Definitely on the “loosely” defined MAKE category, but thought I’d share this anyway in case anyone missed it from an earlier tweet I sent out.

Throughout the day, I kept my eyes and ears open for interesting links and resources shared and thought it’d be a helpful thing to curate and exhibit them together:

Links Next Door (03/05/2014): THATCamp Digital Writing Edition
(Posted over at my site)

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

In addition to talking and playing and workshop-ing at THATCamp Digital Writing, everyone is encouraged to actually Make something. In this spirit, we are holding a Maker Challenge!

This competition follows in the spirit and form of the one at THATCamp CHNM last year. More details are available on the Challenge’s page, but it boils down to this:

If you have an idea of a project you’d like to prototype or brainstorm or hash out this weekend, bring it! If a project idea comes out of a workshop or session, go ahead and put something together to progress that idea. These proposals or prototypes can be submitted individually or in groups.

Submissions must be created at the THATCamp.

All submissions will be briefly presented during the last session on Saturday, so there will also be an opportunity for live feedback from the group.

Let this weekend inspire you to create a project or a tool or develop an idea. And you might just win a prize!

Again, for further details, see the Maker Challenge page, and if there are questions, please ask Kristen Mapes (kmapes[at]fordham[dot]edu).

What defines digital writing? We are all too comfortable attaching ‘digital’ to ‘writing,’ ‘rhetoric,’ and ‘literacy,’ but what exactly do we want it to describe? In what fundamental ways have writing practices and products changed in the wake of the personal computer and networked computing? I propose we write and curate content for a website that offers a focused but multifaceted, readable but academically-grounded answer to this question that might serve as a starting point for discussion in courses as well as for other interested readers’ thinking about this question. I will facilitate discussion to establish our goals for the site, provide a forum for collaborative writing, and prep a site template (HTML/CSS, WordPress, or Tumblr depending on the choice of the group).

Come ready to write and curate:

• A declaration of unique principles of digital writing
• A select bibliography of readings / one key quotation from each
• A select collection of thoughtful digital writing resources online
• Other ideas?