Undergraduate students contribute daily to online networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instragram, among other platforms. At Santa Clara University, these existing practices in media literacy are being harnessed for undergraduate coursework and research. Faculty are helping students reflect upon their experience in online environments, and connect those experiences to academic life at Santa Clara. Can you link us to your assignments that involve online writing? See below for student work at SCU in blogging, wikis, podcasts, and digital archives:
- Start by considering “Silicon Valley Didact,” a reflection on blogging in the classroom and sample projects by Olin Bjork (English).
- Consider student interpretations of a popular movie in a shared blog project called Interpreting Hunger Games, an assignment designed by Michelle Burnham (English) for Critical Thinking and Writing classes.
- “By sharing your stories you help others learn.” Contribute your story or have students contribute stories via wwwrite.org, an initiative by Charlotta Kratz (Communication).
- Listen up to Bruno Ruviaro (Music) and students in his “Intro to Electronic Music” class,who published pod-casts as final projects via the interface Soundcloud.
- See how students learn to improve Wikipedia by contributing to the most frequently consulted encyclopedia in the world, in Technology & Communication, taught by Chad Raphael (Communication).
- Similarly, Stephen Carroll’s (English) students use a wiki sandbox to create lasting entries on Wikipedia, such as this edit on artist William Keith.
- Katharine Heinz (Communication) has a long tradition of collaborative wiki-assignments. The Spring 2013 Comm 12: Technology and Communication wiki is particularly awesome.
- Could your students’ work contribute to an institutional archive? Students in Sharon Merritt’s (English) classes regularly post to the Digital Archive for Literacy Narratives, a project of The Ohio State University.
Multimodal Writing Contest (English)
- For a survey of exemplary networked projects at Santa Clara, see entries from the first-annual Multimodal writing contest, hosted by the Writing Program (English).