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In the last #digped conversation, I cited Cheryl Ball’s paper “Show, Not Tell” explaining “Most people have not been trained to view online forums as scholarly. We are encouraged to read and write, in any and every way, but ‘new media scholarship may be dismissed as having an unnecessarily fussy ‘advertising aesthetic’… making it unworthy as a scholarly text in the eyes of the reader.’” After spending time with Ball’s article for a Computers and Composition course I’m taking here at Georgia State University, I then spent some time writing a critique for a paper called “After Digital Storytelling: Video Composing in the New Media Age” by Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton. This article came out earlier this year and opens up a very interesting, and very relevant discussion about digital media production. It asks the question, “when we ask out students to produce multimodal compositions, what is it that we are asking them to do?” For many of us, this question directly translates to another: “How do I evaluate a product that deals in multimodality?” If a students creates something flashy or high in aesthetic quality, how do we begin to critique, or evaluate this?

I propose a session in which we discuss the questions above. Multimodal texts, such as video production, blog posting, or even slide shows are present in all courses we teach and it is crucial that we are clear in what we ask for from students. So I ask another question: “If we know what we are asking for, do we then know what to evaluate?” And another (they just keep coming) “what do we do with the unexpected?”

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photo by Quinn Dombrowski

This is inspired by a similar session I saw at THATcamp LAC 2011.  Anyone who wanted to share a cool tool / app / method that they were using in their classes or personal workflow could use the classroom computer to quickly demo the tool / app / method in about 3 minutes.  We were able to see over a dozen different new things or new ideas applied to old things in a very short amount of time.  It worked out great as an after-lunch pick-me-up kind of session and generated lots of questions, sharing, and quick experimenting.

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In keeping with the theme of THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy, our goal is to open our un-conference to the broadest possible spectrum of blended and virtual participation. For those of you who cannot be here in person, but would be interested in leading a hybrid session, we invite you to propose one in the comments to this post. In your proposal, be sure to include your preference for Saturday morning or afternoon, or Sunday morning. Let us know if you’d like your session to include a blended conversation among online and on-ground participants, or if you’d prefer to facilitate a purely “virtual” session. Sessions can make use of any combination of Twitter, Google Docs, Google Hangout, Skype, etc., as platforms for participation. If you create a session, make sure you’re prepared to “host” it in whatever way necessary.

Depending on how many proposals we get for blended sessions, we will try to allow time on Saturday morning during scheduling for blended session proposers to “pitch” their proposals to the group via Google Hangout or Skype (or something similar). So, if you’re proposing a blended session, be sure to let us know whether you’ll be available between 10:00 – 11:00 am PDT on Saturday.