Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Multimodal Peer Review

I liked much of what Kara Poe Alexander wrote about Responding and Peer Reviews in Chapter 9 of our reading for today. Although peer review is always a part of my 151 class, I had completely forgotten about the possibility of using peer review in a multimodal composition class. (Perhaps this should have occurred to me).

Most of the tips Alexander gives, however, seem to be just adaptations of suggestions for peer reviews with alphabetic texts. This, of course, might make sense to some degree, if we still want to call it a composition class. Obviously many tips for giving feedback on something can be easily applied to alphabetic or multimodal texts, such as questions evaluating the rhetorical effectiveness, or how to prepare students to give each other useful feedback.

Those of us who have our students do peer review with alphabetic texts, of course, (probably all of us) know that it can be effective and helpful for students, but that there are also a lot of problems with it too. Some students still will not go beyond “I think your paper was great. I really liked it,” not matter how much you model and tell them that that is not helpful to their peers. Then, of course, there are those students who might offer suggestions, but are so afraid of offending their peer that they focus only on minor obvious problems. My own teaching and preparing students is probably at fault to some degree, of course, but nonetheless, there will always be some problems with peer reviews.

Now, as far as Alexander’s chapter goes, I was hoping to see more about potential problems with peer review on multimodal projects and more tips that were particularly applicable to multimodal projects and that might not have applied to the alphabetic texts we have always taught. Yet, as I read the 11 tips, it was always obvious how they were just adaptations of peer reviews on alphabetic texts. Perhaps I am assuming that there should be more difference in such peer reviews than there actually are. However, even if it is as simple as applying what we already know to a new medium, just adapting, then perhaps some anecdotes about how such adaptations worked would be useful.

One other problem that I had with Alexander, or perhaps just a question, is how am I supposed to fit in time for instruction and experimentation with the technology, time for students to create their initial “drafts” of their project, time for peer reviews, and “time between peer reviews and project deadlines”? (130). Perhaps a simple timeline schedule would be helpful for me here, but my impression from this and previous chapters, is that having students do a multimodal project is extremely time consuming, and, especially with a quarter’s system (which won’t be round for much longer here), I don’t want to spend half the term, or more, on one project. Of course, perhaps I would teach a class that is strictly multimodal composition rather than just one multimodal project at the end with alphabetic projects before, but even then, I see time management as a potential problem.

4 comments:

  1. I think a lot of us have made time a central feature in this discussion. I don't think it gets any easier when you have 15 or 16 weeks instead of 10. The time thing is especially an issue when students only have access to necessary technologies when they are in class.

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  2. I agree with your last sentence JW. Access has to determine what the instructor can assign and what they expect in terms of revision.

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  3. Matthew,

    I had a similar experience with the reading. The peer reviews she creates are very similar to those we're familiar with. This becomes especially conspicuous when we consider how Alexander sets up the difference between alphabetic and multimodal compositions: that a revision of a multimodal assignment is much more involved and difficult than an alphabetic essay, "that requires only the use of a word-processing package" (113).

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  4. I have to agree. I feel like my own students are just shy of drowning with the four essay assignments I am expected to give them.

    On the other hand, though I do rush through them, I quickly pace myself through the summary/strong response, the exploratory, and the researched argument, and spend a great deal of time on the classical argument as a sort of grand finale that marries every concept and every process we have covered in course. Can I do this with multimodal composition? IDK. And as much as I want to, I am reluctant to try for fear of running out of time.

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