[assessing digital/new literacies]

I'm still trying to craft a pedagogically-sound rubric for the assessment of digital narratives (ones undergraduate students create) and am finding it really tricky. Bryan Alexander has been updating his finds on web 2.0 storytelling and education and he also wonders whether there are any rubrics out there tackling both the medium and the content. Since I originally blogged about this, I have come across interesting resources but my latest find is from Sheila Webber at Information Literacy. She shares with us a fantastic resource for developing a module on information literacy. It sounds somewhat similar to the Education Pack I've made for teaching Inanimate Alice.

"there are five 'chapters' with titles like "Learning Theories and Information Literacy" which provide summaries of some theories and issues, and short reading lists. There are also supporting documents, including an example assessment briefing and mark sheet for an assignment "Design and prepare a training event to develop information literacy skills."

Though this resource by Barbara Chivers is aimed at those teaching librarians, I'm sure all educators will find cross-overs and aspects they can use in other learning environments.

It might be more interesting to read Chivers' IT Literacy pack alongside Lynne Spichiger website assessment. (via Bryan Alexander) Lynne says:

"In developing a website that depicts a controversial subject from a variety of perspectives, we wondered if visitors to the site would be interested in exploring each of the perspectives, or if they would be partial to just one or two perspectives. Would they be partial to the European viewpoint that has predominated for hundreds of years, or would they explore competing views? Although we do not know the backgrounds of our visitors, we do know something about their behavior on the site:

Visitors to the attack scene viewed each culture's tab in roughly equal numbers.
Most of the visitors who viewed each of the non-English cultural tabs, also viewed the English tab: 1,211 of the 1,367 who viewed the French tab viewed the English tab; 1,104 of the 1,272 who viewed the Kanienkehaka tab also viewed the English tab; 997 of the 1,174 who viewed the Wendat tab also viewed the English tab; 942 of the 1,068 who viewed the Wobanakiak tab also viewed the English tab.
866 visitors viewed all of the cultural tabs.
This data suggests that many of the visitors to the website were indeed open to viewing multiple perspectives. But did they learn anything about the event and its competing viewpoints, and did they change in any way as a result of their experience?"

Read the case-study here and see the site in question here.

Don't know your learning style or want students to figure out theirs? Have a go at testing yourself at VARK. After doing the test myself, VARK rightly concluded that I'm a multimodal learner though I didn't realise I heavily favour kinesthetic learning...hrmm...will give it a think:

Your scores were:

Visual: 10
Aural: 6
Read/Write: 5
Kinesthetic: 12

You have a multimodal (VARK) learning preference.