I open this digital essay with a video of Cindy Selfe sharing part of her very compelling argument for the teaching of digital and multimodal literacies in our writing classrooms precisely because she is so convincing. Even the most die-hard critics of digital technologies might find themselves inching just a bit toward opening up to digital possibilities after an hour or two in conversation with Cindy Selfe about it. She makes sense and, importantly, she makes it seem doable. In essence, she is able to justify the need for change AND to, somehow, reassuringly reduce the spectre of risk associated with that change.The ability to reduce the perceived risk of making a change to digital and multimodal teaching is essential for the wide scale digitization of the composition classroom.

For more than 25 years, Cindy and many other composition scholars have advocated for a more thorough understanding of the ways in which computer and internet technologies affect how we teach, learn, think, and communicate as well as for the active incorporation of digital composition into the teaching of writing. Numerous composition researchers have persuasively argued for why digital rhetorics and multimodal literacies matter to the teaching of writing, for how we might go about teaching and producing networked and multimodal compositions, for the when of the “institutional infrastructures and cultural contexts necessary to teach students to compose with new media” (DeVoss et. al. 2), and for what we need to attend to and even be wary of as we adapt new tools in our writing classrooms. (These arguments serve as important background conversations for this essay and brief overviews of scholarship in each area can be accessed through the why, how, when, and what links in this page and on on the left menu)

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