self-assessment
Note: I will be updating this page to contain all back-letters from USU as well as my current letter from ISU. Coming soon, as they say! 
This document is the self-assessment letter from my tenure binder. It provides a retrospective look at my academic activities over the last year. So enjoy if you want to read about my productivity (or lack thereof) over the last year I’ve broken it into three sections to reflect the three areas of research, teaching, and service (and so that you won’t have to deal with scrolly hell on one page).
Dr. Cheryl E. Ball
Asst. Professor of Computers & Writing
Utah State University, Department of English
OVERVIEW for 2005-06
My teaching, research, and service demonstrate an agenda focused on multimodal composition practices in English studies (also called ‘new media studies’ in this context). Multimodal composition can be defined as the production of texts that use several modes of communication (i.e., audio, video, animation, color, interactivity, written text, etc.) often, although not exclusively, using digital technology. I teach students how to compose multimodal texts—useful in a variety of workplace and social settings—from a rhetorical standpoint, focusing on how the audience, purpose, and context of a text affects students’ authorial design choices. I study the multimodal texts that students make in order to produce scholarship for the field of composition/writing studies that details the purpose and usefulness in teaching from this pedagogical perspective. In my scholarly editorial work with Kairos, I am able to help authors craft their digital, multimodal work for the best articulation across media and modes of communication possible.
Teaching overview
Research overview
Service overview
Note: Given more time for revisions — and so a project for me over the next few weeks — I would make an argument more specifically about ‘why digital, multimedia scholarship’? Since my word doesn’t represent everything, I’ll lead readers to another source of expertise, makingMediaCommons, in which the editors discuss (roundtable-style) why digitally mediated scholarship is crucial to understanding and critiquing the academic and social worlds we live in.
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