Beyond the issues around establishing authorship and interpreting quality, teachers also have to reckon with the public and temporal nature of assessment in digital environments. Summative assessment is generally seen as a more-or-less private exchange between student and teacher, and it is generally the case that the student relinquishes authorial power over the assignment at the point that it is submitted. Other than in special circumstances, the evolution of the assignment halts at the point of submission. Digital assignments, however, carry within them the possibility of extending and growing beyond this point of submission and beyond this private relationship. There is an overflow of the moment in time within which the conventional written essay is submitted and fixed.
A feature of the increasingly digital nature of society and teaching is the possibility of presenting scholarship across networked platforms, including those in the public domain. The student who builds an digital assignment beyond the networked space of the institution—for instance, using a blog, a repository, or social media environment— is able to exercise continuing editorial control that is normally conceded when the conventional essay is uploaded to the submission box of the institutional LMS or deposited on the teacher’s desk. Where the traditional assignment lies dormant awaiting the teacher’s attention, the digital assignment lives on. The grader may have taken receipt of a link to the online assignment; however, the student at least notionally retains the ability to continue revising it. This is suggestive of a new dynamic of power relations when a digital assignment is hosted beyond the institution’s space. The teacher’s ability to enforce a deadline or achieve equity across the class is problematic when some assignments continue to evolve, perhaps even beyond the point that they have been graded and assigned feedback. If the student chooses to promptly revise the assignment in line with the grader’s comments, the work considered by the external examiner at the end of the semester—as is normal in the United Kingdom and certain other national contexts—might be considerably different from what was previously reviewed.
The sustained life of the digital assignment enables students, should they wish, to reuse their work or open it to a global public to enable others to learn from it. Of course, this also carries risk for the student author. If some learners might welcome the ability to improve a piece of work in perpetuity, for others it could represent a kind of tyranny as they continually strive for an idealized state of perfect completion. The temptation to tinker is likely to be even greater when work is hosted in a public networked space and potentially subject to scrutiny from a wider audience, whether real or imagined. For the student mapping a particular career trajectory, the networked assignment might become part of an extended online curriculum vitae, something to be publicized (or, conversely, concealed from view through acts of networked curation). The lasting presence of the online assignment raises the prospect that a student might be discouraged from experimenting or confronting contentious subject matter when his or her work could potentially be viewed and commented on outside the context in which it was created.
As well as ceding control over who views her work, the student might also find that the assignment continues to evolve without her input or approval. Within our own teaching, students have sometimes built course work assignments within Minecraft and, previously, in the Second Life virtual world. The public and collaborative nature of these spaces means that the work sometimes remains active as it is adapted or occupied by individuals or avatars with no connection to the original creation. Elsewhere, the life of the animation, short film, or live performance hosted on a video channel is sustained as visitors post comments or hit the Like button below the original work. The pages of Vimeo and YouTube offer countless first drafts and final assignments that continue to receive feedback long after the creator will have graduated from high school or college. In the case of audio assignments uploaded to an interactive space like SoundCloud, listeners are able to assign feedback to specific parts of the track, thereby providing a kind of critical commentary alongside the original recording. As discussion unfolds alongside or beneath the original podcast or video, the exposition of meaning is altered and the assignment becomes multivoiced as the viewer’s attention flickers between the assignment and the reaction it has generated. A digital assignment can live on. It can be iterative, public, risky, and multivoiced, for better or worse.
Conclusion: Beyond Words, beyond the Author
In this part, we have worked across themes of composition, knowledge representation, authorship, and assessment to argue that some deeply rooted assumptions about teaching are unsettled as it increasingly takes place in digital environments. In particular, we have expanded the following manifesto statements:
When education is shaped by complex software and the collaborative spaces of the internet, we have argued that we can no longer default to the notion of the individuated, autonomous human author but need to take account of new, volatile patterns of composition and sharing. As we have shown, this has potentially profound implications for the creation and conceptualization of work that students submit for assessment and, in turn, how teachers assess, grade, and comment on assignments.
Drawing on ideas from the literature on multimodality, we have highlighted some of the key representational possibilities and interpretive challenges that are provoked when scholarship is presented in digital form. The composition of a digital artifact is not attributable solely to the individual student; it instead emerges from a complex entanglement of social and material agents concerned with technology, pedagogy, institutional strategy, and beyond. As teachers, digital education challenges us to think in a new way about the nature of assessment and the practices of grading, including what it means to construct meaning in multimodal and technologically rich contexts. We need to ask who, and what, is responsible for the scholarly work that is presented across the screen and think again about the value claims we can make when we assign grades and credit through assessment practices forged and normalized in an earlier media age.