Assessing Student New Media Compositions

Well, what to address in this article. My first thought took me to a student project for Black Boy by Richard Wright. My student drew a political cartoon which was likely one of the most effective pieces I had seen in years. His drawing astutely captured the essence of problems in our country. The old adage, "A picture is worth a thousand words" held true with this particular piece. There was no need for a caption nor for explanation other than the visual presented to the class. I thought of this as a good jump off point into the discussion of multimodal and multimedia presentations of work in composition classes.

If we view the effectiveness of the piece regardless of the presence of traditional writing, then we should not have to over-analyze the need for new assessments: essentially the assessments remain the same. Is the student demonstrating effective critical thinking skills and the ability to convey these ideas in a coherent and effective manner? Are the themes apparent? Is there a particular tone and mood demonstrated? These are questions that we have been posing for film, and there is no reason to get too worked up in using other forms of media to accompany writing. We can assess just as well and walk away knowing that our students applied skills learned in class.

I think of other projects where have assigned written work with visuals in order to enhance the points that the students needed to make. I am always amazed at the effectiveness of this technology. I don't get too worked up over the simple substitutions that students do thinking that they are enhancing their point and their writing; however, this does allow for a great opportunity to discuss the reasoning for using different types of media to enhance the writing. Additionally, we can assign projects where the visual is the primary, and a written work is used to rationalize the choice of the media used in class.

This article did get to me a bit, because I really do get tired of the need to theorize the practical seemingly common-sense application of pedagogy and assessment. This in no way makes me the perfect teacher, because I am sure that the research and theory has its place, but too much is just too much at times.

I did appreciate the sample projects and the evaluations. These gave me some ideas on how I can clearly delineate my expectations to my class. At the same time, I felt that I had to be an art critic half the time in attempting to evaluate some of this material.

I also appreciate the argument or point brought up relating to deciding who would teach this material. So far, my students seem to find the material on their own and appropriately apply the it. I just need to be more savvy about this high tech stuff. Should the ed. tech. classes teach this? Should the mass media or film studies class teach this? It seems that we can do a pretty good job addressing this type of composition so long as we recognize critical thinking and practical application skills combined with organizational and rhetorical skills.

All in all, as with many of the articles we have read for class, this one has given me good food for thought.