through multimodal writing. As David Blakesly and Karl Strolley explain: “Multimedia composition is the craft of inventing, shaping, producing, and delivering text, audio, video, and images purposefully. As a craft (or art), it is a set of skilled practices for integrating content that may appear in various forms–words, sound, moving and still images, even physical objects–all in the interest of communicating, entertaining, or persuading” (qtd. Hawisher and Selfe, 190). Ours is an increasingly visual culture. By taking time to experiment with the creation of multimodal writing, you will be more prepared to use these tools for personal and professional purposes in the future.

There are two parts to this assignment:

Part 1:

Using your Fairy Tale Analysis essay, create a text in a different modality using Medium.com. Medium is a website that allows any writer to create and share content, bringing together text, video, audio, image, infographic and more into one piece, with relative ease. Your goal is to remediate your essay, taking it from a traditional printed piece to one that incorporates the affordances of the web. (embed link: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2013/03/29/affordances-weave-the-web/). You are encouraged to combine written text with visual and audio elements, using artistic and thoughtful design that will lead to a richer reading experience for your reader. The revised essay should be improved through the inclusion of images, audio, video, photo, infographic and so on. You must create at least one of the new components of this essay, either a visual, audio or film aspect, however you are encouraged to create all of the items that you incorporate into the remediated version. You can use any of the tools identified in the Tools Teachback discussion in our class or you can find a different tool that better fits the design for your essay.

Try to be open to experimenting as you remediate your essay. Play with the design, experiment with different tools, find tutorials and answers on Google if you are struggling, or ask a classmate for feedback and suggestions.

To get started, you will want to create a free account on Medium.com account. You can sign up with Twitter, Google, Facebook or your email account. Please note that when you publish on Medium.com, you can choose to publish the project publicly so that everyone can see it, or you can restrict access so that only those who have the direct link are able to read it.

Requirements:

• The essay must incorporate at least three active links to outside sources.
• A minimum of five multimodal digital elements must be included. These might include audio files, embedded videos, infographics, animations, comics, memes, maps, illustrations, etc.).
• The essay includes at least one item that you created yourself (an audio file, a video, an infographic, image, etc.).

Part Two:

After you have composed your multimodal essay, you will compose a reflection on your process in the Assignment: Reflection on Creating a Multimodal Essay. In this essay, you will reflect on the design choices that you made as you remediated your writing for this new format, how the meaning of the essay has changed, and the challenges you faced in this unit. More details are available in the assignment handout in our course shell.

Works Cited:

1. Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Cornell University Press, 1999.
2. Bergmann, Michael. Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press, 2014.
3. Draper, Paul. "The Problem of Evil." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/.
4. Gregory, Alan. "The Nature of Evil." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, University of Tennessee at Martin, 2015, https://iep.utm.edu/nature-o/.
5. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
6. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
7. Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. HarperOne, 2015.
8. Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1974.
9. Rowe, William L. "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism." American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, 1979, pp. 335-341.
10. Swinburne, Richard. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford University Press, 1998.