Assessing Scholarly Assessing Scholarly Multimedia by Multimedia by

Undergraduates or Undergraduates or FacultyFaculty

Dr. Cheryl E. Ball

Editor, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

Associate Professor of New Media Studies, Dept. of English

Illinois State University, USA

cball@ilstu.edu | ceball.com

NLG’s Five Modes of NLG’s Five Modes of CommunicationCommunicationlinguistic (delivery, vocabulary, logos,

etc.)aural (music, sound effects, …)visual (colors, perspective, layout,…)gestural (body, kinesics, feeling/affect,

…)spatial (eco/geosystems, architecture, …)

any combination = multimodal

(Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 26)

U.S. Multimodal Writing U.S. Multimodal Writing ProgramsPrograms

Kent State UniversityMichigan State UniversityOhio State UniversityMichigan Technological UniversityMiami University of OhioStanford UniversityUniversity of Illinois

(See Atkins, Anderson, Ball, Homicz Millar, et al., 2006)

Connecting Theory to Connecting Theory to PublishingPublishing

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net

What a “Webtext” DoesWhat a “Webtext” Does

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange/index.html

A Course in Scholarly A Course in Scholarly MultimediaMultimedia

Sequence of AssignmentsSequence of Assignmentsvenue/publication analysisaudience analysisgenre analysiscriteria mapping of “values” in the

genre setmedia & modes analysisproject pitch proposalcollaborative scholarly multimodal

projectpeer-review analysis & reflectionsubmission emails to editorscourse reflection

Scholarly Multimedia Scholarly Multimedia CriteriaCriteriaInstitute for Multimedia Literacy

Honors Program at University of Southern California (Kuhn, 2008)

Manifesto Special Issue of Kairos (DeWitt & Ball, 2008)

“Assessing Scholarly Webtexts” tool (Warner, 2007)

Student-Chosen Criteria Student-Chosen Criteria (08-09)(08-09)creativityconceptual coreresearch/credibilityform : contentaudiencetimeliness

Student-Chosen Criteria Student-Chosen Criteria (Now)(Now)Choose and justify their own criteria.

Still use that criteria to write “peer-review” letters just like an editorial board does.

But also: Annotate those letters to explain why and how they’ve used the criteria for that particular webtext.

Reasons for Better Reasons for Better Performance?Performance?Students Scholars

Instructions No Formal Instructions

3-day Assignment Deadline

3-4 week volunteer deadline

Students’ first experience helping with a publication

Rote, albeit invested, role in helping with publications

Required; graded Volunteer; no repercussions

Student’s Scholarly Student’s Scholarly MultimediaMultimedia

Student’s Scholarly Student’s Scholarly MultimediaMultimedia

Before (class final)

After (accepted for publication)

Students’ ReflectionsStudents’ Reflections

http://alwasowicz.wordpress.com/project-reflection/

Scholarly Multimedia + Scholarly Multimedia + Undergraduates = LearningUndergraduates = Learning

Changed instructions to editorial board

Incorporated best reviewing practices into new content-management system

Spread the word about undergraduate research practices AND international multimodal research publications.

Thank you!Thank you!

Questions?cball@ilstu.edu