I definitely related to her discussion of the revision process with multimodal composing. During the year I worked on my thesis project in graduate school, I sent several drafts to my committee to have it reviewed and to get feedback for revisions. However, revision for my project wasn't as easy as changing a few things around in a Word document; I had to start over with a new page. The pictures, photographs, words, book excerpts, diagrams, etc. were glued down to the page and I also used drawings, lyrics, and paint, aspects of the page that couldn't just be gotten rid of or removed in the revision process without starting over with that page. As Poe Alexander notes, "With multimodal texts, then, peer review and revision may be complicated by both the range of genres available to student authors and the materiality of texts. Because of this additional complexity, teachers and students will need to plan ahead about how both to present texts to others and then revise texts after studio review sessions" (113). This aspect of "peer review" wasn't only an issue with my thesis project, but I think it also plays into the studio review sessions we do in ENG 7280. We are creating projects that require more time and effort than an alphabetic text and, therefore, the revision process is more involved and time-consuming. I definitely think it is beneficial to create a "map" or a storyboard of a multimodal project before working on it; this way, classmates and instructors have a chance to look at it and give feedback and suggestions before the project is complete and easy revision becomes an impossibility.
Here's a few excerpts from my thesis:
I think it's also worth noting that the assessment of my thesis involved me creating a 15-page context essay to accompany my narrative collage project. I think this says something interesting about multimodal composing at my previous institution - perhaps a multimodal project on its own isn't "academic" enough to stand alone without an alphabetic component?
In Sonya C. Borton and Brian Huot's "Responding and Assessing," they discuss personal assessment along with peer review. They write, "Assessment is an important component of learning to compose with rhetorical effectiveness. When we help students learn to assess their own compositions and the compositions - the texts - that others create, we are teaching them valuable decision-making skills they can use when producing their own texts" (99). I think this is especially important for me in our ENG 7280 class. I came into this class with very little technological experience outside of using my iPhone and social media and working with Microsoft Office. With our webtext review project, I had no previous knowledge of website building, coding, or Adobe Dreamweaver. Doing the in-class studio reviews helps me to see what my classmates are doing (especially those who may have more experience with Dreamweaver than me) and apply what I see to my own work. I'm constantly learning from others in our class, and the studio review days are a great way for me to learn how to implement new things into my projects and to learn to use the technology better. It is also a time for me to seriously assess my own work. I like the opportunity to have conversations with my instructor and my classmate so as to get real feedback on my work. How can I make this better? How can I use this technology more efficiently?
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