Additional resources for the lit review

I've been shadowing the Online Assessment discussions this week and have discovered and rediscovered some resources:

These are the core and secondary readings (click to visit course site):

This is Clara's transforming assessment seminar covering the Manifesto (link):

Here's the transcript from my own EDC assignment with some useful links:
http://multimodal-assignment.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/7/0/2070115/edc_transcript_from_voice_over.pdf

Here's a link to Sian's OA session from last year:
The audio:


The slides: http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/assessment/p01.htm

oa2013_seminar5.mov
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Finally, here's the text from the site about assessment in creative crisis:

Our core reading for this week, McKenna and McAvina (2011), argues that while digital writing is a regular part of communication online (discussion board posts, emails and the like), it has tended to keep the linear, conventional expression of knowledge. The authors draw on Goodfellow and Lea’s (2007) point that ‘many digital texts occupy new ‘sites’ of writing production but they do not represent fundamentally different writing practices’.

However, there are some forms of digital writing that challenge this linear, traditional approach. You might remember a reading from ‘Introduction to Digital Environments’ by George Landow (2006) on hypertext. Landow (2006) argues that creates a new way for readers to engage with the text, one where the text becomes ‘part of a network of navigable relations’, encouraging critical thinking by evaluating and making connections between the different ideas. Landow says hypertext opens up the kind of ‘multisequential’ reading that is more like what academics actually do – venturing beyond the text to read footnotes, follow up references, gather other sources, and so on. Importantly, also, in creating hypertext, students engage in new genres and new forms of writing. Landow (2006) notes the use of juxtaposition and comparison in hypertext writing, ‘one of which involves joining what one might consider academic and so-called creative writing’ (p. 304). This kind of writing has implications for the reader and, since we’re thinking about online assessment, the assessor, as the meaning behind links, juxtapositions and the connections being made are no longer laid out for the reader and instead depend on a more interpretative act in reading.

And, of course, digital work extends well beyond text. Gunther Kress (2005) talks about the idea of ‘reading as design’. He compares reading a prospectus to that of reading his institution’s website home page:

The traditional page had one entry point—though being so naturalized by centuries-long convention, it was not even noticeable as a feature. It was an entry point given by convention and used by the author (and the readers), who, remember, knew about the world of the audience. Access to the power of authorship was strictly governed. Here, on the webpage, the presence of thirteen entry points speaks of a very different principle: the author(s) of this page clearly have in mind that visitors will come to this page from quite different cultural and social spaces, in differing ways, and with differing interests, not necessarily known to or knowable by the maker(s) of the page. There is no pregiven, no clearly discernible reading path, either of the home page or of each individual page, or of the site as a whole (the issue of navigation, where maps are relatively unreliable). The existence of the different entry points speaks of a sense of insecurity about the visitors, a feeling of fragmentation of the audience—who now are no longer just readers but visitors, a quite different action being implied in the change of name. (Kress, 2005).

Kress (2005) argues that ‘Sequence has effects for authorship and for reading’, as the audience depends on the unfolding of the argument. In images, space works differently and all the elements of an argument are presented simultaneously. In a case like his institution webpage, the reader must find their own path through the material, based on their own subjective decisions on what to prioritise. He suggests that the combination of image and text on a screen are dominated by the logic of the image (seeing the whole first) and thus the interest of the reader, not the author, is dominant. In other, three dimensional works, perhaps this emphasis on the interpretative act of the reader/assessor (as arguably, any act of reading is an act of assessment) is even more explicit as we have the embodied experience of moving in and through the work we are attempting to assess.

So, with these thoughts about how digital writing can both transform our practice and our understanding of what constitutes writing and reading, we turn to this week’s theme of ‘assessment as a creative crisis’. Do new forms of academic writing, like hypertext, challenge our ideas of what constitute academic discourse? And if so, what are the implications for assessing such works?

Perhaps the subjectivity of the assessor is not new – undoubtably our Arts colleagues will see these dilemmas as more common than we might – but they do bring to the forefront something that is always implicit in assessment and that is the subjectivities that we, as assessors, bring to the work. In our Manifesto for Teaching Online (2012)*, Ross, Bayne, Macleod and O’Shea have suggested that ‘Assessment is a creative crisis as much as it is a statement of knowledge’ as it brings that subjectivity to the fore. (Indeed, the Manifesto itself acts as a useful example of a recent work that challenges what constitutes academic discourse – so for those who would like to, do check it out at http://onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com. It also offers a few other statements around assessment that might inform your approach to this week’s theme.)