c.

collaboration:

"...let the stars guide your sight..."

~Adam Mackie~

Christine Robinson, a fellow graduate student, and I were both taking E513b - Form & Technique in Poetry and E632 - Professional Concerns: Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age at Colorado State University during the fall of 2009. We were writing poems in various forms in our poetry class and learning how to teach using multimodal pedagogy and digital technology in E632 - Professional Concerns. Robinson decided she wanted to make a video for one of her final projects. She was telling me about it after poetry class one day and I was telling her about a poem that I had recently turned into a song.

I wrote the poem "The Ballade of a Boy and the Stars" to try my hand in a French form of the folk ballad. Noah, my four-month-old son, inspired me. My wife arrived home with Noah and set him down in the car seat next to where I was sitting outside reading about ballads. He was looking up at the sky and I imagined what he might see when looking into the heavens. I then put the lyrics to chords and recorded the piece with my son Noah making baby sounds in the background. Robinson said she would like to hear it and when she did she loved it. She asked me if she could use the piece in her project to create a video poem and I said, "I would be honored."

The collaborative work that Robinson and I did demonstrates what students might be instructed to do in a secondary English classroom. Twentieth-century technology affords new opportunities to collaborate in educational settings: over email, on blogs, in online chat rooms, and by combining different sensibilities to create multimodal and digital texts. Partners or groups can combine their strengths and strengthen their weaknesses in collaboration and present their work in digital formats, as the following YouTube video demonstrates:

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