Last fall (2022) we reimagined the learning experience of first-year writing and creating something altogether new at IU Bloomington. The course, Projects in Digital Literacy and Composition, focused on digital writing in critical and creative ways by bringing together multiple platforms, practices, and purposes. It asked students to think through how different modalities and media establish new affordances and constraints for what it means to write, including opening our writing practices (academic or otherwise) to different kinds of audiences and audience experiences, which transform how we communicate with and through images, texts, sounds, space, data, and the like. Beyond the content, however, this course also merged key practices in active learning and digital pedagogy, added in a mentor/apprentice dynamic among the instruction team, featured challenge-based engagements (in research, in writing, in media creation, in learning), and foregrounded key partnerships with both UITS Learning Technologies and the IU Archives.
The Overview
W171 invites students to explore a range of digital writing practices using the IU Bloomington Campus as their grounding artifact. Students will recreate key campus structures / buildings / spaces in Minecraft EDU and design immersive experiences for visitors to our Minecraft EDU world(s). But more than just creating a building, each of the structures built in Minecraft EDU will include layers of in-game content (embedded and/or linked to external web locations) related to student work throughout the semester: from personal connections to historical significance, from scrolling digital essays playable audio/visual media.
The Work
Students work in class to develop digital literacy skills and undertake a series course challenges that help them learn to write/create for twenty-first century audiences. Students:
- use Adobe Express to create scrolling digital narratives (webpages) exploring a personal connection to particular campus building, structures, or space;
- undertake a significant research project involving IU Archives and individually author articles/essays that leverage key archival information and artifacts;
- collaboratively produce a multi-article magazine or multi-essay journal using Adobe InDesign for digital and print outputs (i.e., they will be using their research-based articles as content);
- engage in digital storytelling practices (audio and/or video based-creations) to offer a compelling perspective on a building’s significance to IU (campus, students, culture, history, etc.); and finally,
- work collaboratively to recreate select structures in Minecraft EDU, embed / link in-game (in rhetorically meaningful ways) the content created throughout the semester, and design a playable/viewable/readable experience for visitors to the Minecraft EDU world.
The Instructional Model
This course is designed to offer meaningful learning experiences for students. As such, this course employs a range of learning strategies and studio-based approaches (a) to help students cultivate digital ways of knowing, doing, and making and (b) to make their learning active, visible, and social.
Second, this course is unique in that it brings together multiple sections of ENG-W171. There is a lead instructor, who oversees the instructional group and all students. Each member of the instructional group will, in turn, champion their own Minecraft EDU Team; and the students will be divided into one of the three teams (e.g., Team Sarah, Team AC, Team Ben), with each Team responsible for their own Minecraft EDU builds/recreations. Additionally, each team will operate with a specific perspective: e.g., Team Sarah = Present; Team AC = Future (IU 50 years from now); Team Ben = Past (IU 50 years ago).
Third, the co-instructors are part of unique learning matrix. The Lead Faculty member not only guides the instructional team in course design and delivery, but serves as an instructional mentor. The co-instructors operate as apprentices, collaborating with the lead faculty:
- to learn new approaches for bringing digital literacy and active learning together
- to gain insights on different strategies for in-class experiences, and
- to be exposed to a range of models for teaching digital writing practices.
Additionally, in the subsequent semester, each instructor teaches their own version or iteration of the W171 course, drawing on the course design, pedagogical practices, and core learning experiences of the pilot model.
- Two instructors (Sarah and AC) taught a regular, 24-student section of the course in Spring 23, while the third (Ben) served as the lead faculty for the spring offering of this model (i.e., 96-student + 3 Assistant Instructors).
Fall 2022 Instructional Team: Dr. Justin Hodgson, Sarah Fischer, AC Carlson, and Ben Storey, M.F.A.
The Partnerships
The instructional team worked closely with UITS Learning Technologies to support the use of Minecraft EDU at this scale. Minecraft EDU is a host-client dynamic and not a traditional server, which presents a unique set of challenges. Additionally, no more than 40 players can be in a given world at one time, which offers further challenges for a course with 96 students and 4 instructors. By collaborating with UITS Student Technology Computing (specifically Matt Decker and Chris Calabrese), one solution was to pilot the use of several virtual machine installs and remote desktop connections to fulfill this host-client dynamic. While this first attempt is one-of-a-kind course, the hope is that what is being pioneered here will be of value to others.
Second, the instructional team worked closely with IU Archives (specifically the Director of University Archives Dina Kellams) to create challenge-based engagements for students that help them (a) learn research techniques and practices and (b) leverage the rich artifacts in the IU Archives to offer contextual, historical depth to their research projects.
CCCC Presentation - A Video Overview (with Student Examples)
As a kind of update/overview of the course, I was scheduled to co-present on this design at the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication (Chicago, IL) with Miranda Rodak (Director of Undergraduate Teaching) and Scot Barnett (Director of Composition). Unfortunately, I was unable to attend, but I created a video (14min) to deliver my portion of the panel.
Credits:
Created with images by WrightStudio - "Microchip, artificial intelligence, automation and internet of things, IOT, Digital integration. Business internet and technology concept." • metamorworks - "Digital contents concept. Social networking service. Streaming video. NFT. Non-fungible token. Wide angle visual for banners or advertisements." • Thomas - "Fond d'écran Minecraft" • MclittleStock - "Graphic design studio" • noppadon - "story telling text title on film slate " • Rawpixel.com - "Text Content on a magazine" • Sutipond Stock - "Condenser microphone golden in the studio recording creating the sound effect for the content creator" • adragan - "Successful business team winner give five. Team building. Copy space for text."