It was suggested that many non-traditional assignments (especially those directed toward publishing course experiences) are particularly useful in the way they shift the audience. Students are no longer writing for an audience of two (themselves and their professor). In many assignments they are extending that audience to the entire class, and in certain cases to the wider college community and interested parties across the digitized globe. The impact of writing for such a broadened audience would seem to be useful practice for many future employments.
In response to my unease at dropping writing assignments and substituting non-traditional assignments (an unease that I exhibited at the meeting, but don’t entirely possess), KJ suggested that perhaps we should move away from the equivalency mentality. Critical essay writing reinforces one set of skills; new media projects reinforce other sets of skills. Perhaps our job is to identify those skills and then determine how valuable we believe them to be.