Feedback on my EDC10 multimodal assignment

Whilst doing a research trawl using reading lists from previously completed courses, I've also decided to bookmark feedback on relevant assignments. The idea here is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of work that I've submitted to date. Where flaws or gaps are mentioned within the feedback, I have a helpful reminder of what I need to be wary of and to address. Perhaps the most valuable feedback will be that provided by Sian in response to my those from the EDC10 course. I've reproduced the feedback below and later this week will work through it point-by-point, picking out what I perceive to be significant with a view to my current dissertation project.

"E-learning and digital cultures: final assignment feedback
Name of student: James Lamb
Mark for the lifestream: 85% (A)
Mark for the final assignment: 75% (A)

Overall mark for course: 80% (A)
Feedback provided by: Sian Bayne
Elements: Lifestream, Assignment

Lifestream
Activity: This is an exceptional lifestream, which represents a deeply impressive commitment to and understanding of the course design and its intellectual content. The activity it represents is genuinely excellent, with multiple items coming through for literally every day of the course, and a first rate range of feeds from multiple sources. Reading your comments feed (I realise this stopped coming into the lifestream at the end of November, and have accessed it direct), your commitment to a culture of peer support, mutuality and collegiality in your relations to your peers has been extraordinary, and a real gift to the course. The lifestream as a whole represents an outstanding level of engagement.

Reflection: Your weekly summaries are all in place, and in these and throughout your blog it has been really inspiring to see you pushing back the boundaries of multimodality, and bringing a genuinely visual (and auditory) sensibility to the course. Your final summary was nicely done – I liked the way you returned to the commonplace book idea, and it made me think that it might have been an ironic and fun thing to do to actually do this in analogue form and put it in the post : ). Overall, the quality – and quantity – of your blogging is outstanding throughout, and I particularly liked your self-depracatory stance toward The Blog and its working through in your signature video style! Your lifestream encapsulates the essence of what we hoped the lifestreams would become.

Knowledge and understanding: Your visual artefact, ethnography and posthuman pedagogy were all outstanding, demonstrating a high level of understanding of course content and a great capacity for analysis. They also provoked a lot of commentary and discussion among your peers. Overall, the enthusiasm, energy and insight with which you have engaged with this course is brilliantly conveyed in the lifestream, and your commitment to the process and success of the course has been profound – many thanks.

Assignment

Knowledge and understanding of concepts
Knowledge and use of the literature
This is a really well-produced essay, which considers the digital ‘futures’ of essay writing and the shift into multimodality within formal learning and teaching. You identify some of the key challenges in working across media and modes in HE – in particular the question of criticality – and you interestingly align theories of multimodality with notions of multiple intelligence.

For me, it was here that the assignment lost some direction. On the one hand, Gardner’s theory I think needed a more in-depth critique than you provide here (you acknowledge that it is problematic and based in little evidence, but do not subject it to a very rigorous analysis beyond that). More fundamentally, perhaps, bringing in a theory such as this which concerns itself with the more or less ‘innate’ characteristics of individuals sits oddly with contemporary literacy theories, which tend to see literacy (and transliteracy) as very much located in social practices and embedded in social contexts. In other words, literacy is seen as socially-informed and constituted, not as an innate quality or ability of the individual. You might want to look at some of Lankshear and Knobel’s work (http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/033522010X.html) on this, or the work of the New London Group (http://tinyurl.com/2qdob2). In this regard, your at times too-close alignment of ‘literacies’ with ‘intelligences’ was problematic.

It would have been interesting, perhaps, to have focused more on the context of established literacy practices in higher education – the work of Ros Ivanic, and Teresa Lillis, for example – and to have explored the question of why text and scholarship have been historically so deeply bound up with each other, before going on to look at how technology might shift all that. However, there is a limit to what you can do with a word limit, and overall the ideas you convey here are both well-described and constitutive of a clear and well-formed argument.

Constructing academic discourse The series of videos are really beautifully-produced – nothing jars, the flow is smooth and coherent, and the balance of text, voice and animation builds to form an engaging and well-crafted piece of work which never jars, and remains interesting right through. You exemplify, as well as describe, how a multimodal and transliterate piece of academic work might look, sound and feel. Nice job.

Knowing your work from the course, I was slightly disappointed there was no soundtrack, but this is a very minor feeling about a really well-executed piece of work. : )

Student nominated criteria Does the assignment demonstrate 'aptness of mode' (Kress 2005).
In a sense, the essay is quite conventional in that it sets out a clear academic argument, based in the literature, and develops that argument through more-or-less conventionally structured exposition. It works with conventional academic discourse, rather than working against it or challenging its fundamentals. This is done very well, and you demonstrate how animation, audio and visuality are not necessarily strategies for resistance of convention in academic writing. In this sense, the essay demonstrates a high level of aptness of mode.

Great job James, and a fine end-point to your outstanding work on the course."

At-a-glance, there's some useful stuff there, including links to some potentially useful literature on text and scholarship.