Festival2012/Submit/Design for Knowledge Making and Community

• Title of session: Digital Is: Design for Knowledge Making and Community, Digital Is: Community and Creation by Design
• Your name and affiliation: Christina Cantrill, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Paul Oh, and Chad Sansing of the National Writing Project (NWP)

(The NWP is a network of sites anchored at colleges and universities and serving teachers across disciplines and at all levels, early childhood through university, inside and outside of schools. We provide professional development, develop resources, generate research, and act on knowledge to improve the teaching of writing and learning in schools and communities.)

• Session format: Design Challenge

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

The NWP Digital Is website, digitalis.nwp.org, is a project of the National Writing Project (NWP). It has been designed to be a knowledge-base that is created and curated by its community of members in ongoing ways.

We're exploring how to foster this community of knowledge makers using online tools. We see these communities functioning to grow an emerging field of practice in education (ie. digital literacy and connected learning), and in this session, we'll gather experiences from fellow educators and knowledge makers, as well as community managers, developers, and designers, to further shape the existing organizing tools and overall forum.

We are going into a full updating and redesign process in 2013. Come to this design challenge and help us imagine Digital Is into the future!

How do you see that working?

We’ll start with thinking about the different ways that we have all experienced knowledge being shared and created in online or face-to-face environments and then, after some group work, bring those experiences into a look at Digital Is specifically. Our design challenge will therefore include opportunities for individual writing/reflection, group sharing, and larger group reporting, crowdsourcing and response. Additionally, in getting to know Digital Is, you will have an opportunity to learn from community member user stories and also engage as potential community members in your own right.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

All these activities can be scaled for whatever community gathers to participate.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

At the writing project, we regularly use writing and the writing process to support both personal as well as collective inquiry, design and iteration. Throughout this session we will therefore work to make explicit some of the shared processes from our community while being open to learning from yours.

We hope that familiarity with the goals and community of Digital Is also supports you in considering joining the community and sharing your work. We will make this invitation and opportunity explicit throughout.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

We will have some ideas, as well as questions to pursue and recommendations to consider, that will help us pursue building the most awesome website and knowledge building community ever made in support of literacy and connected learning!