This is important to me professionally because my department uses a variety of media --video, interactive Web sites, video games, print, photography, wikis, digital mobile devices (iphone, mp3 players, etc) -- to communicate with and educate audiences. We are all strong believers that images plus words are powerful tools to reach and engage many people - of all ages - effectively. This department has been working with multimodal media to educate various stakeholders for more than 30 years, so their really is no argument in our eyes when it comes to using images and words to do this.
Lovett's piece does a good job at the struggle some people have to show others that video and images are important communication media and should be respected as such. However, I'm interested in when this was published...the most recent source was dated 2006, so I'm assumming this was published in 2006 or 2007. If so, it still seems unreal to me that college program leaders would still have a difficult time sustaining such programs and convincing administrators (the main funding arms of universities) that this is an important field of study for a variety of students across many disciplines. I guess this speaks to an important argument that people in the field are still having with "naysayers" so to speak.
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The Lovett, et. al. piece has yet to be published (it should be coming out soon), so that just adds to your incredulity at how programs and administrators don't see value in the communicative potential of video. Talking about the work of Media Productions is a great example of how multimodality has long been used very successfully for educational and communicative purposes. It's not a new concept, but it is surprising how dominant the written word is (or at least people's ideas of what the written text is able accomplish).
I think one strength of this piece was its focus on the video development process as rhetorical practice. The point of their course was not just to produce video, but to help students learn to communicate and persuade through visual means. Many of the approaches share connections with writing, but the visual mode also affords other means of engaging the audience. This distinction in the course's purpose is key to their argument.
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