Have you ever wanted to bring digital media into your classes but weren’t sure where to start? Have you ever felt pressure from students to do more media writing or administrators to include more screen-media activities in your courses, but you only have a vague idea of how the media might be incorporated? For better or worse, rapid changes in technologies are altering the mediascapes of our courses—from the humanities to the sciences, business to art—and many of us find ourselves now facing the digital literacy/digital creativity imperative: i.e., the need to make some form of digital production available to students as part of their course assignments. But figuring out how to introduce/include these kinds of assignments, particularly for the first time, can be quite a daunting task. There are so many factors to consider—from the media/platform that you want to work with to the ways in which you might assess that work—and the sheer number of options and tools can be overwhelming. One way I have found to help instructors ease into the multimedia conversation and pedagogical practice is by having them remediate an existing assignment.
When I say remediation I don't mean remedial, nor do I mean it exactly as new media scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offered it to us back in 2000. Rather, I mean something perhaps closer to an act of transmediation. Where we take a traditional essay assignment or response paper, something we’re pretty familiar with, and have students make something digital in its place—building a photo essay or a website or a video, as just three among the many examples. But figuring out how to do this kind of assignment remediation can itself be challenging. This Spark Page, then, is designed to introduce and frame some guiding considerations.
- What mediating technologies are available to students?
- What practices/tools interest me and have value for students?
- What am I/the class gaining with this mediation?
- Does it align with course goals/outcomes?
- In what ways will I need to change my expectations and assessment practices?
- Are there any useful assessment models out there already that I might employ?
- What is my role with helping them learn the technology?
- What are some ways of getting students to learn the technology?
- What is my pedagogical focus in this undertaking? The final product? The process? The learning involved (and student awareness of such)?
These questions collective serve as a way into the practices of remediating assignments, and can be further divided along the lines of mediating practices, goals and outcomes, reshaping expectations, invention and play, pedagogical orientation, and assessment(ology).
I always start with these three questions: What media are available for students to work with? What media practices interest me and seem to have value for the students? And what is my comfort level with those mediating practices? These questions help me get a sense of my options, my interests, and my relationship with the mediating practices that will be at the center of this remediation. And these considerations, in turn, help me shape how I approach teaching digital writing practices in my classes (i.e., whether I function as expert, as coach, as co-learner, and so on). Further, it is important keep in mind that you do not have to be an expert in any particular mediating practice to bring that practice into the classroom. In my experience, students have responded quite positively when I am learning a technology along with them as compared to when I operate from position of technology expert. The key, it seems, is to acknowledge your comfort level up front and allow this to inform not only the kind of remediation assignments you might assign and the methods of assessment you might champion, but also the pedagogical models you might adopt for your class.
When choosing the assignments to remediate, the media involved, and the kinds of digital projects to encourage students to pursue, I try to ground my decisions in relation to the specific goals and outcomes of the potential remediation practice. If exchanging an essay for a video assignment doesn’t add new goals or outcomes, or at least offer new takes on existing goals and outcomes, then you may want to rethink bringing in the video component altogether. Thus, I often frame my decisions as a question of gain: “If I turn this response essay assignment into scrolling digital narrative (via Adobe Spark Page), what are the students gaining?” “If I have students make a visual argument rather than textual argument, what are the advantages?” The answers to these types of questions are often multilayered. First, there is nearly always the obvious layer of technical skill development (i.e., learning Spark or learning Photoshop). Second, there is typically a layer where the different media orientation introduces new perspectives for students’ critical inquiry practices. Often, layers one and two are often more than enough to warrant experimenting with remediating assignments. But I still prefer to have multiple gains with each digital creativity/digital literacy. So, I also pursue ways in which a given media might help me improve, augment, or illuminate critical practices. Or I pursue ways in which a given remediation might expose students to new modes or methods for critical and creative engagement. Or I pursue ways in which I can make alternative modes of reasoning (inherent in the various mediating practices) available to students—options where I ask myself during the design phase and my students during the implementation phase general questions like “What patterns of expression are emerging with this mediating practice?” or more targeted questions like, “How is this remediation component asking us to work from new considerations of audience?” As such, I think it is easy to see how something like audience, as just one amongst the many elements available for consideration, can be treated quite differently as we shift across mediating practices: for example, if having students create web-based pages that operate primarily as interactive images, then considerations of audience are as much aligned with matters of usability (and user experience) design principles as they are with any a traditional, over-generalized audience considerations.
As I work to design, implement, and evaluate a remediation assignment, I regularly remind myself to remain flexible in my expectations. In fact, a kind of guiding question for me is, “How might teaching this multimedia assignment change my expectations of my students, of my assessment, of my teaching?” Thus, I typically begin by choosing multimedia practices I’m familiar with and which allow me to pursue related goals and outcomes to those of the traditional assignment. For example, I might exchange a short response paper with a short response video posted to a course blog site. This bridge point between response paper and response video allows me to recognize, relatively quickly, my own expectations in pretty concrete terms. But then I start to consider how the media pushes back against those considerations and how it asks me to reconceptualize my expectations. As such, when trying to remediate an assignment, one needs to consider how the remediation asks after new elements, new roles for traditional concepts and strategies, and, as a result, new goals and outcomes, new assessment methodologies, and even new relationships with our media. In this case, it helps to work in both directions: we can choose digital writing/making practices that readily connect to traditional assignments (the contact point), but we also need to be sure to allow the affordances and the constraints of the digital dimension to impact our expectations. I mean, it makes no sense to expect a hypertext essay or video argument to do the same things or operate under the same guidelines, assumptions, logics, and aesthetics as an argument-based, research paper. And, extending this further, it also makes no sense for us to think that our most effective pedagogical practices for teaching alphabetic literacies (and their related genres) will necessarily translate into and through digital literacies. Thus, we have to be open to altering our expectations on multiple scales.
One major consideration for including a remediated assignment in our courses, is how, if at all, do we teach the technology involved (and how much instruction in that practice do students need)? If you are an expert in a given mediating practice, perhaps you make handouts, create training videos, provide step-by-step guidance during an in-class lesson, and/or offer tips and strategies not only for technical production but also for aesthetic and rhetorical consideration. If your approach identifies more as a co-learner, perhaps you adopt a more play-oriented tactic, where you and the students play with the technology as a learning method. This approach is not only reflective of the kinds of writing publics Kathy Yancey has spoken about in her work, but encourages self-directed learning strategies (where students learn to leverage their resources, from the Internet to their peers). My suggestion is to correlate your approach with your media and pedagogical comfort levels. As a personal example, I tend to situate myself between the expert and the co-learner: I like to provide a few short lessons or handouts on the basic operations of a technology, but then I present students with a challenge and take on the role of “on-demand resource”—floating around the room and helping, as best I can, when issues arise. This shifts our mode from the step-by-step orientation toward playing to learn. Thus, instead of focusing on overly-specific techniques in a software or platform, I offer strategies for helping them locate the “how to” information they need as well as for identifying platform-specific terminology that will aid students in their practices and searches for learning how to learn particular techniques of representation on their own. (See my 8 Crayons of Photoshop as one example.) The reason I champion this approach is that in a few short years (if not months) the platforms we are working with in my class will change and new ones will emerge. I can’t anticipate what Photoshop will look like in 2023. Thus, I find it vitally important to help students learn how to learn to use a given technological platform because developing those media-oriented learning strategies seems (more?) critical in our current digital climate.
While many of the considerations so far touch on matters pertaining to the pedagogical—from expert to co-learner approaches, from teaching techniques of representation to media-oriented learning strategies—there is a larger pedagogical consideration involved here as well, and it revolves around the ways in which instructors orient themselves and their students to this remediation practice. Meaning, do you view the remediation as being primarily about what the students are likely to produce? Or do you focus on the act of engagement that is being offered in the authoring process? And these are just two among the many orientations, but ones that reflect the problematic product/process divide. While these categories aren’t mutually exclusive, the way one leans here invites a different set of expectations in the assignment itself. Is the assignment about what the artifact represents (as measured demonstration of understanding) or about the process involved in making that representation (i.e., about the learning process)? My own pedagogical orientation often flitters along the trifecta of revision, response, and reflection, which I utilize in a couple of ways. First, in a more product orientation, when designing remediation assignments, I try to identify practices that ask students to use media to revise (if not altogether re-envision) a particular artifact, respond to a particular issue (related to course content and discussion), or reflect on a particular theoretical frame. Second, I also use this orientation as a guide for the writing/making process: having students create initial drafts, respond to one another’s work (provide feedback via peer review), revise their multimedia creations based on that feedback, and then reflect (at the end) on the project, the process, and what has been learned. The key with this process orientation is that it offers multiple feedback loops for students and several key points for intervention (i.e., moments where my content expertise can be brought to bear on the project). Each stage also invites students to learn new strategies for engagement.
Collectively, then, these orientations help shape the kinds of assignments I might design, the kinds of technologies I may want to work with, and the kinds of goals and assessment strategies I might adopt.
This is perhaps one of the harder categories for remediating assignments. Not only are there specific questions of content vs. learning and process vs. product, but there is also specific challenges to the ways in which we can actually provide evaluative feedback: in writing, in screen-captures, in audio/video formats, etc. Further, a single remediation assignment can often produce quite an array of projects (which call for different rhetorical and aesthetic considerations), and this only compounds the problem of assessment. I mean, how do you develop and apply a heuristic when you cannot fully anticipate the kinds of projects likely to emerge? Further, how do we anticipate how we are likely to respond? Different media impact us in different ways, and while I may know how to treat traditional writing assignments, I simply cannot ignore the totality of experience that is part of seeing images or watching video. That is not to imply that traditional writing does not include these things as well, but that (1) we are more familiar with (and often trained) for responding to writing and (2) the affective often sits more prominently at the foreground of many multimedia creations. As such, evaluation for multimedia often has to adopt a flexible, responsive assessment approach. While I provide more specific assessment strategies on my Spark Page, Assessing Digital Projects, my general suggestions and strategies are to adopt a multiplistic approach (thinking in terms of technical skills demonstrated, the level of development reflected, and the sophistication of the representation), to allow yourself twice the amount of time you think you need, and to find a way to avoid the overly-distanced, stock-response and/or the compliment sandwich.
As an additional consideration, I tend to use audio or video as my medium of choice for responding to student digital work—recording myself talking through a student project as I experience it and/or providing them evaluative feedback in this form. This allows me to not only personalize my responses to students, but lets them see the real gritty and discombobulated nature of responding to these kinds of projects. In fact, I’ve adopted this approach in how I respond to nearly all my assignments because it stands in direct contrast to the controlled, cleaned-up, teacherly type comments they get on everything; and part of what I want to reveal is the messy and tension filled process that is digital media assessment. I’m not saying this labor-intensive, time-consuming strategy of audio/video responses is a practice everyone should want to adopt across the board, but introduce here (1) to offer an alternative and (2) to function as a marker that might encourage you to think about your methods, modes, and measures of assessment and feedback when designing remediation assignments.
Credits:
Created with images by pixelcreatures - "compass map navigation" • rawpixel - "business paper analog" • Samuel Zeller - "Ladder to sky clouds" • Todd Cravens - "untitled image" • Nietjuh - "pawns chess figures colorful" • Jordan Rowland - "Teacher in Togo" • geralt - "finger feedback confirming"