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.

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.

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.)

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.

How do we learn new techniques to enhance student writing? How do we incorporate open pedagogies, such as those of open online platforms, to support student learning?

In this play session, participants will engage in a brainstorming game to generate assignments that enhance writing practice and pedagogy alongside a variety of learning goals, while eliciting best practices for using open digital tools–that is, digital tools readily available to users regardless of platform or system.

At CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, we’ve embraced the OpenLab, an open digital platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration built by and for City Tech using open source software (BuddyPress/WordPress). The OpenLab, like other college’s online platforms, provides a space for everyone at the college–currently over 9500 students, faculty, and staff– but does so using social networking capabilities to tie together and surface the activities in courses, projects, clubs, and portfolios. The OpenLab itself is a laboratory for writing, a place where students experiment with the kind of writing they have done in analog classes alongside new opportunities for writing in situations they might never have written before, with a variety of purposes, formats, and audiences. This play session uses the element of hands-on experience to offer participants new opportunities to collaborate and create.

Many OpenLab members, new to teaching and learning in an open online environment, have benefited from this kind of collaboration, and have generated dynamic assignments and activities as a result. This play session will briefly showcase some of these compelling examples from OpenLab members to model the potential results of integrating open digital tools into courses, whether they be composition courses or those that incorporate writing in an across-the-curriculum or in-the-disciplines approach. Participants will then have a turn at playing the brainstorming game that will equip them with tools for thinking about open digital pedagogy in their own practices before sharing their resulting assignments or activities with the group and with a wider audience online.

One of the most important results of the proliferation of digital media has been a relative increase in studies of the history of the book. As new forms have challenged the primacy of the book, interest has been piqued in the form and history of the book as an object of intellectual communication. I believe that this is because the new modes of communication and presentation that digital media offer have defamiliarized the designed formats of traditional publishing. The design makeup of texts, which is normally virtually invisible because of the ubiquity of the codex, has had a light shown on it by the newness of digital formats, reminding us specifically of the oldness of books and that there was a time before the codex. From this point of defamiliarization we can begin to see that argument, discourse, and scholarly communication can happen in formats other than the book, article, or research paper. As such, we are provided with an opportunity to in effect start anew and explore the virtually infinite possibilities that digital media provide us in designing compositional experiences.

I would like to propose a session where we work to deconstruct those structures of writing that are assumed to be givens purely due to the design history of different forms of material texts, while actively attempt to experiment with different toolsets (Prezi, wikis, blogs, Tumblrs) to find creative ways of doing new types of digital composition. Think of it as a praxis session where we are actively considering the conceptual impulses behind why we choose to write in a certain way while actually composing new forms of expression to convey a narrative/story/argument that we normally would assume to be conveyed in traditional formats. This session will be conversational, playful, and experimental and hopefully will bring forward new tools, methods, and approaches to writing/composition.

A great place to read about how to handcraft visual argumentation such as this is Edward Tufte’s chapter in Visual Explanations about Visual Confections:

• Edward R. Tufte. “Visual Confections: Juxtapositions from the Ocean of the Streams of Story.” Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997. 121–51.

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?

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.

How open Is open source?  How accessible is digital writing?  I propose a session on what makes digital texts accessible or inaccessible to disabled readers.

I will introduce participants to one form of assistive technology used by readers with print disabilities (blindness, low vision, and dyslexia): screen-reading software.  Using free demos, I will give participants an opportunity for hands-on experience with this software.

Drawing upon my experience as a participant in a recent two-day Accessible Future workshop, I will familiarize participants with some factors in web design and text archiving that enhance the accessibility of digitized materials.  I will introduce them to WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool and invite them to use it to assess the accessibility of a few sites, including  thatcamp.org.