Our group developed a formal assignment that asks students to stake a claim to an underdeveloped page within Wikipedia that profiles a composition/rhetoric scholar whose work we have read, and then build up the content of that page based on their research. In addition to the Wikipedia community users who will land on the page and, perhaps, edit it (thus further increasing the currency of the topic), I will reach out to the community scholars who are under consideration, inviting them to view and leave comments in the Talk pages. Through the success or failure of specific elements of the page, students will learn the relative ethical values of these elements within the discourse communities of Wikipedia, of composition/rhetoric, and of our classroom, while also developing skills editing mediawiki documents and learning to critically read Wikipedia articles in general.

This assignment was developed using the Open Digital Pedagogy at Play game from City Tech Open Lab. Our cards were:

1. General Education Student Learning Outcome: Use the arts, sciences, and humanities as a forum for the study of values, ethical principles, and the physical world
2. Open Pedagogy Technique: Inviting industry professionals to comment on student work
3. Game: Monopoly

Group members:
Benjamin Miller
Lindsey Freer
Jill Belli
Jody Rosen

I would be interested in joining a panel of workshop leaders in a hands-on foray into course site design. My own preferred platform is Wikidot, which allows easy revision tracking, custom menu building, file uploads, and a landing page with the full course schedule.

Participants would begin by sharing past sites, then use the remaining time to develop new sites for the summer or fall with each other on-hand as guides-on-the-side.

Reading through most of the proposals so far, I know there’s a lot of interest (which I share) in how the kinds of writing and composing we do can be reimagined or enhanced by the affordances of a digital space. I want to propose something a little different, and in some ways opposite.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing code in the R statistical environment, generating textual analyses of research writing in Composition/Rhetoric. Much of that time has been spent “alone,” solitarily composing and debugging or reading articles and manuals and help fora online. But Comp/Rhet research suggests that this kind of isolation isn’t ideal for most composers, at least those who are working to learn their craft.

In this session, I’d like to get a bunch of similarly minded humanist coders to work together in a shared physical space. Even if we’re working in different languages — R, Javascript, html, Python, what-have-you (even English)– I want to create a kind of writing lab in which the focus and energy of those surrounding us lends each participant additional motivation and support. And as questions of algorithm and procedure arise, we could pose them and thus learn new strategies both by instruction and also by contrast. (Though Joel Spolsky makes an interesting point about losing “flow” due to interruptions, he’s writing about expert coders in professional programming settings; I don’t think any of us at this conference are likely to be that, though I could be wrong.)