Welcome to Issue 6.2 of Xchanges!
Welcome to Issue 6.2 of Xchanges! In this issue, we feature four texts by graduate-student scholars from New Mexico State University, Clemson University, University of Washington, Seattle, and Illinois State University. These texts--one Prezi presentation, one website, and two scholarly articles--speak to the theme “Textual Evolution: Assessing Changes in Textual Production and Interpretation in the Classroom, Workplace, and Cyberspace.” These innovative texts speak directly to the ways in which our uses--as readers, as students, as teachers--of textual media have changed over time.
A principal subject of inquiry in this issue is the history of hypertextuality and reinvention, as demonstrated in Erin Frost’s Prezi, which considers the “Alice” books’ repurposing of images to accompany new content. Frost’s study of the Alice books reveals that we have long practiced multimodal reinvention as a means of conveying social and political commentary. This multimodality is omnipresent today, as Nancy Fox’s study reveals. She examines the present-day integration of video-making technologies in the first-year writing classroom as a way to facilitate student learning of rhetorical and technological practice. Fox claims that such multimodal integration will help us to revise our understandings of literacy and will push us, as teachers and scholars, to engage directly with the expanding horizons of videotexts as means of “transformative” critical discourse. Another investigation of transformative communication technology is Jennifer Scott’s discussion of the dexterity of the wiki format as a management tool for constantly changing information. Since wikis are “inherently collaborative,” Scott contends that instructors should integrate wiki usage into their course plans because wikis spur discussion, collaboration, and learning. Finally, Josephine Walwema analyzes our reliance on forms/templates for purposes of comprehensibility and efficiency in a Technical Communication context. Walwema urges us to consider the ethical and creative consequences of such reliance and asks us to alert students to issues of “invention, topoi, ethos and ethics” in their work with templates, in their TC classroom and beyond. We hope you will enjoy reading, viewing and interacting with these fine scholarly works from this issue’s group of young scholars!