research paper proposal

I may be way off base in this, but I'm thinking I would like to explore how multimedia interacts with issues of identity and authority. In particular, I am thinking of either blogs or wikis (supported by flickr and Photoshop) as a means personal storytelling. Kathleen Welch suggests that encouraging a student's "interior discourse," something in which they are "automatically accorded authority," can be considerably empowering for students. Telling their own stories increases their "writerly authority" and enables the students to present a believable self, an ethos that contributes to the success of the presentation. Further, she suggests, such an approach shifts the writer's focus from establishing authority to other writing issues. Once the students recognize the empowerment of encoding, they also begin to understand that the process (or "how") is at least equally as important as content (or "what"). Of course, the use of multimedia further increases the students' sense of understanding process over content.

An entire multi-modal presentation for the story-telling project would entail scripting on the blog or wiki, storage of photos on flickr, and culminate in producing an audio and visual Photoshop presentation stored on the wiki or blog. What do you think?