![screenshot from the video with Joyce at a podium and the blurry words Make Disrupt Innovate in side boxes on both side of her](images/video-menu.jpg)
The final remediated video of "Making, Disrupting, Innovating"
In the end, we created a video remediation of Joyce's Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Chair's Address that replicated aspects of the experience attendees might have recalled while also pushing the boundaries of previous CCCC Chairs' Addresses recordings and publications. This new video is not simply a record of the address in Houston, nor does it attempt to be a video copy of the text in College Composition and Communication (CCC); it's a new mediated experience that can be watched, paused, commented on, and shared.
Our remediation answers Joyce's call to remake and reform, and it also challenges the status quo of reprinting CCCC address scripts in academic journals that the public can't readily access. By remediating Joyce's address and making it available to a wider, more public audience on YouTube, we gave it a second life (or maybe, a million more lives), and an opportunity to be accessed for free, by the public. Even though Joyce's call to action was meant for members of CCCC—practicing researchers and teachers—the embodiment of her argument in our remediated version reinforces her message, disrupts the status quo, and encourages other academics to speak outside the echo chamber of academia.
Based on our experiences, we see some important takeaways for graduate students and faculty in our field wishing to invent remediated videos as scholarship:
The first is providing the time and space to experiment and play with new technologies. While an intensive two-week graduate seminar is perhaps not the ideal space to both learn new software and create a final product, Erica and Sarah were able to meet this challenge because of the space and time offered to them to play around and experiment with Premiere Pro. As many scholars in and outside our field have argued, play and experimentation are important to the learning process (e.g., Brown, 2010; Gee, 2003; Cooper, 2010). In the first few days of learning Premiere Pro, Erica and Sarah allowed themselves to play around and learn the features, and allowed themselves to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Such openness to potential failure is important, we believe, to learning new technologies.
Also important are support systems and guidance from those who are more familiar with the technologies. Erica and Sarah received some support from Michael and the course's teaching assistant, Andrea, when they had technological troubles. Neither Michael nor Andrea are experts with Premiere Pro, but they could model troubleshooting behaviors and help to scaffold Erica and Sarah's learning process (a process that otherwise was like diving into the deep end of a pool without swimming lessons).
The second is the importance of collaboration and mentorship in invention processes. Creating opportunities for graduate students to invent in collaboration with professors is an important form of mentoring. By collaborating with graduate students on creative and scholarly projects, established and emerging scholars create spaces for graduate students to learn new technologies, sharpen their application of theory, develop scholarly habits, and learn and practice genre conventions. The remediated video of Joyce's Chair's Address is an example of this mentoring practice: Sarah and Erica had many conversations with both Michael and Joyce about audience expectations and the genre of the Chair's Address.
But this Kairos webtext also serves as an example of mentoring: It took time to write and revise as we discussed the conventions of a scholarly article, such as the need to forefront claims, discuss evidence (rather than have it speak for itself), situate a project within scholarly conversations, and so forth. Further, because this webtext was designed for the screen instead of a print-like traditional article, we discussed and put into practice media content management, like file-naming conventions and collaborative writing technologies, which allowed us to create sustainable practices that could lead to a successful final product. Such mentoring activities can be both stressful and time-consuming. For example, we are finishing this webtext a full seven months after finishing the video, due to various other commitments and the difficulties of collaborating at a distance. And as Sarah and Erica mentioned in the discussion of their invention process, this mentoring and collaboration can be anxiety-inducing for graduate students, who are not only entering a profession but concerned about "getting it right" for their professors and large institutional clients like CCCC. (Kairos has historically been an important site for graduate student mentorship; see, e.g., Cassorla, 2006.)
Our third takeaway relates to the nature of Joyce's call to make, disrupt, and innovate in the field. In her address, Joyce called on members of the field to "Make new rhetorics, new publications, new pedagogies, new research methods" (41:57). We hope that this video remediation constitutes a "new publication" (and joins a long history of digital making—"new pedagogies"—in rhetoric and composition graduate courses).
In the opening of our webtext, we noted that we purposefully reference quotations of Joyce's address from the remediated video itself, rather than from her official printed version in CCC (official in the sense that it is institutionally supported by CCCC). We chose to do so for two reasons: First, because we were composing an Inventio webtext, we wished to focus on the digital product that we collaboratively invented rather than give reference (and thus preference and deference) to the print version of Joyce's talk. Second, we hoped to see the video remediation of Joyce's address as new media scholarship in its own right. As we noted elsewhere in this text, CCCC Chairs' Addresses have historically been treated as print texts, and we hoped to treat the video remediation as a text worthy of its own study.
Because digital scholarship is often dismissed as not as rigorous as print scholarship, we hope this webtext has helped to demonstrate "the important intellectual labor behind digital production" (Sorapure & Stolley, 2007, "Goals"). But, as Erica and Sarah explored, it can be difficult to navigate the balance between convention and innovation. While at times our remediated video perhaps leans heavily toward convention, at other moments it is disruptive of viewer expectations (in ways that we hope delight and potentially instruct). Ideally, this piece and the remediated video it discusses are meant to exemplify the kinds of made innovations that can disrupt what we think we know about genres, composition, discourses, and their various audiences. We strive here to continue, add to, and extend Joyce's call to make, disrupt, and innovate.