In a first-year composition course a few years ago, I had students design multimodal campaigns about social/political issues of their own choosing (creating a print document, an audio text, and a visual or multimedia text). In this course, I had one student who was a very strong proponent of open source software; indeed, he often made comments in class discussions about why he felt his peers should switch from windows to linux, from photoshop to gimp, from MS office to open office. Yet, whenever my young open source advocate would make his pitches, the rest of the class would roll their eyes and largely ignore him. In many ways, the student had been making sophisticated arguments for why the open source development model was preferable (ethically, politically, pragmatically) to the proprietary development model, but his peers were turned off by his nuanced discussion of the politics of software development--seeing discussion of "code" as the province of tech expert geeks.

As a result, I suggested that the open source advocate design a multimodal campaign with the specific goal of convincing peers in the class to switch to open source software. The student began by polling his peers about the reasons they wouldn't make the switch to open source. He got some enlightening responses such as: 1) I already know how to use X proprietary software and I don't have time to learn a different way 2) I already have X proprietary software or operating system on my machine, so I don't see any benefit in switching to a free alternative at this time 3) Open source is something only "geeks" do (it ain't cool to be into linux) 4) I don't really care about the "politics" of open source software 5) I don't want to know anything about the code that runs my software...I just want it to work.

In the end, the student began to design materials (a video, an audio remix, a print document) with the class audience in mind. In order to deal with the fear of switching from proprietary software, he strove to demonstrate that open source alternatives had very similar interfaces to proprietary software (and thus it wouldn't be hard to make the switch). Recognizing that people would not necessarily switch to open source because it was free, the student tried to demonstrate ways in which open source products were superior to proprietary alternatives (less likely to crash, offered more advanced features). Although the students' campaign was not entirely successful, he did actually convince a few of his peers to try out open source software (and he did learn a lot about adapting his arguments and vocabulary to an audience different from himself).

I tell this story because I think it suggests that OSS can provide a fruitful topic for persuasive multimodal writing in composition courses. In this case, I had a student who was already a fan of open source try to persuade others who were not, but it might be interesting to see what more conventional (non OS geek) students might do if asked to try to make persuasive arguments for open source technologies (or even against them). By making arguments for open source, students could learn a good bit about the rhetoric of technology, and we teachers might learn a good bit (that we could pass on) about what kinds of arguments might best persuade college students to consider open source software.