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, 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 within the community as a way to make meaning and knowledge together.

The website therefore is created to support publishing and sharing along with ways to discuss and curate, thereby supporting the community to collect and gather resources while also making new connections among and between them. In these ways, Digital Is is meant to support knowledge making and community within an emerging field of practice (ie. digital literacy and learning).

We are going into a full updating and redesign process in 2013 to further development both the community and its sharing and connecting abilities. 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 also 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 both 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!