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. At Digital Is, the community gathers resources, collections, reflections, inquiries, and stories about what it means to teach writing in our digital, interconnected world.

Digital Is was designed and created based on two fundamental practices of our network: 1. a belief in peer-based learning within a community of practice ("Teachers Teaching Teachers"), and; 2. a focus on inquiry with those communities as a means of shared meaning-making and knowledge creation.

The website therefore is meant to support both inquiry into what literacy means today as well as to provide a place for teachers, learners, writers (and creators of all kinds!) to share and publish their work. The idea is that through sharing, discussing and curating work, Digital Is supports the surfacing of knowledge as well as opportunities to act upon and grow new knowledge together.

We are going into a full updating and redesign process in 2013 to further development both the community and its sharing and growing abilities. Please help us imagine how to develop Digital Is into the future!

How do you see that working?

We’ll start with a quick fun way to get oriented to the current forum, like Digital Is Bingo (http://digitalis.nwp.org/resource/3453), and then allow for some time for everyone to dig in a little based on their own interests. After some time getting situated and familiar with the community, we will dig back into the theory of action that has informed the current site design, then break into small design groups where ideas can be shared and discussed, followed by an opportunity to share out and discuss ideas in a larger group. We’d be open to design-thinking processes (we’d love to learn new ways to do this) or we can model some of our own ways of working together as groups of educators and writers.

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?

Although this is a design challenge, we hope that familiarity with the goals and community of Digital Is also supports others in thinking about joining the community and sharing their work and thinking too. We will make this invitation explicit throughout.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

We are going into a full updating and redesign process in 2013 and we hope to gather ideas from the Mozilla community to support us in imagining how best to foster and grow the Digital Is community into the future.