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.