Digital Writing Main Menu Table of Contents Assignment Design for Scalar Books Preparation Evaluation and Assessment Other Tools and Platforms Technical Instruction and Support

Introduction

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by William Deal,  Denna Iammarino, Barbara Burgess-Van Aken,
Kristine Kelly, and Anthony Hersh

 

Creativity, Visual Richness, Refreshed Writing, Collaboration, Digital Literacy

These terms characterize the goals of our working group's proposal for a year-long cooperative project using digital tools in our writing and research classes in SAGES and Cognitive Science.  We chose to use platforms and tools where students could experiment with and experience writing in different digital forms:In designing this project, we wanted to inspire our students to be creative and to assume greater agency as writers and readers. Hence, our assignments encourage experimentation with non-linear, media rich writing and to think creatively about diverse materials like images, video, audio, and text.  Of course, we also expected and encouraged solid textual research and written analysis. By finding, producing, and curating images, video, audio, and traditionally written text, students take an active role in the selection of materials and form of their research.  They also decide how diverse media can be presented in visually engaging ways and count as meaningful knowledge.

Our ambition is to promote digital literacy and to help students assume some creative agency in the digital, internet-driven world they live in.

Collaboration is a skill that students in all disciplines need more experience with. Scalar and MediaWiki, in particular, foster active, collaborative learning inside and outside the classroom.  For some of the projects we assigned, small groups of students brainstormed and decided their projects’ focus and the media and materials to include. For large-group, whole-class projects, students needed to build connections between their individual pages to make a successful whole project.  Other projects allowed students to work individually and to share their work among their academic cohort.
 
Thus, using these digital tools helped students learn how to cooperate and engage in dialogue in real time and, more importantly, to see their writing as a kind of conversation among themselves, other academics, artists, and everyday thinkers.
 
With this Active Learning + project, we hope to offer students and instructors a fresh look at research writing and the potentials of digital media in this practice. For instance, as you’ll see in linked examples, student writers analyze relevant primary and secondary materials and also supplement their analyses by using the amazing scope of the Internet to find visual and auditory media and to make connections between the course focus and larger contemporary or historical contexts.  The hyperlink becomes a tool, par excellence, of taking writing from the constraints of the page to follow interesting and unexpected paths into the world.

Our working group put our own project into practice and collaborated to produce this Scalar book, Digital Writing, of best practices and insights for using selected digital tools in course projects. Browse through the pages of the book and follow the paths we have set.

You can follow any of the paths below by clicking on them.  Each page will have a menu at the bottom directing you to the next page on that path.  To return to this Introduction page or to navigate to another path, click the menu icon at the top left of the page in the black bar across the top.
 
Please contact us directly if you have any questions.
 
 

 

This page has paths:

  1. Digital Writing Kristine Kelly

Contents of this path:

  1. Assignment Design
  2. Preparation
  3. Evaluation
  4. Other Tools and Platforms (Bill)
  5. Technical Instruction and Support

This page references: