Dear fellow writers and teachers of writing,
I've got a senior level creative writing seminar that I regularly teach in the spring. Students can work in poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction, and the course is devoted to talking about writing/playing (exercises), reading, and workshop of more finished pieces. I've assigned one text (Stephen King's On Writing) and then some online readings in all three genres (randomly discovered in a moment of pre-course planning) but have left the second half of the semester open to their online discoveries.
I'd like them to find readings and assign them to the rest of us, and then I'd like them to write in a blog about their readings -- what can we, as writers, learn from these readings? What kinds of writing challenges or exercises can we generate from these readings? While I'm requiring them to share their writing exercises (also self generated) with the rest of us on Google Documents, I'm expecting their writing about writing to be more polished -- and thus posted in the public space.
Until yesterday, I was planning to use ONE blog with multiple authors (there are 13 students enrolled in the course at the moment), mostly for ease of reading, but after listening to Robin DeRosa talk about learning in the open, and allowing students ownership of their academic work, I'm rethinking that plan. Would it be more effective to get each student to create his or her own blog and then tweet each post to a class hashtag?
Until yesterday, I thought I'd have students share their reading assignments with us in the Google Doc syllabus, but now I'm thinking that we should create our own "anthology" in the open so that other creative writers can use it, and so we can keep adding to it as I teach the course each year. We can also add the writing exercises that students generate, and perhaps some examples of their responses. I'll have to learn more about how to assemble that sort of textbook, following Robin's example.
Any experience or advice would be appreciated -- the course starts a week from today!
The readings that the students are finding, do these have to be freely available on the web?
ReplyDeleteIf so, the blog posts could be their individual reflections on the readings they assign each other, with the thought of what might go in the classes final collection of readings. They could then decide as group what to put in a collected anthology as the last project and collect them as an open Pressbook : http://pressbooks.com/ (I think this is what Robin used).
Yes, these readings have to be freely available. It makes a lot of sense to sort through what they find and, at the end of the semester, collate the best in pressbooks.com. Thanks!
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