Digital Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse

In a print portfolio, remediated on a book, the arrangement is singular. In a digital portfolio, remediated on a gallery, the arrangements are plural. And the students invented in each are quite different.

In a print portfolio, the tendency is to tell a single story, one with a single claim and an accumulating body of evidence. In arrangement, a digital portfolio — again, by contrast — is multiple, is defined by links. Because you can link externally as well as internally and because those links are material, you have more contexts you can link to, more strata you can layer, more “you” to invent, more invention to represent. In sum, the potential of arrangement is a function of delivery, and what and how you arrange — which becomes a function of the medium you choose — is who you invent. Moreover, I suspect that as multiple means of delivery become more routinized, we will understand each of the canons differently, and we will understand and be able to map their interrelationships.

— Kathleen Yancey: “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of. Student Work”

depaul.digication.com

Digication overview:

• Why digital portfolios?
• Why Digication?

Digication FYW pilot report:

• Student feedback [199]
• Faculty feedback [5]
• Delivered to FYW Assessment Committee [48]

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Please note that we have 143 McGaw scheduled from 10:00 a.m.-noon on our meeting days, but usually finish our meetings by 11:00 or 11:15 a.m.. This allows some extra time for hands-on consulting and collaborating on programs that you want to learn more about and to get some practice — for example, Digication, Photoshop, iMovie, and other programs that support technology-mediated pedagogies.

In the WQ, we’ll combine the two working groups that already had substantial overlap: the Digication digital portfolio working group and the D-WRD working group. If you’d like to add agenda items for upcoming meetings, send them to Michael:

Friday, January 7th: Digication workshop

• Background: AQ Preliminary Report; discussion led by Scott Johnson
• What is reflection?

Friday, January 21st: Digication Workshop

• Background: Cambridge on “Composing the Ethics of Authenticity”

Friday, February 4th: Multimodal Composing

• Background: “Thinking About Multimodality”; discussion led by Tricia Hermes

Friday, February 18th: Reading, Responding to, and Grading Digital Portfolios

• Background: Pilot Group Assignment & Scoring Guide; discussion led by Darsie Bowden

Friday, March 4th: Student Digication Roundtable — come hear about their experiences!

Friday, March 11th: Debrief and plan agendas for next quarter? 9:00 a.m. before the department meeting?

Friday, March 18th: Digication Workshop

Agenda: Post- Kathleen Yancey Talk Reflections & Future Plans

Using key terms as a digital-portfolio organizing principle in Digication?
Providing models of reflection for students and for colleagues?
Does Digication support our collective purposes for reflection?
What multimodal reflective practices can enact our theories of reflection?
Privacy issues (settings PDF)
Student survey
Create faculty survey? What would you like included on it?
Finals Week: collecting “Downloaded” versions of digital portfolios

New Literacy Narratives:  Stories about Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Computers and Composition
Guest editors:  Sally Chandler and John Scenters-Zapico

From their inception, literacy narratives have provided powerful means for documenting the complex, social and material interactions that orchestrate both who we are as writers and the world where we write.  Literacy narratives created through interviews have supported landmark studies of reading and writing in the culture at large, within particular identity groups, and in association with changing technologies (Brandt, 2001, 2009; Selfe & Hawisher, 2004; Sohn, 2006; Young, 2004 ); reflective, analytic narratives composed in the classroom have played an important role in helping students become better writers and in training future teachers (Corkery, 2005; McVee, 2004; Rabin, 2008). It is no surprise that digital technologies are changing not only the content of subjects’ stories about reading and writing, but also the forms these stories can take.

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D-WRD is going to meet twice a month — first and third Fridays — 10-11. a.m.; again, this is totally voluntary and optional. If you’d like to join us, please do.

Dates:

— Friday, Sept. 17th: discuss Yancey’s “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work”

— Friday, Oct. 1st: agenda TBA, depending on what you need & want

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First-Year Writing Program
Autumn Faculty Meeting
August 28, 2010

D-WRD Updates

Our methods:

Mutual support and collective expertise

• Intellectual
• Rhetorical claims
• Pedagogy
• Technical

December 2009: DePaul Online Training Series
January-July 2010: DOTS Participants’ course design
March 2010: met with FYW Committee on assessment and visual rhetoric

Winter and Spring 2010: Digital portfolios — iWeb, Acrobat 9, WordPress

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We will post materials here that we might generate during Wednesday’s (8/18) train-the-trainers workshop with Jeffrey Yan from Digication.

Agenda:

232 SAC

10:00 a.m.: Introductions
10:15-noon: First Year Writing digital portfolios, 2009-10; Digication overview, uses, and features
Noon-12:45: Lunch and discussion
1:00-3:00: ITD, FITS, and IS overview (AMS technical support and training, Help Desk, back-end); discussion, Q&A, hands-on development
3:15-3:30: break
3:30-5:00: First-year Writing Outcomes & Assessment in McGaw Hall; meet with Professors Darsie Bowden (Director, First-Year Writing) and Peter Vandenberg (Department Chair)
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Introduction to Crafting Questions for On-line Discussions (Penn State Learning Design Community Hub)

How do I write good online discussion prompts? (DePaul, Teaching Commons)

S and T: Style and Type of Question (from CREST+ Model: Writing Effective Online Discussion Questions): see especially,

• Pair swapping
• Pair evaluating
• Grouping
• Student-created questions

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* 143 McGaw Open Lab Hours & Consulting

During these times, Robyn Kelley — our Lab Consultant and CDM graduate student — and Max Witherspoon, our IT Support Consultant and Computer Science major, are available to assist you and your students with technology-based projects for your courses, or electronic-portfolio development. Robyn is experienced and adept with most communication and design software, including Creative Suite programs, and has developed electronic portfolios for her own work. Max is an expert with hardware, classroom technologies, and operating systems. Both are remarkably talented with social media and other web-based applications.

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Claire Lauer’s article in the current Computers & Composition — “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and ‘Multimedia’ in the Academic and Public Spheres” — nicely articulates some of the rhetorical differences and implications of “multimedia” and “multimodal.”

Abstract: Scholars have begun naming and defining terms that describe the multifaceted kinds of composing practices occurring in their classrooms and scholarship. This paper analyzes the terms “multimedia” and “multimodal,” examining how each term has been defined and presenting examples of documents, surveys, web sites and others to show when and how each term is used in both academic and non-academic/industry contexts. This paper shows that rather than the use of these terms being driven by any difference in their definitions, their use is more contingent upon the context and the audience to whom a particular discussion is being directed. While “multimedia” is used more frequently in public/industry contexts, “multimodal” is preferred in the field of composition and rhetoric. This preference for terms can be best explained by understanding the differences in how texts are valued and evaluated in these contexts. “Multimodal” is a term valued by instructors because of its emphasis on design and process, whereas “multimedia” is valued in the public sphere because of its emphasis on the production of a deliverable text. Ultimately, instructors need to continue using both terms in their teaching and scholarship because although “multimodal” is a term that is more theoretically accurate to describe the cognitive and socially situated choices students are making in their compositions, “multimedia” works as a gateway term for instructors and scholars to interface with those outside of academia in familiar and important ways.

Samples from two WRD103 students, Autumn, 2009:

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In a discussion of Trent Batson’s “The ePortfolio Hijacked”, Chris Coppola articulates three types of electronic portfolios:

Type I – Self representation. This is like the artist’s portfolio. It’s a composition where an individual uses online tools to construct a presentation of their work they can share with some audience.

Type II – Learning focused. The use of online tools that align learning activities with specific outcomes, integrate reflective activities in the process, and often extend well beyond the boundaries of a particular classroom experience.

Type III – Assessment focused. The focus in this category is often driven by accreditation or some other form of multi-level organizational assessment. It involves the alignment of outcomes or standards with curriculum and evidence/examples of student learning.

[Chris Coppola]

This recent article in Campus Technology — “ePortfolios: Here, There, & Everywhere” — “reflects the current debate on the future of ePortfolios: How are they evolving with the growth of Web 2.0? What are the right tools to create them? And do they have a role beyond the academic setting as part of a person’s lifelong learning endeavors?”

Particularly compelling: “If students become disengaged from the process of maintaining their own identities as learners, ePortfolios become a compliance activity– the death knell for continued usage of the ePortfolio after graduation.”

Stuart Selber’s new CCC article,  “Institutional Dimensions of Academic Computing,” includes this analysis of “one particular endeavor — creating an electronic portfolio — to look more closely at institutional dimensions. Such a move also recasts the relationship between production and instruction, using other conceptual pairings that reveal different sorts of priorities and perspectives.”

“The bottom left-hand corner of Figure 2 contains specific resources that can be integrated into a process for creating electronic portfolios. [The point of Selber’s article, however, is that — at his institution — the resources are not integrated.] Here there are both student-oriented and teacher-oriented resources. For example, students can access a worksheet that asks them to construct a plan for gathering evidence they will need to support the claims of a portfolio. Teachers can access a research-based rationale for integrating portfolios into their classes as well as worksheets for establishing outcome statements and assessment methods. And there is a rubric that aligns stages of portfolio development with general institutional resources, creating a more specific portal into those resources that foregrounds process.”

The Oxford English Dictionary is available online via DePaul’s University Library (DePaul login required). You can build etymological and other research assignments into any WRD course (sample assignment PDF).

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http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/13sentences

The technology used to capture that is EtherPad, a real-time collaborative-writing platform.