This semester, I launched a pilot project in a writing-intensive literature course, Great Works of World Literature, required of all undergraduates at my school. We offer up to 75 sections of this class every semester and most of our students are not English majors. For the pilot, students across four sections of the course are reading three common texts and collaboratively annotating these texts in CommentPress. The instructors are discussing annotation practices and purposes in class, and asking students to work in groups to annotate the three common texts for specific purposes that are relevant for the classes. This proposed session will share the purposes that students and teachers identified for textual annotation; discuss the results of the annotation work students did in CommentPress; consider the challenges; and explore the potential of CommentPress for building an interactive archive of student reading and writing. Questions I’d like to consider include:

• What are the limitations and potential in CommentPress for this kind of work?
• How can we encourage more interactivity, creativity and conversation in the student annotations?
• What other platforms might be effective for this kind of work?

I look forward to hearing from others who have done or are interested in doing similar projects, and brainstorming more ways to promote student writing and reading in digital platforms.

One of my teaching goals involves incorporating a digital exhibition writing assignment in my undergraduate art history courses. I envision this assignment as a form of collaborative writing. Students would work in small groups to divide the labor and delegate responsibilities for preparing the general exhibition narrative, various exhibit labels, and artist biographies. While these tasks are common of exhibition planning, I believe that the digital environment will present a different set of challenges and possibilities. The capacity for multimedia implementation would make the online exhibition space far more dynamic than the environment one normally encounters in actual art museum settings. The writers/designers would have to think in a very engaged and networked manner to realize the potential of the digital exhibition mode.

As I plan this assignment, I would like to learn more about other people’s experiences with digital exhibition writing in general and as a pedagogical activity.

• What challenges related to this topic have you faced?
• What strategies did you employ?

I have experience employing social media, WordPress blog, Twitter, and Pinterest, in the classroom. The takeaways I have from assigning student blogging and tweeting are particularly useful as I begin to develop ideas about this more advanced project. Additionally, I have participated in small to large collaborative digital writing groups. These activities entailed using a combination of Google Docs/Drive, MSWord with track changes, and email communications. We made those platforms work; however, they each presented frustrations and sometimes seemed awkward for group writing. So I also would like to discuss more interactive, yet free or low-cost, platforms for both student collaborative writing and digital exhibition writing.

I propose a discussion about teaching digital writing when students have limited access to technology. At my open admissions community college, many students don’t own computers; they use the internet, read, and take notes primarily on their phones. My classrooms lack reliable internet access. What kinds of digital writing assignments will scale for students and spaces with limited access? Are some students and institutions too poor and/or underprepared for digital writing? Should digital writing be separated into its own lab course with technology-access prerequisites? Is digital writing compatible with an open admissions policy? I am interested in larger issues of social justice and access, but I am also interested in practical solutions to get my students writing online.

I see some others here interested in teaching issues and would be happy to see this topic included in a larger session on teaching; it needn’t be a standalone session.

As many of you have heard, May has been designated as a month for groups around the world to come together to edit Wikipedia in honor of Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz, who was a Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow.

For this session, I propose that we discuss good practices and strategies for editing Wikipedia, as well as approaches for editing Wikipedia in a classroom setting. Or (and?) the session could be used to edit Wikipedia entries.

This session is for experienced Wikipedians and for people who want to learn more.

Read about the Wadewitz Tribute Edit-a-thon and find resources.

For this session of THATCamp Digital Writing, I would like to stage a conversation about the ways digital writing can be taught, encouraged, and evaluated in the classroom. What type of assignments and class activities do you set up in your class that produce innovative and original digital composition? What grading criteria/rubrics have you come up with to assess the work of your students? How do we model a process of digital writing in ways that merely reproduce earlier modes of composition pedagogy?

I will kickstart the session by sharing my own experience in teaching an “Introduction to Multimedia” course this spring semester at Rutgers University and will relate the various ways in which my experience as a composition and English literature instructor came to inform my approach to teaching “digital writing.” I will share course materials I used this past semester and I am curious to see what other students and teachers have used in the past to either evaluate others or their own work (maybe by the end of the session we can have a general grading rubric that lays out the core principles we see as being necessary when dealing with the wide-ranging concept of digital writing). On a larger scale, I am also interested in discussing the ways inquiry into the very difference (whether in scale, medium, or process) of producing digital writing can be woven into discussion, assignments and the very structure of courses that deal with digital writing.

From tweeting to multimodal research papers to Prezi, writing these days means more than just black text on a white background. Through workshops and discussions, THATCamp Digital Writing aims to deepen and advance our notions of all facets of composition. Participants in THATCamp Digital Writing will explore how to effectively compose using different digital tools and platforms. We begin with a special lecture on Friday afternoon, May 2, 2014, at John Jay College, and continue all day Saturday, May 3, 2014 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus with workshops, discussions, and a Maker Challenge.

At THATCamp Digital Writing, join a dynamic cast of participants to

• Learn more about innovative ways to digitize your work and publish it online
• Share pedagogical methods that use digital media for writing and research assignments
• Explore how to evaluate online writing and give feedback
• Question how tools, technology, and methods for publishing work shape the way we write
• Take workshops on Scalar, Juxta, Omeka and collaborative writing
• Tell people about your work in a Lightning Presentation and during discussions
• Make connections with others
• Establish new collaborations.

TCDW is being organized by Amanda Licastro, a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Elizabeth Cornell, IT Communications Specialist at Fordham University.

We’re on Twitter: @THATCampDW & #TCDW14