Talking Back to Teachers by Hailey

In the chapter Talking Back to Teachers: Undergraduate Research in Multimodal Composition, a group of graduate students studied theory about multimodal/multimedia work. The students traveled to a Watson conference, which is a congregation of professors and scholars who work with computers and composition studies. The students made videos about the experience of seeing older scholars dealing with technology. The students reference Kate Hayles' theory of hyper and deep attention. Kate Hayles discusses how many people have a hard time reading texts because their mind wants to wander to other things like technology. Many people these days believe college students today don't have much capacity to focus deeply on a reading task because they prefer to give their attention in a more hyper manner, switching from sensory input to sensory input as they move fairly quickly among media texts online rather than reading a linear book. An example of this theory can be seen in our own classroom. The week that students presented their blog videos seemed much more interesting to me than whenever the students just read whatever they posted on their blogs that day. Watching videos with a length of ninety seconds seemed to be way more interesting than just a wall of text. The class also seemed to be a lot shorter that day compared to the other classes. Maybe it was because I was able to pay more attention due to the short length of the videos mixed with the audio and visual content. Everyone has their own personal views on technology and how it affects their attention span.

-Hailey