Multimodal Collaborations

One learning outcome in the First Year Writing curriculum at my university states that students should understand that meaning is socially constructed. I try to model this understanding by engaging students in activities in which the social interaction is conspicuous. Collaborative multimodal discussion can depict the social interactions that are part of the composition process.

The site www.voicethread.com offers the ability to create and publish multimodal discussions. One can upload any sort of document and then others can comment in several forms: text, webcam recording, and audio recording. My classes use this technology to share ideas about collaborative documents and for peer critiques. Another way I use Voicethread is to have students create and publish multimodal discussion in-class.

Since we do not meet in a computer lab, we use my laptop with students taking turns recording their understandings or questions about a class text. This method has one drawback due to the fact that I am logged in as the user: all comments appear to originate from my avatar. At first it is strange to see a student’s video emerge as an extension of my profile photo. This is actually an opportunity to explain the idea of literacy sponsorship. My user identity sponsors their use of the technology in a way similar to how teachers sponsor students’ discourse within the class. For me this is not ideal, but it allows us to collaborate in a non-lab classroom as well as talk about issues and problems with sponsorship.

Below is an example of a Voicethread collaboration that students created in the classroom. The students’ task was to address the three learning outcomes for our first three readings. They were asked to state ideas that they understood or ideas that they still needed to consider, share these in small groups, and enter a statement into our Voicethread discussion.



The artifact shows various levels of understanding. Some are uneasy statements read from spiral notebooks, while others are confident orations of complex ideas. Once we published the Voicethread, we observed it as a class. Students raised important questions about the multiple modes of discourse and the ways that each mode demonstrated authority. They also wondered whether the quality of a student groups’ understanding of a learning outcome affected the choice of mode. In fact, we raised many more questions than we answered. At this early time in the semester, that was more than OK. Students were working together to identify important lines of inquiry about the social aspects of discourse and writing technologies. In activities like this, students can clearly see their role in the ongoing research of rhetoric and composition.