Summary on "H1N1 Virus and Video Production"

Michael Pennell introduces a new project in his first-year writing class as a tweek to his syllabus before school starts. This project consisted of an optional college video contest project that would push students to inform colleagues about the H1N1 Virus and health professionals to support them for prizes as an incentive. Pennell found this college video project as a good and new way to rhetorical approaches. 


The first few weeks in Pennell's class consisted of working on this project and students took into consideration their similarities with other students, but soon faced certain difficulties with technology. Some students didn't have cameras, the proper softwares, information, and many students found themselves imposing alternatives for limited space. Unfortunately, many students found this project as an obstacle with limited resources.


Although Pennell agreed with Jason Ranker who stated “Students who work in similar multimedia writing environments may find new, motivating, self-guiding purposes for writing as afforded within the whole activity of producing a multimedia, digital video text.” on the great rhetorical approach of  videos, he found that it was most definitely a project that could not be fully expanded with students' imaginations because of their limited resources. 


As a conclusion, Pennell found that most students preferred the usual techniques that a regular first year writing class would include rather than the new approach he took. Although he realized the attention grabbing was more effective than a traditional paper, he found that most students preferred not to deal with the difficulties of a new, different project. This relates to what I'm learning in my English 1311 course because we are currently in the process of a discourse community project that gives of the option of a video, billboard, or a pamphlet. I agree completely with Pennell because video production is a good way to grab attention, but there are limited resource that must be dealt with; as a result, my group and I chose to take the non-technological route prior to this reading to avoid the potential problems that we would have.

Pennell, M. (2010). H1N1 virus and video production. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 10 (3), 568-573.