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

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.