Assessments of Digital Writing: How Do We Identify and Value Competencies?

In pre-digital writing classrooms, instructors sought student outcomes that focused on developing language arts literacy.  But in digital writing classrooms, those outcomes have been expanded to developing literacies--textual, visual, aural, participatory (social networking), software and hardware, and on. So, as we develop assessment tools for multimodal composition classrooms, where should instructors place their focus if they don’t want to abandon their emphasis on traditional core writing instruction?

As one example, The National Writing Project’s Because Digital Writing Matters describes the Michigan Department of Education’s “Content Expectations” (2006) that focuses on the tools and techniques of digital writing in their high schools, which can be transferred to the college student as well (pp. 102-103). These standards of assessment layer digital writing onto other valued competencies in literacy:

1. Blogs, web pages - the student must write, speak, and create artistic representations to express personal experience and perspective;
   
2. Multimedia presentations - use the formal, stylistic, content, and mechanical conventions of a variety of genres in speaking, writing, and multimodal presentations;
   
3. Management of print and electronic resources - develop a system for gathering, organizing, paraphrasing, and summarizing information; select, evaluate, synthesize, and use multiple primary and secondary resources;
   
4. Use of technological tools - Use word processing, presentation, and multimedia software to provide polished written and multimedia work; 
5. Make supported inferences and draw conclusions based on informational print and multimedia features; use various visual and special effects to explain how authors and speakers use them to infer the organization of text and enhance understanding, convey meaning, and inspire or mislead audiences;
6. Examine the ways in which prior knowledge and personal experience affect the understanding of written, spoke, or multimedia text; 
7. Understand the commercial and political purposes of producers and publishers - learn how they influence not only the nature of advertisements and the selection of media content, but the slant of news articles in newspapers, magazines, and the visual media.
   (Note: All bold text was the emphasis of the original author, not mine).

I wish that my writing throughout my high school and early college years would have been subject to the above standards of assessment.  I would have become a more critical analyzer of information rather than a student who wrote what I thought my professors wanted to hear in the format they wanted to see (a traditional academic essay).

Not that that format lacked value; I needed to learn it as a foundation of writing. But it wasn’t the end-all, be-all as it was treated. I needed to acquire more and other literacies, as evidenced by the fact that as a graduate of the MAPW program, I discover myself lacking in personal digital literacies that I was not even aware of until taking the Digital Technology in the Writing Classroom course. Thus, I support assessment methods and standards that push students into the unfamiliar and that cause measurable development in a variety of digital literacies.

Eve Bearne wrote of standards of assessment applied to the development of student writers as "multimodal textmakers." I’d like to know more about how to describe the development of students from: "a multimodal text maker in the early stages, to becoming an increasingly assured multimodal text maker, then becoming a more experienced and often independent multimodal text maker”  (Eve Bearne, 2009, p. 105). 

I’m interested in how instructors have implemented these or other similar standards in assessing students’ writing, and any rubrics used that cover these dimensions. I find it somewhat daunting to create such a rubric, so I’d love to see more examples of workable assessment tools. 

Principles of good practice in digital writing classrooms--what are they?

I'm working with a team of graduate students at Kennesaw State University (Spring 2011) to develop a position statement on digital technology in the writing classroom. My group is establishing principles of good practice for a digital writing/new media classroom, as well as faculty responsibilities that support those good practices. 

Below are six principles I wrote as part of our collaborative statement.  I welcome your feedback on these principles. 
(I cite page numbers from The National Writing Project's Because Digital Writing Matters with Danielle DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks (2010, Jossey-Bass):
 
          First, as teachers of digital writing, we must engage in an ongoing review and refinement of current practices, and invent new ones for digital literacy. In doing so, we need to assure that principles of good practice governing these new activities are clearly articulated. Thus, we make the following assumptions about writing courses that engage students in developing digital literacies. Features of these courses should:

   

         a. provide students with a clear articulation that being a digital writer is composed of information literacy, including the development of ongoing skills in research, file saving, file storage, file transfer, composing, revising, editing, and the ability to manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneously presented information in participatory environments (p. 13, 97); 

   

         b. address the rhetorical complications and implications of paper-based and digitally-mediated texts to enhance the critical dimensions of students’ thinking and writing (p. 14, 59);

   

          c. focus on the participatory culture that digital literacies sustain; and thus build skills including “play, performance, simulation, appropriation, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, and visualization” (p. 11, 13). 
    
   

          d. develop proficiency with tools of technology, but should transcend specific technologies so students can change and evolve with technology, rather than remain rooted to skills anchored to one particular tool or technology (p. 40);

   

          e. equip students to be more than passive information consumers (p. 13, 31), and take into account literacy barriers, language barriers, and cultural diversity, since the Internet tends to be geared toward English-speaking middle-class learning methods (p. 31) that divide the “have’s” and “have nots” (p. 12, 31); 

   

          f. lead to specific student outcomes as represented in an e-portfolio, that minimally demonstrate a progressive development of Yancey’s four-part framework: self-knowledge; content knowledge; task knowledge; and judgment (p. 109-110).

The full position statement written collaboratively by the graduate students of my class may include an introduction written by our professor, Dr. Laura McGrath.  As a class, we are considering submitting this article for publication. I will post a message on my blog with a link to the published document in the event that we get it published.