Thinking About Templates

Thinking About Templates

To create digital multimedia (what Kress and van Leeuwen term multimodal) works, one needs an understanding of the affordances of different media, modes, and genres - what we might call the semiotic aspects. But to express themselves, students must also learn to use the technological aspects: the digital equipment and tools: cameras, recorders, telephones, and computers with corresponding software.

A template is a piece that is already partly made: it has a selected visual (or aural) style, a hierarchy, and has blank fields for the necessary parts of the piece that the user must remember to create.

Any writing technology will have an impact on the texts authors create with it.

Templates imply a somewhat new form of writing, with somewhat different influences on the writing process.

It seems that a broader understanding of how templates influence finished works is an important part of digital literacy.

I will give a systematic overview of the ways I found that templates influence what authors can create. I will conceptualize these as prescripts and provide a typology of their different kinds before discussing concept of prescripts in a broader context.

If we are to teach students how to be computer literate, we must direct their attention to the different prescripts of different authoring tools. We cannot escape templates and their prescripts, but every user should ideally be aware of them, be able to choose to work with them or against them, and then also choose alternative templates when available and suitable.

Interface Prescripts

Interface prescripts are prescripts that make it simpler to create a text by taking away choices.

The main benefit of templates is that people who lack the skills to communicate effectively with computers can get the necessary confidence and head start to produce something they will be proud of.

The most important aspect of templates is that they make authors out of people who otherwise would never create anything. Templates enable but can only simplify the process by limiting the range of possible expressions.

Design Prescripts

In my experience, most of my students, friends, and colleagues are more comfortable with writing than graphic design. Although this probably is different in some professions, it seems that quite a few people are happy to find that many professionally created visual designs are available as templates.

However, the prescribed design may - and will often - collide head on with the text of the user. For instance, a prescribed design may invoke connotations (additional meanings) that do not align to the written text, or the design may set aside areas for text that are too small or too large.

We can at least see two reasons why this is desirable for users.

1. If, as is often argued, a home page or weblog is a way to present an image of who one wishes to be, then a coherent visual (or aural) style adds to this. Layout styles, color schemes, and typography bring connotations with them, as do music and editing effects. The aspiring home page or weblog author would want to have a look that matches his or her perception of being conservative or cool, fashionable or geeky, a hip-hopper or a surf dude.

2. Another reason may be an aesthetic desire of creating something beautiful, or at least almost professional looking, and the pride from achieving this.

Design Prescripts

Templates are generally made according to some well-established genre, and much of what they prescribe is actually genre conventions.

A template is normally created with a special genre of communication in mind, which has incorporated typical traits of that genre.

In computer templates, much of the genre is set in stone. It is part of the mould, and will shape every material poured into it.

Understanding: Metaphors

How should we then understand the template? A few possible metaphors come to mind, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Templates could be likened to:

• Collaboration between the template author and the user,
• a platform to stand on to reach higher,
• a mould to shape an object, or
• the framing of a house that is clad in brick or wood.

Understanding: Forerunners

Creativity-as-selection is restricted to the predefined choices, yes, but Manovich sees these restrictions as necessary for creative practice: if everything were to be coded from the bottom up, it would take a very long time to create anything interesting. We should add that a great many people who do blog, edit home video, or maintain home pages would never be able to do so without templates and creativity-as-selection.

…a "computer literate" is one who realizes that prescripts are necessary and limiting at the same time, and that a different tool or a different template will not free him or her from prescripts, but just bring other prescripts.

Prescripts and Digital Literacy

If we are to teach students how to be computer literate, we must direct their attention to the different prescripts of authoring tools. We cannot escape templates and their prescripts, but every user should ideally be aware of them, be able to choose to work with them or against them, and then also choose alternative templates when available and suitable.

Essential to Digital Literacy

Prescripts of templates influence the creation process and the finished work in (at least) three ways. Prescripts

• limit the means of expression (interface prescripts),
• add meanings in another sign system (design prescripts), and
• tie the text to a genre (genre prescripts).

…one important part of teaching digital literacy is to teach students to be attentive to the prescripts of authoring software.

A digital literacy will have many parts, and I have argued here that one part of digital literacy is attention to the software's prescripts. A digital literate knows that there are prescripts in software, and that it is necessary and practical. But she or he also knows that the prescript has its limits, and that other prescripts are possible.

Students need to be taught that when they find it difficult to create something, it is often the prescripts that hinder them and not their own lack of skills. Much of what we think of as "computer literacy," "experience," or "expertise" is in fact experience in working around the prescripts in a template.

Sources

Kress, Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003.

Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. N.P.: Longman, 2002.

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold, 2001.