Elsewhere in this chapter, I (Cheryl) told readers that I began to re-think what digital scholarship is and can be because of these students’ projects. Not just what academic writing cum digital scholarship can look like for them—something that I’d been thinking about for years both inside (see Moeller & Ball, 2007) and outside (see Ball & Moeller, 2008) of the classroom—but what digital scholarship is for all of us.

This question came to the foreground, at first, when The Normal Group began to wonder how their chapter proposal for The New Work of Composing would be received by its editors—and, subsequently (if accepted), readers—when it was clear that the authors were not primarily academics or scholars in the way this field of readers would normally use those terms. Nor could The Normal Group claim to be experts in multimodal composition theory. What they could claim some expertise in, based on the work of a single 16-week period, were practices of multimodal composition. They had learned strategies for becoming part of a disciplinary conversation (albeit not actually being IN the discipline) by reading in a field and attending one of its conferences, analyzing both print and digital media sources for incorporation into a multimodal argument about the conference/field, and producing that argument well enough to be a passable* example of multimodal scholarship in the field.

And that was a lot to accomplish, especially in digital writing studies where scholars often learn new technologies every few months, it seems, and use those technologies to create scholarly submissions to journals like Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, or even to more popular or open sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Prezi, and their personal blogs. From the perspective of the one so-called scholar in the group, I can say that The Normal Group learned as much about multimodal composition and technological literacies as many of the first-time authors have for the digital media journal I edit. Which raises the question: Who IS an expert in multimodal composition? As well as: What does it mean to be an expert in multimodal composition in a field that values DIY multimodal scholarship? (The journals of digital writing studies, after all, are no Vectors, nor should they be.)

The issue at stake here is who gets to speak in scholarship (e.g., scholarship that is published in peer-reviewed journals and similar venues)? With rare exceptions^, it is never undergraduates. And yet undergraduates are capable of producing, as the projects in this chapter show, powerful and purposeful pieces of multimodal scholarship that have significant value to the field of digital writing studies. While these projects are sometimes raw in their delivery, the value of rawness should not be overlooked as a method of scholarly engagement in either our or our undergraduates’ work. The “materially rich,” “unexpected, elemental” qualities of students’ DIY scholarship is “ready for our engagement” (Ball & Kalmbach, (QA:YEAR) p. 4), if we would just take a chance and listen.

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* Although I don’t have the conceptual space here to detail what “passable” means in terms of assessing scholarly multimedia work (I am attempting to elaborate on it in other work), for now I will say the following: For the purposes of the class, I drew on Brian Ballentine’s (QA:YEAR) description of when open-source software programmers know it’s time to publish a new release: when the program is “workable” or “when it runs.” (QA:PAGE) That is the definition of “passable” in my version of English 239—when a piece of scholarly multimedia works, quite literally, on a technological level, but also on a purposeful/conceptual level. In the scheme of submitting their work to digital media journals, students’ work must at *least* meet the qualifications to get a Revise and Resubmit letter back from the editor. (I elaborate this assessment heuristic in a forthcoming article in Technical Communication Quarterly.)

^ The Normal Group was *thrilled* to find one (!) session at the Watson conference that included undergraduates as part of the research project and presentation: Session G4, “Message/Texts in IM, TM, & FB: The Shape of Contemporary Writing” with Kent State University faculty members Christina Haas and Pam Takayoshi and undergraduate students Jessica Heffner, Emily Dillon, and Dee Awad. [Here, Takayoshi explains why Dillon and Awad as well as Haas were not in attendance.] Over half of the students in the Multimodal Composition class attended that session in anticipation of seeing undergraduate students as speakers. Although they were a little disappointed not all the undergraduate panelists made the conference, they did appreciate Takayoshi’s remark during the Q&A session:  “This is probably the most undergraduates I’ve ever had” in a panel and audience in “almost 20 years” of attending conferences. She remarks (at the irony, I’ll point out, of) how faculty members are “surrounded by undergraduates all the time” at work but when we go to professional conferences, we never see them. “It’s nice to have you guys here, participating in the conversation.” Yes it is.