Tools Takeaways
● “Rethink” foregrounds a need for flexibility in composing multimodal scholarship as an ongoing negotiation with tools. The tools used can raise new insights about the pieces that the composer might not have considered. An ongoing process of discernment, weighing, and balancing is needed to see whether the original idea in its initial form is worth pursuing at all costs or whether the new inscape design possibilities might be worth introducing as a shift into the project.
● “Engage” highlights the importance of professional development in learning new technologies and skills, even if their immediate use is not clear. Once learned, this knowledge and these skills can serve to generate new ideas for projects based on an expanded idea of what projects might be possible.
● “Adapt” points to the importance of being familiar with a wide range of tools and options as a way of increasing one’s rhetorical “vocabulary” in designing multimodal scholarship. “Adapt” additionally encourages an ethos of a DIY or open-source aesthetic (Stolley) and systematically sharing that adapted approaches so that others can benefit from that knowledge and the effort gained in achieving it.
● “Afford” speaks to the need for a strong digital composing center and available software on campuses. Sometimes workarounds, patches, or bandaids for a project are simply no longer effective or practical, and an expanded set of affordances (especially via high-quality tools, and individuals or tutorials to help teach them) may be precisely what is needed to fully communicate an implicit design-as-argument in its most sophisticated form.
● “Limit” speaks to the need to teach and value failure as a key part of invention, to accept limitations and setbacks as part of the process of developing a webtext’s inscape. “Limit” highlights a key need to judiciously negotiate when it comes time to let go of an idea, but also to build a culture around webtext composing that accepts and values failure as part of the knowledge creation process.
