“This course takes a hands-on approach to exploring, reading and writing in digital (web) environments. Students in the course consider ways that digital writing environments create opportunities for writers to address multiple audiences, to bring together visual and alphabetic texts and to involve readers in the construction of those texts. Students in the course develop a variety of digital texts including blogs, website and wikis. Students’ work is collected in an ePortfolio design and assembled over the course of the term.” – UNE Catalog
Reading & Writing in Digital Environments provides students with the opportunity to take an advanced study course involving ways to create and make online sources, such as blog posts, web pages, and social media posts, to help students understand the information they’re learning. Students are able to apply information in new situations, analyze connections among new ideas, evaluate and justify the stance or position they take on their ideas, and create new and original work. The course involves four main components: Blog, ePortfolio, DS106 assignments, and readings/discussions/other work.
Blog Posts
The blog posts for the course begin on week one with students choosing a topic to write about for their blog posts. Once the topic is picked in the first week, one post is made by the end of week one and two posts a week follow for the remaining five weeks of the course. The main purpose of the blog posts is to learn how to use a blogging platform, write posts that work in a blogging genre of the student’s choice, and working towards making your posts similar to what professionals and/or successful bloggers posts look like. For my blog topic, I chose the topic of, “How Roads Impact Wildlife”, discussing various ways our major transportation infrastructures (i.e., roads, canals, railroads, highways, interstates) impact wildlife through either issues, resolutions, or specific species involved. An example of my first post made discusses how ecopassages could benefit wildlife through crossing over or under roads to avoid the hazards roads pose, such as mortality, wildlife-vehicle collisions, and limited wildlife movement.
ePortfolio
The ePortfolio component of the course is an individual student’s vehicle for their own professional digital identity. An ePortfolio will show the student’s collection of work throughout the WRT 304-O: Reading & Writing in Digital Environments course in an electronic format; students can also add other courses to their ePortfolios, such as how I added a course I took for my Animal Behavior major, called, “PSY 495 – Animal Behavior Internship/Research“. Starting in week one of the course, students start to build on their ePortfolio so by the end of the course at week six, it is more complete and showcases everything the student wants to display about themselves. An example of work I did for my ePortfolio was write an “About Me” page; for me, this page showcases how I started off in the career field I wanted in high school, and how I’ve made my way to UNE with my two majors.
DS106 Assignments
DS106 is known as “Digital Storytelling 106”, a course initially developed at the University of Mary Washington (UMW). The focus of the course was to encourage individual students to become more active and intentional when creating or publishing digital materials to tell their stories online. For this course, WRT 304, the professor sampled some of the DS106 course offerings in the form of “DS106 Assignments”; these assignments focus on what UMW’s course achieved through creating individual assignments such as images, MEME’s, animated GIF’s, and web-based assignments. An example of a web-based assignment I completed was called “The Color Walks Time Line” where students were required to, “Choose a color and then take a 20 minute walk in which you take 5-8 pictures of the color as you encounter it. Then upload the photos to Flickr and create a time line using TimeLine JS.” I chose the color green and formatted my timeline with pictures I took from when I traveled to Belize, titling it “Green Walk in Belize.” Along with the DS106-based assignments, students were also required to complete DS106 “Daily Create” assignments; “Daily Create” assignments are daily challenges to be completed within a 24-hour period off of the DS106 Daily Create’s Twitter page. An example of a daily create I made during this course was for May 19th, 2020, where individuals had to take a photo of their lock-down holidays during the COVID-19 pandemic; I took a picture of my driveway from my window to show the view I saw everyday during the pandemic.
Reading and Discussions
Throughout the course, one to three readings are assigned per week with discussion questions to answer by each student. The questions are posted to the “Forum” where students can chose from multiple questions to answer the appropriate amount of questions for each weekly assignment (i.e., usually three to four responses required weekly). After students post their initial responses to questions, they are then required to comment on other peer’s responses and reply to any peers that commented on their initial responses. Examples of readings we’ve conducted throughout the course are provided below:
- Howard Rheingold, “Participatory Culture” (from Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, 2012)
- Mark Bernstein, “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web”
- Sue Anne Dunlevie, “16 Rules of Blog Writing and Layout”
- Austin Kleon, “Credit is Always Due”
- Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, “The Art of Asking”
- Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism”
- Creative Commons: “Share Your Work”; “Licensing Considerations”; “Licensing Types”
- Celeste Fowles Nguyen, “The ePortfolio as a Living Portal: A Medium for Student Learning, Identity, and Assessment”
- Audrey Watters, “Why a ‘Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (for the Future of Knowledge)”
- Martha Burtiss, “Making and Breaking Domain of One’s Own: Rethinking the Web in Higher Ed”
- From Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited, Chapters 1-3, 5 (rented from UNE bookstore)
Students were also required to sign up for Codecademy, a free website that provides resources for learning code, for the readings and discussion component of the course. The focus of using Codecademy was to learn modules on HTML and CSS, as these are two important tools that power what people experience with web pages. On my ePortfolio, you can see my Codecademy achievements located under “WRT 304-O -> Codecademy Achievements” where I have provided the modules and lessons I learned from and the badges for my achievements.
