New-Old Rubric

While reading this article, I wasn't aware that there was such a crisis regarding the ability to assess multimedia projects. On the first page, Sorapure refers to the three articles (Takayoshi, Zoetewey & Staggers, Yancey) and states that in all three we see a "balancing act between old and new, as the authors detail suggestions for adapting current approaches and inventing new ones to help us assess writing in new media." This doesn't seem too difficult of a task for us to bite off and chew.
This spring I was involved in an Intel course that integrated the new writing with the old curriculum. The end products consisted of technology-focused units utilizing wikis, blogs, etc. as part of the learning process. While developing these units, we had to develop assessments for different aspects of each one. Seemingly simple, we adapted traditional rubrics slightly to use in the assessment of the students' projects. As I think back to the spring, this rubric adaptation really wasn't a challenge and didn't seem to be a hurdle for any of the participants in the course.

Now, regarding the multi-modal form that the compositions take, I think that this is phenomenal. This is something that was unheard of even ten years ago, something only that could be seen on television and in the movies. I have seen some of these compositions turn out so well and right-on, and some that have crashed and burned. Just as we as educators must learn to embrace new technologies and integrate them into our curriculum, we must teach the children to embrace them and use them appropriately.
As a precursor to the larger assignments, Sorapure assigned "several shorter exercises that invited students to explore relations between text and image." Some students will "get it" right away, others (most) will need these types of activities to avoid the "crash-and-burn" scenes that could result from their misunderstanding. Furthermore, Sorapure hopes that these exercises allow "for exploration between modes," and show the students "that the modes should not simply repeat each other." This is something I feel that I need to work on when I present technologically-infused units. Right now, I am still digesting all of the metaphorical and metonymic relations between the visual and verbal modes of all of the collages represented in the article.