Many English teachers in Japanese high schools and universities are still teaching the “hamburger” style essay in English composition classes: three supporting sentences sandwiched between a topic sentence (top bun) and conclusion (bottom bun). I find myself doing this more often than not because students are evaluated on how closely they adhere to this model.

In the U.S. and some other countries, recent trends in writing classes reveal that many teachers are going “multimodal” in their approach.

Ask yourself these questions:
Do you teach college writing? Can your students write at the basic sentence or paragraph level? Are you tired of teaching formulaic essays to those who may never sit for the TOEIC or TOEFL? Are you and your students losing motivation? If you answered “Yes” to most of the above, it may be time to go multimodal, especially if your class has Internet access.

Multimodal writing tasks move beyond single-mode print text into the world of video, sound essays, slideshow presentations, brochures, and other media. Creative and inquiry-oriented, multimodal writing is one of the biggest recent changes in writing courses at American universities, largely replacing the five-paragraph formula paper.

I gave a presentation on this topic last year that includes several examples of multimodal writing produced in my classes at Hokkai Gakuen University:

Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is “a trend in World Wide Web technology, and web design, a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users.”

Now there’s a mouthful. If it helps, think of Web 2.0 as the “Read/Write Web” as opposed to the “Read Only” Web 1.0.

I recently completed an excellent Electronic Village Online (EVO) study session called Blogging for Educators delivered via Yahoo groups. Although the primary focus was on blogging, a number of other Web 2.0 tools were used by participants to share ideas. One of the more exciting ones was called VoiceThread. This application lets people add comments to the discussion theme using text, voice, or webcam video. Pretty slick, IMHO.

I will be taking a closer look at VoiceThread and various other Web 2.0 tools for educators in upcoming posts.