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

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.

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).

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.

Digital writing and publishing often include images, sometimes to illustrate a point, but often as the central topic of the text. Researchers in the humanities and art history might amass hundreds, if not thousands of digital images, downloaded from institutional and public resources (ArtStor, Google, DPLA, library visual resource centers) or their own scans of research & archival materials and photos taken on site visits.

I would like to propose a session to share ideas about how personal digital collections are created and managed, including and not limited to: 

• online sources and search
• scanning and image manipulation
• image management software & metadata
• uploading and sharing on social networks, blogs, websites
• Creative Commons and copyright issues