Anderson's "The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation"

Anderson, Daniel. "The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation." Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 40-60.

In the writing classroom, Anderson advocates multimodal composing using "entry-level technologies with simplified interfaces, limited feature sets, and broad availability” because, he argues, they “can ease the way towards innovation" (43).  He acknowledges that foregrounding a particular technology seems to counter good pedagogy, but “putting technology first promotes opportunities for play and experimentation that can lead to new learning” (43), and such experimentation “can facilitate a sense of creativity that can lead to motivation” (44).  In environment where students experiment, play, and become creative through the use of an easy-to-learn technological tool, the classroom becomes a construction site or studio space.  For students, this can mean a flow-like experience as they compose.  For teachers, it “serves as a catalyst…to reconceptualize pedagogies—technical things shed new light on existing paradigms and open possibilities for new methodologies” (42).  This causal relationship between technology, motivation, and innovative pedagogy also acts as the connection to distance learning.  While Anderson speaks specifically about entry-level composing technologies, his claim that simple tech tools can foster creativity as we work to achieve goals within constraints may also apply to some of the simplest technologies of distance education, such as message boards, blogs, or social bookmarking.

Anderson goes beyond these immediate benefits of using entry-level technologies; he quotes Morrow and Tracey as he argues that making choices about modes and composing tasks "’offers students responsibility, and empowers them with control over the situation’” (45).  In turn, this agency makes students able and more likely to engage in "critical, civic participation,” which helps achieve a major goal of education—for students to be “’social critics rather than indoctrinated consumers of material culture,'" as Selber puts it (45).  Thus, Anderson draws a causal chain from using entry-level technology for multimodal composing to motivation to agency to social criticism.

Finally, Anderson offers several examples of multimedia projects using accessible software, including an iTunes playlist in response to a text or topic, a PhotoPlus collage capturing content and themes of a text, and a MovieMaker video using rhetorical appeals.  For each one, he offers his own students’ commentary on their experiences of creativity and motivation.

The use of simple software (especially if it is also free and web-based) has obvious appeal for distance educators whose students may have varying access to advanced software.  If an institution does not offer extensive technical support to distance students, an instructor could consider finding or making a series of video tutorials, which would be sufficient to teach a limited feature set.  If the teacher made such videos herself, she could also model the language of composition and rhetoric and the most relevant features as she demonstrated the functions and possibilities of the software. 

Because distance education already relies heavily on students’ motivation, Anderson’s suggestions to build and then ignite student agency may be a good fit for teaching writing from a distance, not simply because it is practical but because it can help achieve our goals of helping students apply critical lenses to the world around them, in and outside of the academy.