A Review of Digital Video Production in Post-Secondary English Classrooms at Three Universities  

Digital video production in composition courses is both new and exciting. However, this newness comes with challenges and obstacles as well as more questions than answers. What exactly is so fun, attractive, liberating, and transgressive about digital video work? Is it the time invested in editing minutes or hours of footage into seconds of film clips? Is it the sheer thrill of having the power to overlay images, words, and sounds to produce an effect impossible in the real world and highly effective in the multimodal, rhetorical one? Is it that the composition teacher is finally asking for a product where grammar (understood as punctuation and sentence structure) is mostly invisible? Is it the crisis moments when the software, the hard drive, and/or the accompanying hardware crashes and we are still left with a classroom full of students to teach? Or, is it the mesmerizing effect of the screen that promises sustained attention to a composition assignment? The answer, we think, in all cases is 'yes'--yet sometimes that yes is a hesitant one.

Meeks, Melissa and Alex Ilyasova. Kairos (2003). Articles>Education>Multimedia>Video