 |  |  |
 |  |  |
About
The Linking Assignment for ETEC540: Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing challenged us as students to make connections between our own coursework and that of our colleagues. Inspired by a task that asked us to revisit the design of our first course task and redesign it by changing its mode, I have curated the above six exemplars of student productions that uniquely approached the task, showcase a range of diverse multimodal possibilities and production methods, and intrigued and impressed me with their creativity and expression.
The Original Task
The initial “What’s in your bag?” task asked us to explore the contents of our everyday bags and analyze how each of the items might explain who we are, where we’re from, our cultural environment, as well as our literacies.
Our instructions were to create a post in our course blogs that included a photo of the contents of our bag, a photo of ourselves if we wished, and either a short statement or video. Nearly everyone across two sections of the course decided to write a text-based response, and surprisingly, there were only two students who made a video.
Modebending Task
Six weeks into our course, we were asked to revisit the initial “What’s in your bag?” task and reimagine it using a different modality, with one caveat: we must use audio in our re-creation. This meant that each of us had the agency and freedom to approach the assignment in a way that connected to and expressed our individuality, identity, culture, and interests in a way the first task might not have. When you compare the original task with the mode bending task, the productions in the latter are so much richer, engaging, creative, and expressive. I wonder why so many of us relied on our traditional literacies to create a text-based artifact for the first task instead of creating a multimodal video, but I’m glad it worked out this way for me to be able to compare and contrast how my classmates and I approached the two tasks and to see such a remarkable difference between the two.
The task asks us to build upon our traditional literacy practices by using multimodal approaches to create digital productions, and in doing so, we draw not only on these traditional literacies but tap deeper into our identities, contexts, and our larger worlds, interests, and literacies outside of school.
I hope you enjoy exploring this linking assignment and my wonderful colleagues’ productions through my commentary and reflections.