Ball, Cheryl E. (2012). Adapting editorial peer review for classroom use. Writing & Pedagogy. Firewalled at http://www.equinoxjournals.com/WAP/index

abstract

This article picks up, literally, where another one leaves off: “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre-Studies Approach” in Technical Communication Quarterly (Ball, 2012). In that article, I describe how I have brought my editorial-mentoring work with Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes “born digital” media-rich scholarship, into undergraduate and graduate writing classes. This article describes how the process of editorial peer-review translates into students’ peer-review workshops in those same writing classes.

accompanying materials

• pre-print version (pdf)

Ball, Cheryl E. (2012) Assessing scholarly multimedia: A rhetorical genre studies approach. Technical Communication Quarterly, 21(1), 1-17.

abstract

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

accompanying materials

• final page-proof (pdf)

description (from proposal)
A collaborative session with two of my textbook co-authors (Kristin Arola and Jennifer Sheppard).

I will discuss the practicalities of writing a collaborative textbook project with authors who share a theoretical and pedagogical approach but who haven’t collaborated as a group and are not co-located. This presentation will discuss how the authors modeled their own textbook’s approach to designing multimodal projects, following the same mistakes and having the same successes our students have when writing. This speaker will provide a meta-narrative of the book’s coming to fruition (even as it is still a work in progress, and we invite feedback on its current iteration, to be shown in the panel). We will detail, for instance, some of the collaborative techniques and technological programs we used, our internal and editorial negotiations to determine the *kind* of textbook we wanted (materially, theoretically, and practically), and the realizations we made about our assumptions in teaching writing to English majors (even in new media ways, as we do), but how we mistakenly dismissed first-year students taking Writing 101 as a possible audience for our book in the quest of creating a book useful to our colleagues teaching multimodal projects in their business, politics, and biology classes. We will provide examples from our writing process, to show the book-in-progress, and to show how this narrative of writing for students is formed on the idea that, as teachers of rhetoric and writing, we can never divorce our theoretical understanding of writing and the research of writing from our pedagogical approaches, either in the classroom or in writing for the classroom.

description [the 'cover' blurb]

ix visualizing composition is a concrete introduction to the fundamentals of multimodal composition. Each tutorial moves through the following three steps:

1. Define. Illustrated definitions help you visualize principles of layout, design and composition: element, contrast, purpose, text, framing, audience, alignment, context, emphasis, color, proximity, organization, and sequence.
2. Analyze. Guided readings of real-world texts—such as photographs, movie clips, comics, and animation—model how writers of different texts put theory into practice.
3. Respond. Interactive assignments invite you to make your own rhetorical choices—determining font face or color, image hue, and the placement and organizational of visual and textual elements—and to write about the impact those choices have.

Note: This is the second edition of ix, the CD-ROM Arola and I co-authored in 2004. In this version, 9 of 13 tutorials (broken down by terms associated with rhetorical design choices) have been completely revised, with new and more multimodal examples and analyses.