As an innovative component of the FIU English Department’s Writing Program, the Digital Writing Studio provides a collaborative environment where students will learn how to compose effective, rhetorically informed digital and multimedia texts, whether class assignments or extra-curricular projects.
Operating Principles
1. Because digital texts that combine written, audio, still image and/or video components only work when they engage or persuade their users, learning technical skills is most effective when combined with rhetorical understanding.
We’ve all experienced poorly designed PowerPoints, confusing web pages, or lame smart phone apps. And they are often produced by people with considerable technical skills. When working with these or more complex multimodal texts, understanding rhetorical principles—that is, how to appeal to and persuade an audience—should guide technical know-how. Learning to do this will help students to be more creative as they expand their technical skills throughout their lives.
2. It is an emerging reality that democratic members of the university and society must learn to produce effective digital texts. This fact will only grow more urgent in the coming years.
Public discourse currently appears in multimedia forms—video clips, podcasts, interactive government reports. Effective public participation will increasingly hinge on the ability to produce such texts. Similarly, audiocasts, video lectures, academic blogs and online multimedia presentations have all charted new directions for scholarly engagement that build on traditional lectures and paper writing. Learning the rhetorical basis of how to choose appropriate formats and produce them well will develop Worlds Ahead global citizens, scholars and workers.
3. Access to technology in a collaborative studio environment best supports the teaching and learning of digital writing skills
The DWS is an organic, technologically advanced collaborative teaching and learning space. For example, a student ‘s work on a video essay might involve a conversation that focuses on brainstorming and mapping out the scene selection needed to communicate with a chosen audience. The student may return and edit scenes to best emphasize the message of the essay. Making informed choices about writing and thinking through a project requires digital writers, in all stages of the writing process, to collaborate with other digital writers.
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