As a writing professor (both expository and creative writing) at an art and design college, I teach to an interesting population of makers, many of whom have been told at least once before they get to me that “it’s OK you can’t write, because you’re a ‘visual’ person.” Students who attend more traditionally academic four-year colleges generally expect that they will be expressing their knowledge acquisition and production through writing, but many students I work with do not. I do a lot of promoting the ideas of writing as thinking, as process, as making; I ask students to consider their writing meaningful creative production worth sharing, and that it can be an artistic and design project as germane and challenging as work they do in their studio major-related courses.

In the past year I’ve been teaching a new class, “Project-Writing Studio,” an advanced writing workshop that offers the time, structure, support, and rigor it takes to complete an ambitious writing project they formulate on their own and “pitch” to the class on the first day. This is in many ways a traditional creative writing workshop, but for the kind of work the students are writing: Short films, ‘zines, illustrated books of poetry, graphic novels, storyboards for animated features, interactive fiction to be read online, short stories to broaden the content of a product-design website, and on. Through these projects, I’ve been introduced by my students to digital writing tools/platforms (Twine and iBooks Author most specifically) I hadn’t known existed, and had to consider how to talk about and teach to writing in these forms—especially how to take full creative advantage of the possibilities they offer in ways that are integrated into the project and help make meaning, rather than functioning marginally, as “bells and whistles.”

I will be able to share/demo several student projects, and discuss how the tool/platform informed the composition, revision, discussion of the writing. But as this is a talk session, this would just be a way to start conversation with others about the way digital writing and the forms it must be poured into can promote both creativity and critical thought about creative expression. I’d love to hear from THATCamp participants about other platforms that exist or can be adapted for digital creative writing, how writers can use them and readers access them; and how to address convention and reader expectation (a large set of considerations when shaping content) when teaching to writing in new platforms.

I’d like to have a conversation about the nature of the student writing on course-related blogs.

All writing, in any media, is an act of exhibitionism.  For student writers, who are emerging as knowledge producers, the question is even more fraught as they straddle two paradigms for making meaning.  One part values knowledge as standard and knowable, while the other seeks abnormal discourse that can add to what is known (Freire, Rorty, Bruffee).  These contradictory impulses are the crux of learning and the crux of learning to write.  One must learn the conventions of academic discourse and simultaneously learn to override those standards in order to contribute to that discourse.

What complicates this process is the rise of new media, which seduces student writers with ease of use and immediate, purported, professional presentation.  But what happens to the writing of student writers who are composing in new spaces in which there are few conventions and a perceived lawlessness?   At first glance, the student blog offers little of the hallmarks of polished academic writing; there is a disregard for order and arrangement, revision, and attribution.   But there is also tremendous intellectual activity represented, which is associative and detailed.  There is evidence of important attention to design, to invention, to gathering resources, and to evaluation of materials.   Therefore, one must re-think what one is looking at by considering these important questions:  What are the features of student writing on a blog?  What happens to the writing of those who compose on blogs and who use blogs as platforms to showcase their projects or store their research?  What happens when these user-writers can make meaning in ways that are not writing? How can we understand and assess the content of student invention blogs?   What are we looking at anyway?  What is happening to writing?  What is happening to student writing is manifest in the media in which it is composed now and in other formats in the past.   In these digital times, this change is happening in a very rapid, public way, and this is especially in evidence on the student blog.

Blogs are not a genre necessarily; they are a medium, which connects a sender to a receiver.  In fact, student writing on blogs (with its possibilities to include hypertext, visual and aural media and with its access to a readership and commentary) challenges basic assumptions about textuality.  When we refashion writing space by making it flexible, interactive, and readily accessible, there is no continuous flow of the reading path.  There are abrupt changes of direction and tempo as users (readers and writers) interact.  Students draft and post questions for their peers’ consideration and response.  Thus, the discussion continues asynchronously in a student-directed way. Collin Gifford Brooke applies this refashioning of the writing space:  “We encourage them to shift their own perceptions of writing, urging them not to think of their essays as empty, preexisting containers to be filled, but rather as texts emerging from an ongoing process of reading, thinking, and writing (25).”   I have observed that this potential can indeed be fully realized with blogwork.  There is certainly a change in the way students regard writing in digital spaces, as authorizing them to interact with texts and meaning in new and important ways.  However, what we read on student blogs can often seem fragmented and unfinished. What we witness in student writing on blogs is not what we are accustomed to reading in print.  In fact, I argue that in some ways blogwork is superior in that represents the struggles students have with the making of meaning.  We must process the student blogger’s rhetorical moves in other ways.

I am interested in discussing the ways others design/assign, interpret and assess blogwork.