Digital architectonics: A case study of educator designed multimodal texts.

摘要

This dissertation examines the composition process of three experienced professors who spent a semester designing instructional videos to be delivered online to students. The growing adoption of online education, in conjunction with the dominance of the screen in everyday communication, has required university educators to develop strategies for designing texts that combine multiple modes of communication. In this study, university educators composed texts that consisted of spoken, visual, and written language. In order for researchers and educators to understand best practices for composing texts on and for the screen, it is necessary to investigate the design decisions university educators make as they compose digital multimodal texts. Furthermore, it is necessary to investigate the transition university educators face as they move from delivery of course materials in a print-based format to those that are multimodal. In particular, I have sought to uncover the writing choices university educators make by building upon process scholarship in composition studies from alphabetic texts to new media texts. My findings reveal that university educators make decisions that are best understood as an effort to redesign meaning from available meaning-making resources into new educational contexts. The resulting model attends to traditional rhetorical considerations and those that utilize the full range of communication modalities to describe the multimodal composition process of the three participants.