Introduction
Kristine Kelly, and Anthony Hersh
"Creativity," "Visual Richness," "Collaboration," "Sophisticated Writing," "Digital Literacy"
These terms characterize the goals of our working group's proposal for a year-long cooperative project using new digital tools in our writing and research classes in SAGES and Cognitive Science. Our ambition is to promote digital literacy and to help students assume some creative agency in the digital, internet-driven world they live in.
We chose to use platforms and tools where students could experiment with and experience writing in different digital forms:
- Scalar, an open-source web publishing platform developed by USC
- MediaWiki, an open-source wiki writing platform used by Wikipedia
- Comic Life, software and templates to create visual essays and stories
- Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories
Collaboration: 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 whole-class projects, students built connections between their individual pages to make a cohesive project. Other projects allowed students to work individually and to share their work among their academic cohort.
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.
Sophisticated Writing: With this Active Learning+ project, we hope to offer students and instructors a fresh approach to research writing and an introduction to the affordances of digital media. For instance, as you’ll see in linked examples, student writers analyzed relevant primary and secondary materials and supplemented 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.
