For my task seven, I struggled to decode the assignment and took a look at what some of my fellow students did to complete the task. After watching Erin’s and Marie’s I decided to do a fake TikTok Challenge format. Since I chose the alternative assignment in task one and went through my digital bag I wanted to bring it closer to the original task by trying to replace my phone apps with physical objects. However the objects I found were not able to fit into a bag.
I think its important to challenge students to engage in mode-changing to expand their creativity occasionally. Though it is important to encourage students to engage in mode-changing, I like the idea of allowing students multiple options to engage in the subject matter in a way that fits their learning style best rather than insisting on an even mix when their learning preferences don’t align. Group work can also be a good way to allow students make a whole product while being able to showcase their speciality in a particular modality, such as the more artistic student doing the diagrams for a lab report. Another challenge with engaging in mode-changing can be ensuring feeling of safety while experimenting though low stakes assignments (i.e. the task worth 6% rather than a final assignment worth 50%) and allowing students options within the mode-changing.. This follows Powers and Moore’s 2021 research on failure within game-based learning where they found if the penalty is too high it will demotivate students and discourage protective failure (failure being more likely when experimenting with mode-bending initially). I think there has already been significant shifts in the last 30 years to encourage multimodal texts through the expanding availability of technology and realization by educators of the need to focus on more than just the “3 Rs.”
References
Powers, F. E., & Moore, R. L. (2021). When failure is an option: A scoping review of failure states in game-based learning. Techtrends, 65(4), 615-625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-021-00606-8
Hi Jennifer,
Thank you for sharing this amazing challenge and I really enjoyed watching it. It demonstrates that almost every aspect of our daily life has been reshaped by technology since we rely on multiple apps for different tasks throughout the day. Imagine the extent to which it has reshaped the way we communicate with each other and share information, and multimodal representation is just one of the significant changes. I wonder how you felt about switching from writing to making a video for this task. Does it make any differences in your approach to the task or in your delivery?
I agree with you that it is so important to provide choices for students and creating a safe environment for them to explore the different modes of meaning making. As the New London Group stated, essentially “all meaning-making is multimodal” (1996, p. 81), finding ways for students to engage with meaningful multimodal representations, whether it is understanding, deconstructing, contextualizing or creating, should become the norm of our pedagogy.
Hi Trista,
Thanks for watching. I definitely found a difference between writing and making a video. Video is a medium I use less often so my lack of comfort with the medium may have led to less creativity and more repetative phrasing (as I only storyboarded instead of scripted after the first scene). I also found that I did less editing on this assignment compared to my writing assignments as my experience with editing video is less than writing in a word processor (similar to my lack of editing of the manual text task).