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.
