Recent scholarship, particularly that of Rice and Ball, Walker, Sorapure, Shipka, as well as others, has moved multimodal composition from an "option" or a "possibility" to a, perhaps the , central concern of what it means to teach and learn composition in the classroom. For example, Walker is concerned primarily with the new mediation and its (first hand) place within academic research--concerned with the production of texts that push the boundaries of scholarship, and Sorapure with assessing new media compositions in a way that she argues looks to the relations among textual components as a productive "way in" to such assessment.
Beginning with the 2005 Computers and Writing conference at Stanford, I was compelled by my sense of such a fundamental shift to confront a fundamental question in my relation to the issue of remediation and assessment: I, too, had long "made optional" new media compositions--I had long encouraged them. I had long made overt that the computer allows form to serve meaning. And indeed entire courses were founded on this very potential. But Walker, Sorapure, Bell, and others inspired me to conclude that I was not doing enough--that my evolution as a teacher was too tentative. So I set about redesigning--or, given the fundamentalness of the change, designing-- my so-called "advanced composition" course from scratch. In doing so, I made "remediation" the central requirement of the enterprise.