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\nIn 2002, while attending the Conference on College Composition and Communication, friends persuaded me to attend the New Media segment of Computers in Writing Intensive Classes (CIWIC-NM) under the direction of Anne Frances Wysocki. The two-week workshop at Michigan Technological University in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan promised to prepare me for an upcoming professional change. I had just accepted the job as the director of the Computers in Composition and Literature on the Columbus Campus of Ohio State, and I was charged by the incoming chair with taking the program in new directions in teaching and research (as well as changing its name to reflect current practice in the field and to become more representative of the work in digital media across the department). This, without a doubt, would necessitate some training beyond my understanding of \u201ccomputers and composition.\u201d\n
In addition to reading and discussing scholarship in new media, the workshop was committed to new media production. Participants were taught Macromedia Director, an authoring program used for creating animated, interactive, stand-alone projects. The workshop as a whole, but mostly the production component, pushed me to think about composing in new terms and to reach beyond alphabetic print and static page layout. Composing in Director required me to compose in a timed space where I negotiated speed, duration, movement, and the relationship among objects in motion.<\/p>\n
When I returned home to Ohio State, I quickly discovered that working with Director was going to be prohibitive because of the application\u2019s cost, but Flash would allow me to introduce students to new media composing in similar ways, and the university had affordable licensing options I could access. Our hardware was old. Really old. I was having a difficult time convincing those holding the purse strings to invest in English studies when, in their words, \u201call you do is type.\u201d I did find one sympathetic ear who was willing to listen to my vision, mostly out of curiosity because my descriptions of digital media composing were so out of the ordinary from her experience as a student who once enrolled in English classes. She asked to see some examples of that I might ask students to compose (I showed her a project I completed in CIWIC-NM along with other work I found online because I didn\u2019t yet have student work) as well as assignment ideas. She informed me that she was in the process of upgrading a public student lab, and she offered to equip one classroom with the computers she was removing; these computers provided processor speed and memory necessary to run Flash. That next term, I asked students to create small Flash movies that combined print, images, and audio into self-portraits, documentary segments, animated quotations, and public service announcements.<\/p>\n
After two years working with Flash and machines that were truly struggling, our programmatic efforts and the changing discipline were recognized with funding from the university to convert one computer classroom into a digital media composing studio, a space that could truly transform teaching and that would serve as a studio space for students outside of class.
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