Multimodal Experience Among Students

Featured Image: “Research Methods” by Michael Gallagher, CC BY-SA 2.0

Last week, I did a blog post about a required reading. This week I want to do a post a piece of recommended reading. Melanie Gagich’s study, Exploring First-Year Writing Students’ Emotional Responses Towards Multimodal Composing and Sharing Academic Work with Online Public Audiences, caught my attention between this and the other recommended reading.

In Gagich’s study, she writes about despite her students growing up with the internet and social media, when it comes to assigning them a project where they have to “create a digital multimodal text that includes at least two of the following elements: textual, visual, audio, and/or video and share it with an online public audience”, it turns out to more difficult for them than what she originally thought. Gagich gave a survey to her students for their thoughts on the project before they started working on it. The results came back with 38% of students giving a generative (“positive”) response. 46% of them gave a circumstantial (“uncertain”) response. 15% gave a disruptive (“negative”) response. While still leaning more positive, it wasn’t a majority as originally thought.

In that same survey, the students were asked what assignments they did in high school. Traditional assignments like essays, oral presentations, slideshow presentations like Powerpoint, and non-digital posters, overwhelmingly beat out digital multimodal texts like websites, podcasts, digital posters, and yes, even blog posts.

In addition, 79 of those students were also asked about their experience in “creating multimodal texts at school” and “sharing academic work online”. A majority of them in both cases answered that they had no experience. These surveys show that these post-millennial “tech savvy” generations are not really as experienced with multimodal assignments as initially thought.

This study caught my attention because if I had to answer on this survey, I’d probably answer the same as the majority in that I would probably a circumstantial response. I was born in post 9/11 word. I’m part of the so called Gen Z, and yet, I don’t much how a lot of modern tech works. I’m more comfortable when doing essays and oral presentations, and even then, I can get anxious doing that.

I did actually do some more “multimodal” assignments in high school. I had to work on a blog back in on my high school classes. In fact, I still occasionally post on it. Mostly about comic books though. I think I did work on a personal website as well. I believe it was one of these google sites that more holds your hand.

Even with my past experience in blog posting, I’m still uncertain whenever I do these new blog posts. Mainly because it’s been a while since high school and I think those posts let me write anything. The posts for course however, have to be related to what we read over the week. I thought this would be a good reading to focus on because it relates to my own academic struggles. It’s something I can vent about because it’s easier to write about the negatives than the positives.

Last week, my uncertainty was if they would accept my post because I used a creative commons picture (which I did credit the original poster) but I was unsure if I had to use an outright public domain image. Judging from my grade, a creative commons pictures is fine as long as you credit the source. My uncertainty for this week is that I might be doing this wrong because I’m analyzing a “recommended” rather a “required” but a required to me also felt like that it would make this post stand out from the others. Even after I post this, I’ll likely have a new blog uncertainty next week. I don’t know what it’ll be but it’ll be something new.

I do have uncertainties with this website assignment as outside of those google sites, I have no experience in website creation. I’m constantly thinking if my initial designs are good enough or still not enough. Yes, these are rough drafts, but I even rough drafts can overwork me. These uncertainties keep me up and make sure that I make these assignments as good as I can so I don’t just wing them.