Assessing College Instruction in Digital Rhetoric

Educational researchers point out that today’s college students do more writing than ever before, but because this writing is largely done in the context of social computing, these forms of communication are often poorly integrated with course requirements and faculty expectations that are based on the print cultures of the university. Students writing in informal situations with online friends may also perceive these discourses to be ephemeral and thus may be more likely to generate texts regarded as inappropriate by potential employers or gatekeepers to graduate or professional school.

In conjunction with a campus-wide initiative to explore “The Future of Writing,” U.C. Irvine has begun to offer courses that satisfy the upper-division writing requirement on the subject of digital rhetoric to foster the development of new forms of authorship and to offer more direct instruction in multimodal writing, the editing of rich media content, and document design.

In the 2007 and 2008 iterations of this course, students began by examining their own rhetorical practices in the context of the familiar social network site Facebook. During the course of the ten-week quarter, they also analyzed the persuasive powers of computational media such as videogames and content-creation for online virtual worlds.  Although they completed a series of conventional reflective essay assignments, the bulk of course credit was allotted to public writing for the web, so that blogging and online video production constituted the largest percentage of the grade. Like other composition courses, students completed projects in stages, revised their work in response to critical feedback, participated in peer review, and were graded using common standards for research in academic disciplines developed by the office of the Campus Writing Coordinator.

One of the unexpected effects of this course was that a number of students continued their blogs long after the course was finished. Some students were still contributing carefully composed content for the web a year later, even though they derived absolutely no curricular benefit from these activities, which were started for a particular class, that could be measured in grades, course credit, or academic units. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some believed that they had developed audiences for their blogs outside of class, while others felt the obligation to continue writing because they were exploring a particular mode of personal development or wanted to create places to showcase work for graduate school or the job market. It is also interesting to note that after learning about possible risks to privacy and public reputation from composing for the web, a number of students pulled down their blogs and YouTube videos, even those who had received high grades and were nominated for further recognition. This group included the recipient of the campus-wide award for multimedia writing in 2008.

This summer, using funding from the People and Practices Research Initiative, instructor Elizabeth Losh will conduct a formal survey of former students to look at two basic research questions: 1) Why are members of the still-blogging group still blogging? and 2) Why did members of the group who removed their materials from the web choose to do so?  In addition to assessing students’ current attitudes about public communication and private work on the Internet, researchers will also solicit ideas about how such classes should be taught in the future.