Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre Studies Approach

Abstract

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

Keywords:

• assessment
• Dynamic Criteria Mapping
• genre
• Kairos
• scholarly multimedia
• values
• webtexts

Notes

^a From Kuhn, V., Johnson, D. J., & Lopez, D. (2010). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 14(2). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html.

The latter term, “scholarly multimedia,” was brought to prominence by the USC School, that is, the collective of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and Vectors journal, both of which are located at the University of Southern California.

Although I usually assign this entire sequence only to undergraduates, I have discovered that graduate students need this disciplinary-knowledge breakdown just as much as undergraduates so they can better understand the disciplinary conventions of publishing in their field. During a recent semester teaching graduate students in a multimodal theory seminar, I discovered during the proposal stage (having skipped everything prior to that as, mistakenly, being too pedestrian for the graduate students) that they had no idea how to articulate the scope, audience, or values of a particular journal. I should not have been surprised, given that students at this point have usually recently entered the field or may not even be in rhetoric/composition or technical communication but might come from linguistics, creative writing, literature, and so forth. Next time I teach graduate students, I will be much more explicit in my directions, following those I use for the undergraduates, which includes all the assignments above.

For details on these assignments, please see http://www.ceball.com/classes/239/fall10/major-assignments/ for an undergraduate example or http://www.ceball.com/classes/495/assignments/ for a graduate example.

If we rely on rigor as our scholarly touchstone, we miss the value that supposedly nonrigorous (e.g., nondiscursive, affective, imagistic) meaning-making strategies can have in our scholarship. (I think Kuhn would agree.) O'Gorman (2006), Murray (2009), and Kress (2010) all discuss the problems of assigning rigor too much value in a dichotomous comparison to affect (or just interest, which is the term Kress uses). Both O'Gorman and Murray particularly engage with the necessity of including image in our discussions of the value of digital media work.

When I first conducted this assessment strategy, the four parameters that Kuhn (2008) outlined were not yet being attributed in scholarship as the assessment method used at IML. Not until Kuhn, Johnson, and Lopez's (2010) work was published—a year after my students starting referring to our set of criteria as Kuhn +2—that the connection to the IML's Honor's Program, which Kuhn directs, became clear. In addition, the four parameters were created with the previous honor's director, Steve Anderson. For more information on the history of this criteria, please see Kuhn, Johnson, and Lopez's webtext.

The name stuck, for good or ill, in that it is nondescriptive of that for which the heuristic exists, although it also appreciatively recognizes the author who wrote about the heuristic convincingly enough for students to see its absolute-use value.

Students are not required to submit texts, but they must go through all the genres of submitting, including writing a query or proposal e-mail to the editors, which they can send to me as the teacher if they do not actually submit their work.

Undergraduate students work in groups of three or four in my multimodal composition classes. Graduate students work independently, unless they prefer to work in small groups.

Public Service Announcement: If you have never authored scholarly multimedia and you try to assign that writing to students, you will struggle to guide students through the rhetorically and technologically intensive troubleshooting process that this assignment requires and struggle more when you assess their work. Try to accomplish the assignment yourself first. Start small. These workshops and institutes give you quality time with experts and can help you quickly learn the standards of multimodal composition.

Delagrange took 3 years, and no less than three designs, to get her piece ready for publication. (See her discussion of the revision process in Delagrange, 2009b). Obviously, in a classroom setting where that process may last anywhere from 10 to 18 weeks, a publication-ready piece will not be possible. (I discuss how this process impacts assessment and grading in the conclusion of this article.).

For the language that I use to introduce students to the concept of “trying,” see the Scope section on my assignment page (Ball, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cheryl E. Ball

Dr. Cheryl E. Ball is an associate professor of new media at Illinois State University. She studies multimodal composition, digital media scholarship, and digital publishing. Her portfolio can be found at http://ceball.com