As I'm struggling to complete the visual essay by Tuesday's class, I am reminded of what Rhodes said on Tuesday--our discomfort with this essay mirrors how many of our students feel in our composition classrooms with the traditional essay. Why is this project so difficult for me? I think it's because I am having both a "composition" issue and a "technology" issue.
Even if we were allowed to write a traditional essay regarding our literacy, I would still be having trouble. In fact, I had the choice to write to a very similar prompt for another class a few weeks ago and immediately chose to write to the other prompt (about our individual writing processes). If I think about this like a box (kind of like the box logic), my literacy is in a HUGE box--but the lid is closed. I'm trying to find ways into the box and instead, I just keep knocking the box over. So the topic itself is a struggle for me.
That difficulty has been compounded by my realization that I know nothing about computers--at least not enough to do what I want to do. When a theme comes to me that would unify my visual essay in a much cooler way than it is now, I quickly see that I don't have the software to do what I want, or I've never used the software that I end up using so the learning curve seems insurmountable. And these two aspects of the essay (the composition and the technology) exacerbate each other--they both cause writer's block for the other component. The technology is of no use if I don't know what to write; the writing doesn't make it onto a page because I don't know how to use the technology.
1 comment:
It's frustrating, I know--how to get at a relatively complicated question with relatively simple abilities to express/communicate.
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