Some images from my scribbled and sketched notes. I've spent a lot of time thinking about dissemination. Maybe that's worth reflecting on somewhere in the dissertation itself. If this had been an 'essay' I could have spent days and days more time on 'content' rather than 'form'. But that wouldn't have been as much fun.
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Within this section I offer a rationale for digital form I have taken for the dissemination of my dissertation. Introduction The dissertation guide for the MSc in Digital Education invites any student intending to present ideas in a 'non-conventional form' to submit a 2000-word rationale [finish sentence]. This provides a welcome and valuable opportunity to contextualise and justify the approach that I have taken in presenting my work, including:
Within my research proposal I committed to presenting my ideas in non-conventional form - my intention was always to explore the possibility of offering more than words on page or screen. As the dissertation exercise has progressed, my thoughts on how this would be realised - recorded within my dissertation blog - have developed, influenced by a range of factors including the insights offered by interview participants, my examination of literature attending to multimodality, the pressure of time and also an recognition of the limitations of my own technical proficiency and critical skills within different modes of representation. As such, what follows is a reflective piece that outlines my position, interweaved with extracts from my blog, data from interviews with course tutors, and reference to the literature. [Note: Consistent with the approach across my dissemination, although this rationale is dominated by text, where appropriate, this is juxtaposed with image (screen shots, photography, hand drawn sketches and notes) in order to convey meaning and aid the representation of ideas. I acknowledge that this might render this rationale inconsistent with the requirement (within the dissertation guide) for a 'conventional rationale', however as per my wider dissertation, such an approach would have jarred with the subject under discussion.] My enthusiasm to present a non-conventional dissemination has been accompanied by an anxiety that the completed artefact will be seen as failing to exploit the opportunity for innovation and creativity that digital multimodality offers. My approach however has been to consider how I might best share my knowledge and ideas to the reader, ahead of an exercise in demonstrating or testing my own creative or technological proficiency.
In electing to offer a multimodal artefact for assessment I have focused on the form that will best allow me to communicate ideas and knowledge. Considering the subject of my research, it is entirely appropriate that I should elect to present my dissertation in a digital multimodal format. Indeed, there is an argument that to do otherwise - to submit a conventional text-based essay - would have to be seen in itself as questioning the validity of the digital multimodal form in an academic setting. Off the top of my head, I think each one of the seven interviewees has talked about the "risk" of presenting work multimodally. In some instances they specifically talked about there being a perceived (and sometimes real) risk of taking a multimodal approach to high stakes assessment. And perhaps most significantly from a personal of view, there have been a few occasions where the riskiness of the multimodal dissertation has been discussed.
Hmmm. This isn't encouraging. If the tutors responsible for marking dissertation on the MSc programme are talking about it being problematic - and they were necessarily just talking about a student-based sense of trepidation - maybe I should heed the warnings. Is now the time to take risks or do I lose a bit of face and opt for a more conservative, less interesting approach? I think a key point here - and it merits being put in bold type - is that I should only opt for multimodal dissemination if it can be realised effectively. Considering the topic of my research, it really wouldn't look good if my own dissertation failed to put into practice some of the lessons taught or learned during the exercise. Not another website. That phrase came into my head earlier this evening. I was giving some more though to how a dissertation could be presented in a non-traditional (i.e. entirely text-based) format. In particular, I was thinking about multimodality, the rationale being to present a dissertation that reflects the nature of my wider participation in the course. Or to put it another way, the dominant themes and tasks during the MSc haven't been concerned with putting text on the page therefore why start now? An obvious choice might be to present the dissertation across a website. I've built a few websites for coursework assignments during the MSc therefore it feels like there would be a certain safety in doing so for the greater task of the dissertation. I recognise that the mode of presentation should be aligned to the content or the subject matter I choose to focus on within the dissertation (I'm thinking about Gunther Kress's 'aptness of mode', here) however a website feels like treading old ground. One idea that may or not be appropriate (but I'm going to record it here anyway) would be to create an online publication/e-book - like the documents I've create in issuu. One that springs to mind is the commonplace book I prepared for the E-Learning and Digital Cultures course. On the one hand, this type of document/resource allows for academic conventions (such as presentation, structure, citations) to be met. At the same time however, it allows for hyperlinks, audio, video, imagery and probably other digital jiggery pokery depending on how much time/money I would be prepared to spend on the software. In terms of structure, it would also be relatively straightforward or consistent with a traditional dissertation. I quite the combination of experimentation, without going so far from the norm that it becomes risky. I've just retrieved the commonplace book I mentioned. In fact it turns out I put two together for the EDC course. The one pictured above is my lifestream summary assignment. I think the screenshot shows how this approach can be seen as multimodal and reflective of some of the strands that have run through my participation on the MSc programme. The presentation of information is visual, textual and aural (the post it note cites sound that accompanies what's on the page. I think it will be interesting to consider whether this could lend itself to a dissertation.
For each of my dissertation ideas thus far, I have anticipated presenting my work in a non-traditional, digital format. In addition to being of personal interest, each of my ideas has seemed suited to presenting work in a format that is multimodal in nature. It's something I've experimented with during the MSc programme and have sometimes found to be exhilarating (and on other occasions, exhausting). It is also something I've been encouraged to think about by members of the course team, over and above the general guidance offered in the Dissertation Guide:
'It is worth stating here that the e-learning programme team is committed, given the technological context of the this area of scholarship, to encouraging any participants who want to submit a dissertation using media other than plan text.' As I understand it, no-one (on the MSc programme) up to this point has submitted a dissertation in a non-traditional format. Considering the experimental nature of the course (and the evident creativity and imagination of participants) this has struck me as odd. It would seem to me that within our field of practice, submitting an entirely text-based dissertation (when there wasn't a requirement to do so) seemed unusual. I wouldn't expect that everyone would want to submittal a digital dissertation, however I would have though that it would have been commonplace. Apparently not, though. An explanation of the possible resistance or reticence towards 'writing up' digitally can be found in the Dissertation Guide however. 'If you do present in an alternative format, your will also need to write a conventional rationale for what you have done. This rationale should be of approximately 2,000 words...should detail for your reasons for adopting a digital formar - reasons based in the literature as as in whatever practical or professional factors are involed' Let's be clear. In my experience, submitting work in a non-traditional format is already more time consuming than than the more traditional text mode (I would say at least double the time, for me at least). Furthermore, the experimental nature is by definition more risky than the long established and accepted presentation of words on the page. And then on top of this, it's necessary to write an additional 2000 word - the length of a typical essay assignment on the MSc programme - that is itself up for scrutiny. I'm still tempted and intrigued by the idea of presenting a digital dissertation, however when the dissertation already comes with time pressures (or as the Dissertation Guide puts it, 'Studying at this level often involves considerable personal sacrifices...great amounts of energy and, at times' even greater amounts of patience.') opting into a supplementary assignment isn't enticing. This isn't to say that I don't recognise the need for a rationale of this kind, only that, alongside other factors it helps to explain why no one has followed this route before. When the stakes are high (and I don't see how an MSc dissertation could be seen in any other way), is it really the time to start taking risks? |
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