more thoughts on the option issue

The more I have thought about Kathy's comment, the more I feel inclined to agree with it--to a point. I believe we limit the creativity and learning of the students and teachers if we limit the assignment to just a PPT or a poster. We need to think more about this.

Can we not create learning outcomes and evaluation criteria that would fit a poster and a new new media project? Perhaps we should let Cynthia Selfe's "visual essay" assignment guide us. She proposes they make a poster or a Web page. (Let me interject here to say that I agree with Kristine and Gary: posters are very much a part of academic life across campus.) She has clear criteria that leans on the canons of rhetoric (K.B. Yancey does as well in her chair's address "Made Not Only in Words.") as well as new principles of visual literacy. I think we should experiment with these options.

Yancey also argues that the best way to teach composing is to let students decide "what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be." I understand why we would want to limit the options, but if we have the rhetorical theory and a handful of solid visual rhetoric principles, why shouldn't we let students make infographics or brochures or PPTs or whatever?

I was thinking, too, that instead of a presentation to the imagined audience as the final, each group could give a reflective presentation about multimodal rhetoric--why they chose the modes they did, what models they depended on, how the modes worked together, what it tells us about rhetoric and technology, etc. This final could bring together everything they've learned thus far on argument (claims, reasons, assumptions), the canons of rhetoric, and research.

One more thought on PPT. Grading PPT is difficult unless you grade the presentation at the same time. Many of the best slides make no sense without presentation. (Check out Garr Reynolds' take on PPT slides. This guy's pretty amazing.) I'm not convinced we need to combine a PPT and a graded oral presentation in the last couple of weeks of class. It's too much.

The bottom line, I think, is transfer. We want to teach transferrable multimodal rhetorical skills that will go with students when they leave the class. Many of our students will never make a poster; but if they do, we want them to lean on what they learned about rhetorical situations, arguments, images, sources, and design from this assignment.