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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For this session of THATCamp Digital Writing, I would like to stage a conversation about the ways digital writing can be taught, encouraged, and evaluated in the classroom. What type of assignments and class activities do you set up in your class that produce innovative and original digital composition? What grading criteria/rubrics have you come up with to assess the work of your students? How do we model a process of digital writing in ways that merely reproduce earlier modes of composition pedagogy?

I will kickstart the session by sharing my own experience in teaching an “Introduction to Multimedia” course this spring semester at Rutgers University and will relate the various ways in which my experience as a composition and English literature instructor came to inform my approach to teaching “digital writing.” I will share course materials I used this past semester and I am curious to see what other students and teachers have used in the past to either evaluate others or their own work (maybe by the end of the session we can have a general grading rubric that lays out the core principles we see as being necessary when dealing with the wide-ranging concept of digital writing). On a larger scale, I am also interested in discussing the ways inquiry into the very difference (whether in scale, medium, or process) of producing digital writing can be woven into discussion, assignments and the very structure of courses that deal with digital writing.