A Flash genius is born...
She was born in the Heavilon second floor computer lab at 4:32 today. A bouncing girl, sixty-five inches, no-one-needs-to-know how many pounds.
Thanks to one Mark Pepper, I think I sort of get Flash. After many grueling hours, I'm pretty sure I can do basically what I need to do to make my GED game (though there will undoubtedly be annoying kinks to work out and some stuff might not look as cool as I'll want it to look eventually). It might not look too special to other people, but I'm pretty excited about it. I'd like to share a bit about my learning process, because 1. I think it's interesting and 2. it might help others. Also, learning Flash has made me think more carefully about incorporating new media into the classes I teach.
I wrote in a previous post that I thought my biggest obstacle was that my narrow little brain works in a way that is contradictory to the way Flash works. Now that I think I kind of get Flash, I think that my initial assessment was right. The problem is this: I want Flash to be this linear thing, like PowerPoint, where each slide builds on the last in a linear way. It sort of does work that way, in the sense that there are frames that show up in a toolbar horizontally across the screen. However, another major part of Flash and being able to work in it is the Layers, which show up in a vertical toolbar. To add to my confusion, it's necessary to add a layer every time you want to add...anything! Very frustrating. The point, though, is that, to understand how to compose in Flash, I've had to alter the way I think, which is something I'm really not used to doing.
All of this has made me think more about the resistance I sometimes feel about requiring my students (especially my 106 students) to compose with different media. Long story short, I’m having a change of heart. I’ve said before that I like having students compose in different media before, but the different forms of media were things that haven’t been different, like PowerPoint. When I think in terms of thought process, PowerPoint is actually pretty similar to composing in Word. In fact, this is the way I’ve used it in the past, like when I have had my students outline their papers using PowerPoint. In this exercise, the title of each slide parallels the topic sentence of a paragraph, and bullet points in the slide represent the paragraph’s major points. The students can look at the slides altogether to think about the organization of their whole essay: the introductory slide=the introductory paragraph, middle slides=body paragraphs, and concluding slide=conclusion paragraph.
Being forced to change my thinking in order to compose in Flash—at my crotchety old age, no less—has been useful for me. I’ve heard people talk ad nauseum about how composing in the traditional, linear essay form is merely something we’ve been trained to think is THE way that composing happens. I think that learning Flash is a good way of thinking about how composing can be much different. I don’t know if I’m actually going to start teaching Flash in 106, but hey, I’m softening a bit. The important thing is that I’m beginning to soften my stance on incorporating different types of media in my composition courses for a reason other than “well, that seems to be what the cool people are doing” or “the kids these days need to learn that sort of thing, so I bes’ teach them.” What I’m realizing is the rhetorical value of teaching students—including English 106 students—to compose in different types of media.