Developing Rubrics for Memes

Now its relatively easy to imagine competencies related to creating 'mashups' and deploying multimedia content to blog stremes.  In essence these competencies form the 'Lingua Franca' of the Internet.  To interact with any degree of sufficiency on the Net one needs to be able to splash media from one place to another and to generate ones own multimedia and splash it around as you see fit, or as far as your skills let you see fit.

Recalling from the previous post that a student could be given the keys to a blog, [username and password] and asked to "Go and grow that meme".

The meme I present in my next post "Chimeric Memes" is as a model for this pedagogical approach. It is basically a primer:  What's in a meme Dorris?  It discusses and describes this entity known as meme, and attempting to live more, it asks for your [1] attention, [2] consideration, and [3] redistribution. The more it is intereacted with the more 'life' it will burn and earn.

For the purposes of the 2009 Emerging Technologies project though, the memes I intend to present to students as 'self contained learning vestibules' will all be Points On A Landscape. Rather than ask a student to grow a blog about a thing we require the student to go and grow a meme about a place; a geo-referenced place.

The Red Centre Way has 11 primary points along its 400 odd Km loop. As well as georeferencing these 11 points the project will also supply some sample Augmented Reality content for each of these points. 

So; when a user is at Simpsons Gap there is some media made available to augment their physical experience of being located at Simpsons Gap... Streaming this kind of content around though is not a 'one size fits all' model. The visiting Dutch Geologist, the professionally dominant Japanese wife [leading the hubby and two kids around] and the 11 year old boy scout on an interstate trip will all require differing content if the meme is to successfully Augment their physical visit.
Ultimately there will be a precisely tagged pool of media content that is available to be drawn up on the fly to suit a users demographic. Variable Demographic Targeting, similar to the ads conversing with Tom Cruise in the subway on the set of "The Minority Report".

Speculation aside, given this divergent demographic, one way we could add potential engagement succor to the concept of growing a meme is to allow the student to describe their own target demographic and grow the meme from that particular unique perspective.


For example: I'm going to write about Simpsons Gap in the WWII epoch, as the wife of a soldier, We've just had a picnic there and an American Pilot we met there told us that Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor...

I'm a male 19 year old successful Indigenous ringer on horseback in 1932, on my way to Town after a months work at  Undoolya Station, I might get into Town about 2 hours before the Indigenous curfew comes down at 6PM...

I've just helicoptered into the Gap to contemplate the vagaries of planting a wind farm near here, my native tongue is Mandarin and I would like some info about land boundaries, mineral deposits, water catchments and the top 3 construction businesses in the Town...

I'm a tree-hugger from South Park Colarado, I want to do the 'Mount Sonder at sunrise' portion of the Larapinta trail walk, rock climb on Mount Conner and find out if there's an Irish Pub in town...


In situations like this, where a student has exercised creative construction latitude, then in this pedagogy, they may also contribute to the construction of a Rubric that can be used to assess the piece of work.  The Lecturer would have their own Institutionally developed Rubric weighted at say 60% and the student has the option of being marked totally by this rubric, or by putting in the extra yards and developing a meme-rubric indicating personally derived criteria to apply in examining the meme, [40%].


Lets consider our humble meme.  Like a virus its neither living or dead, it needs traffic to survive. Its basic nature is inert unless folk are using and reusing its content.
I am just developing this approach and I want to float some ideas about how to assess and appraise the evolutionary work a student may have brought to a given meme.

I have the notion that the amount of traffic a student meme blog generates is one factor.

A meme can be considered as a self contained packet of cultural information.