Unlike most scholarly work, the page never factored into our composing processes for this chapter (borne out of our Multimodal Composition class). Instead, our goal was to capture video and audio moments from the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition and make them into scholarly multimedia projects that showcased both the conference and our perspectives on the conference. The four group projects presented here may do more of the latter than the former, but that’s not so unexpected given that the authors

1. are all upper-level undergraduate students, from several disciplines (not all from the humanities) with no prior experience in multimodal theory,
2. had no prior experience in sustained multimedia authoring (1 or 2 had done small videos on their own; 1 had blogged),
3. had no experience authoring academic scholarship of any kind (either page- or screen-based),
4. had no experience attending any kind of academic conference prior to attending Watson,
5. had no clear understanding (at the beginning of the semester) what professors do when they “publish,”
6. assumed all professors (Cheryl excluded, only due to the obvious digital course content) were “technologically illiterate,” “FaceBook haters,” and (wait for it…) “old,”
7. had only eight weeks to learn the disciplinary conversations about (and audiences for) multimodal composition before Watson, and only four weeks after to complete their scholarly multimedia projects.

Thus, the scope of researching, understanding, and incorporating prior disciplinary conversations about multimodal composition was limited to one semester of undergraduate coursework, and an elective at that. The students (as Cheryl is writing this introduction) rightly decided from reading scholarship and attending the conference that their unique perspective (as undergraduates) was the angle, the new knowledge, that they could justifiably and credibly add to the field of digital writing studies. They took control over what and how their arguments would be made, and these projects are their projects (with only very slight editing, usually for sound quality, on Cheryl’s part). You are the well-studied audience, even though you may not want to hear all of what undergraduates have to say about teachin’ and preachin’ about and with technologies. But that is the point: Undergraduates—who often aren’t expected, or even welcomed, at conferences or as voices in scholarly work—have something to say about teaching and learning with technology, and relish the opportunity to say it (and say it smartly) given the chance.

• The first video-project, “Watson Conference: Students’ Perspective,” examines the relationship between professors and undergraduates who attended Watson by analyzing the perceptions of students held by these professors.
• The second video-project, “Gotcha!“, is a behind-the-scenes (or, rather, a semi-confrontational behind-the-curtain) look at the undergraduates’ experience at the conference. This video is a raw take on both the students’ self-imposed bloopers and the bloopers they felt the “professors” performed.
• The third project, “IsMySpaceUrSpace,” uses a MySpace page to encourage teacherly interaction with social media sites (like MySpace) in their pedagogies. The space is populated with footage from and documentaries about the Watson conference.
• The fourth project and final video, “Technology’s Impact on Teaching and Learning,” offers a straight-forward analysis of why teachers need to be more engaged with digital and media-production technologies in writing classes, especially given an age, as one student in class remarked, of having “Google in your pocket.”

That students’ scholarly work is as important as professors’ scholarly work (and the fact that we can better attend to the gap between those two) was driven home for me, not just by the incredibly smart and sassy work of the 12 undergraduates in my Fall 2008 Multimodal Composition class, but by one sentence that one of these undergraduates, Matthew Wendling, said to a roomful of Computers and Writing scholars at the 2009 C&W conference at UC-Davis. Matt, who had accompanied me to give his perspective on the Multimodal class that I was presenting about, said, “Teachers like to make up academic words by adding ‘re-’ to them: Re-mix, Re-mediate, etc.” The audience of academics broke up into laughter. We recognize! And because of the projects created in this class, I began to re-think what digital scholarship is and can be. As you watch the students talking back to “us” in their projects, I will leave you with that query and address it again in the conclusion of this piece.