How can technology help students navigate the writing process? At the Vassar writing center (where I am a student consultant) we have been working on ways to better integrate technology into the way we interact with writers and collect data about how to improve our services. These data have provided us with interesting insights about who is using our services and what kind of writing our consultants are being asked to help with.

What are some tools and best practices that could be helpful to student writers? How can technology help us beter understand the needs of students in writing pedagogy?

There’s maybe some overlap to other suggested sessions in my idea here, but…

My Digital Storytelling course, in particular, has been great to put together, but it feels like such a creature of my own brain that I would like to talk about it with others who are trying similar things; I’d like to know what’s working for others.  Are you developing one-stop digital humanities courses, or sequences of courses?  What are the constraints on you and your courses given the resources (or lack thereof) at your institutions?  What are you calling these courses?

(BTW, for what it’s worth, I’m defining “digital stoytelling” in something like the way it’s defined by Ball State’s Masters in Digital Storytelling program.  I don’t know if that’s the best or only way to name what I’m doing…)

At Whitworth, faculty from English, communications and journalism, computer science, and art are all teaching courses that in some ways cross into the digital humanities by dealing with media studies or media production in some way.  The oldest of those courses are a group of film studies courses, housed in English.  The newest, my own Digital Storytelling (on new media writing) and Visual Narratives (addressing graphic novels and visual communication), are also housed in English.  That means it’s likely that my department is going to end up in a leadership role, more than likely, for any digital media/new media/emerging media initiative on campus.  I’m interested to hear about how other small schools are handling (or not) interdepartmental majors and minors dealing with emerging media.

I’m particularly interested in what arrangements other campuses are using to share and house equipment, and in any initiatives to create shared media labs or classrooms.  At smaller campuses, it’s easier to get to know (and like!) colleagues from a lot of different departments (in my experience, so far), and that’s good for coordinating efforts.  But to create something like a shared media lab or a shared pool of equipment still raises a lot of tricky coordination problems.  E.g.: What if we all contribute equal resources to maintaining our equipment and spaces, but English or communications hogs the equipment?  What if we all run our most new media-intensive courses in one semester (or one January-term) and create too much demand for our limited resources?  What if we build around present faculty members and then lose the key player for one department or another?  And maybe a question for another forum: How do we manage to keep the equipment and facilities up to date?

This proposal is for a mix of question-asking and idea-sharing.

One of the fundamental tasks in many humanities classes is reading a text to discuss it with a group. Students are already bringing their own devices to class, and some campuses are starting to provide tablets or e-readers to students.

Is there an opportunity for technology to change how we do the very basic exercise of reading together?

What would be gained or lost with social reading?

What tools are available right now for successful social reading, and what would “successful social reading” look like to you?

For me, it means being able to read the text in my own way and then flip a switch or change a view to see how my colleagues have responded to the text, to which I can reply and contribute. People who read faster will see an update feed of the latest comments, and slower readers will only see comments relevant to the sections they’ve covered already. I don’t know of anything that fully captures this fuzzy ideal picture in my head.

Some social reading tools (to varying degrees) I am aware of include: GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon’s Kindle Public Notes, Kobo’s Reading Life, and Jeff Howe’s 1 Book 1 Twitter (#1book140) initiative.

What I hope to get out of such a session would be ideas for bringing social reading to the classroom in such a way that all readers can be included (whether they have a device or not) and adds an out-of-classroom dimension to the discussion of the work.

I have often had students contribute to a class blog as a writing assignment. There are two things that I’m wrestling with. (Well, at least two things…)

Students are really nervous about using an unfamiliar technology at first, and then they figure out only so much as they have to. They don’t take advantage of the platform because they don’t want to invest the time to work out even little things, and I don’t want to require using the tools in a particular way because learning the tools isn’t an outcome I am particularly focused on. Should I focus on it more? Should learning to incorporate links and visual materials be a goal for these writing assignments? I’m worried that they will get hung up on the technicalities, and I want them to see the forest, not be blinded by trees.

Second, I ask students to post weekly. They always complain that they can’t think of ideas to write about. I tell them this is all about paying attention to the world around them and about invention, and they get that – but they still sit down to knock out the task at the last minute with a completely blank slate; few seem to really acquire the habit of paying attention and squirreling away those things that they might want to explore more thoroughly in writing. I think they are just busy, and they want to focus on getting each task out of the way rather than finding connections or letting things simmer on the back burner.

What I guess I am wondering is how do we get busy students who are conditioned to focus on grades that depend on products and tests to relax and play with technology – and with ideas? How can we reward them for playing?

*Yes, I’m riffing off Stanley Fish.