Weekly Response: November 3

Danielle Donelson

Weekly Response for 11/2/15

            I appreciate the idea that students engage in instruction and in creating assessment forms, whether for alphabetic texts or multi-modal ones or digital ones. I remember, as a student, being asked to brainstorm how to construct a rubric for a composition assignment. This activity affected and altered the way that I thought about composition instruction, especially as a producer. Therefore, I completely understand how engaging students in that process of creating a rubric for digital media and multimodal assignments would assist students in re-conceptualizing the composing process.

The rubrics provided in both texts offered some concrete examples of how I may assess students’ multimodal, and perhaps, more specifically, digital compositions. In Alexander’s piece, I especially appreciated the tips that were provided to assist instructors in assessing multimodal assignments. Having some concrete tips, and reflecting on how they are ones that have been used in this class, make me feel a bit more competent to begin introducing multimodal assignments in my composition class. I understand that I must keep in mind that I don’t need to be the expert on everything related to composition; rather, that both instructors and students may learn together, as the process can be daunting and each may bring different strengths to the proverbial table. I think relinquishing that control and admitting to not being the expert (in fact, admitting oneself to also be a novice in one area, even if it is in technology) is an extremely difficult thing for veteran Composition Instructors, those who feel like they are not digital natives.

To end, I appreciate the point made that composing digital texts is just as nuanced as composing alphabetic texts, if not more. Additionally, the composing process ought to be considered, emphasized, and learned from. In this way, we may also understand the digital composing process to be as recursive and just as need of meta-awareness and reflection as the alphabetic text composing process.