Curation in Writing: Using a “Building” and “Breaking” Pedagogy to Teach Culture in the Digital Age | Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 As Wheaton College explores the potential for blended learning in the liberal arts context, we’ve found that technologies our students use for learning are fruitful objects of critical engagement in their own right. This has led us to frame the design of technology-related assignments that aim for critical engagement into a useful alliteration: building and breaking.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 10 As a particular example, blog writing offers a platform for a form of reflexive writing that can be harnessed to teach the art of publicly engaged social commentary. Drawing on the experience of working with over four hundred students writing blogs at Wheaton College in an introductory course in anthropology, this paper uses specific excerpts of student writing to explore curation as a mode of online writing that is simultaneously “makes” and “breaks” the online space. Blogs as a writing strategy that is creative and encourages students to curate knowledge about culture through reflection on key issues in the social sciences: the politics and ethics of representation, power imbalance and the circulation of knowledge, and social responsibility.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Blogging can also harness reflexive writing that critically uses online blogging platforms to define and stretch our understanding of “curation” and its audience and, as such, can be understand as an example of a larger pedagogy: Building and Breaking.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 Building and Breaking
By building knowledge in digital tools that visualize, organize, contextualize or otherwise curate our course content, our students engage with potential audiences in new ways that can be channeled into reflective writing. When we critically analyze, test, and attempt to “break” digital tools that curate course-related content and then reflect on that act together and as individual writers, we become more critical users of digital technology. The “nutshell” learning outcomes for each type of assignment are listed below:

Learning Outcomes for Assignments that Build
Make and reflect on choices to:

Find digital content
Group digital content
Present digital content
Put together digital content with traditional print sources or data collected offline

Learning Outcomes for Assignments that Break
Identify and critique the content and design choices implicit in an existing digital object.

Critique choices about where the content came from
Critique choices about how the content is grouped
Critique choices about how the content is presented

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 1 Assignments that use “building” curate existing digital content in order to define and gather a new collection of digital items that has a signature logic and coherence. The choices students make about what to include, why to include it in their collection and how organize/provide access to it can prompt critical reflection for the makers in addition to whatever value the tool might offer to potential users.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 2 Assignments that use breaking make students critical users of existing digital objects. Using critical and inferential engagement with the object(s), these assignments tease out the decisions made by designers. Students develop a critique of the designer’s purpose and execution of that purpose. The focus of that critique can hinge on the discipline being taught, the tool itself, and/or student initiative.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 In both sorts of assignments, writing output, as process-oriented reflection but also a product itself, is great for driving home the information fluency and content outcomes in a convergent way.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 1 Everyone’s a Curator
Both “building” and “breaking” work from the same core assumption: everyone using and sharing digital content is a curator, whether they mean to be one or not. Curation, like a lot of things, is best done deliberately and with care and involves skills we can cultivate in our students.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 1 Because the scale of digital content and data now accessible is sublimely massive, none of us can engage with it at all without first making choices about which discrete segments of it we will engage. The need to make choices about the content we engage and share with others is unavoidable and merits critical reflection.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 More, as curation becomes a greater factor in commerce and culture we increasingly find ourselves at the mercy of curators. The stakes can be high. Some will curate irresponsibly or for reasons that might be obscure, intentionally or otherwise. Whether we’re discussing how Reddit users voted conspiracy theories that accused innocents of the Boston Marathon bombings to the “frontpage of the internet,” or the provenance of an ad in a given user’s Facebook newsfeed, curation is an act with human, ethical, and technical dimensions that can be explored in any classroom that engages with digital objects.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Curation is a matter of such broad consequence that it can be considered meaningfully across discipline. A humanities classroom might ask whether a collection fairly or fully represents the human record and relevant experiences of a topic; social science courses can consider how and why people curate as they do; natural science courses can explore the vagaries of algorithmic function or as an example, at scale, of emergence.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 3 Whatever the questions we ask about curation, they can be framed by an approach of “building” and “breaking.” But the fundamental question is universal: “Why does this thing go with this other thing and not that one?” The space for subjectivity and judgment in any curator’s answer to that question makes it a solid foundation for a writing assignment.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Designing an Assignment that Builds
There are countless platforms students can use to gather a collection of digital content and publish reflections about the process behind it. Each option has its pros, cons, and is subject to local factors.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 But really, digital objects can be gathered into a collection on pretty much any website you and your students could build via three basic features of html: hyperlinks, embed codes, and hosted image files. WordPress; Blogger; Tumblr; Drupal; Google Sites; Pinterest; Omeka; these and other platforms are simple to set up and to use, and all suffice for a wide range of “building” assignments.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 2 Other platforms make certain kinds of visualization and arrangements of collection objects easier to construct or can serve specialized needs. Prezi and other tools like Poplet allow you and your students to visually arrange collection items in a way the demonstrates their interconnections at both micro and macro scales. Google Earth plots collection items to geographic location and TimelineJS plots them chronologically. Whatever your need, consider consulting with your educational technology department or teaching and learning center. Sample “building” assignment concepts are shown below.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Assignments that Build: Samples
Consider some sample assignment concepts that use “building” as we’ve defined it here:

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 2
In a course on American folk music, students choose from a list of songs that each have a rich and varied recording tradition. Students create playlists in Spotify that show this change for one song and embed these playlists into blog posts that explain their choices and process.
In a literary theory course, students use MLA International Bibliography to find citations for scholarly works that together demonstrate how the critical response to a canonical novel has changed over time. Using TimelineJS, they create a timeline that includes particularly illustrative examples of that change. On the course message boards, students write about the citations they were closest to selecting but ultimately decided against.
In a course on the history of Boston, students use Google Forms to nominate and choose a neighborhood of the city to visually annotate in Google Earth. They then use the Boston Public Library’s collection of archival photographs to find images that they can plot to Google Earth.
In a writing course, students use WordPress and Digress.it to annotate course readings for technique and structure.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Certain logistics are worth planning for in an assignment that builds. Critical questions to ask yourself upfront:

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 4
Will students curate collaboratively or individually? What would be the trade-offs in each case?
Will students need instruction on the tools they need to complete the assignment? If so, will that be provided by you or by a guest presenter?
Will students somehow use the final product of the assignment in-class, accompanying a presentation?
What platforms will the class use to gather and display the final product(s)?
Will the final products have a life beyond the classroom or the present semester? How will you plan for that?
To what extent do you want your assignment to have tools-based outcomes? Do you want your students to learn how to use WordPress? HTML? Metadata?
How much content will students be curating? How will students be prompted to reflect on curation? Will their reflections be apart of the content presentation or be pushed to another platform (a blog, a paper, a presentation, etc)?

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 2 It might be counter-intuitive, but using the assignment prompt to limit where students look for content can teach them more than leaving them to figure it out on their own. For one, it allows you to develop in advance a good sense of what sorts of content students will find and whether that truly fits with your goals. Your students, in turn, can explore with a productive focus. Consider consulting with your liaison librarian for help with choosing a good collection to start your assignment from.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Designing an Assignment that Breaks
Assignments that break begin with certain questions: How can students learn about a digital object’s purpose and function by investigating its presentation or output? What can the limits of its design tell us about the model of user (human!) behavior that it assumes? What choices–and, hence, values–went into the construction of this digital object? What learning outcomes related to course content can be deepened, challenged, or complicated by a critical understanding of the given digital object?

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 1 Assignments that break can be logistically simpler than those that build, but not all digital objects “break” equally well. Some will get to rich questions like the above more directly than others. Assignment design is crucial, as is advance testing on your part. Your students will not use most digital objects in the way you do. The variables that students introduce need to be anticipated to ensure that they see the phenomena your learning outcomes depend on them to see.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 At the same time, breaking assignments can and perhaps should be messy. Students won’t all have the same experience breaking a digital object and that’s okay. Sharing their experiences with each other via face-to-face or online discussion–as well as having you or a visiting expert on-hand to explain the variations of experience–is key and gives the fullest sense of the object being explored.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 1 Consider an example of an assignment that we’ve used and revised over the years. To prompt students to consider the fundamental differences between using Google and a scholarly database, we designed an activity that asked them to search “Batman” in both systems and then compare and discuss the results. This worked well because Batman, a true cultural icon, is considered in a lot of different and interesting ways in both scholarly and popular contexts. Still, the activity had a canned quality. We knew that there were plenty of searches students would do, especially for their own writing, that wouldn’t show this contrast with such clarity. That opacity is a part of using these tools even if it is useful to keep certain categorical distinctions in mind.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Since we expanded the activity to allow students their own choice of superhero, more of them have had, at least in the moment, a more bemused experience. “I didn’t really find anything on the PowerPuff Girls in the college library database,” a student might complain. We’re not surprised when this happens, but the students are. So together, we ask: why not? Whither the scholarly consideration of a formerly trendy but ultimately short-lived cartoon show? There are a few possible answers, and going through them with students–particularly as a group–can help them down the road with seemingly unrelated tasks, like choosing a manageable topic for their big research paper. There’s nothing quite like seeing one student tell another their topic is impossibly narrow.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 2 One way to think about “breaking” is to think of it as reverse-engineering: given this output, what can we deduce about the design of this system? As a pedagogy, it puts students in a critical frame from the start. This is particularly important for assignments that leverage technologies that students use already for uncritical and goal-oriented purposes (like Google Search).

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 Depending on your focus, “breaking” can get to important learning outcomes about the cultural role that information systems play in the human experience. More pragmatically, however, “Breaking” teaches information literacy. A student who has critically considered a search engine–the sorts of content it will return, the way it matches queries to results, how it ranks results and why– is a more able user of that tool in the future. For the instructor of our case study below, assignments that “break” have made for much more interesting grading and allowed the instructor to learn about the ways that culture comes to be understood. Sample “breaking” assignment concepts are illustrated below.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 Assignments that Break: Samples

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0
Students examine a Wikipedia page with a high number of edits and consider the changes that were made to the page over time–and why.
Students look at Google Poetics and use it to consider questions about authorship (who is the author of a “google poem”?) and the definition of literature (Is a Google Poem literature?) while also exploring Google’s design choices in its autocomplete search function.
Students use a large image collection using a tagging folksonomy (Flickr) and compare its treatment of a particularly thorny or contested terminology to its treatment in a collection that uses controlled vocabulary (a library catalog).
Students compare the first five results for a single search term in three different searchboxes, including at least one that exists primarily in a commercial context (ie, Google, Bing, etc) and one that is used for scholarly materials (a library database).

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 1 Curating Culture Online: A Case Study of a Cross-Cultural Blogging Project
Using the learning experience of working with blogs with more than four hundred students from 2007-2013 in an Introduction to Anthropology course, it is clear that blogs guide students into “making” and “breaking” the online space as an extension of the classroom.

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 The assignment requires each student to document the process of learning about culture in a public blog that curates the individual’s encounter with unfamiliar cultural practice. Learning anthropology in blogs, students learn to assume that culture is everywhere and that understanding that requires engaging with communities, and, crucially, a challenge their own and each other’s misunderstandings.

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 To learn cultural relativism, a basic concept of social anthropology, students are charged to make and break cultural knowledge online and they agree to do so in public either using their own names or pseudonyms. Curating self reflection together with web-based information and data collected in interviews or participant observation, the assignment challenges students to reframe both their conceptions of culture and writing:

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 1 A cross-cultural encounter puts us in a situation where our understanding or our belief in how things “are” or how things “should be” is severely challenged. Cross-cultural encounters provide an excellent opportunity for understanding the discipline and practice of anthropology because they force us rethink ourselves and the worlds in which we live.

¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 Your professor and your peers will read your writing and it will be available to the public at large. Anyone may comment on your writing (you colleagues will) and part of your job will be to rethink your encounter with other’s commentaries in mind.

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 – Cross-Cultural Blog Assignment Description (M. Gabriela Torres, Anthropology 102 Syllabus, Wheaton College).

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 1 In our experience student-authored blogs became a reflexive curatorial exercise that both creates and questions knowledge in public. The public nature of this process encouraged rethinking of writing strategies and forced collaboration on the process of learning about culture. In practice, students actively engage with web communities and with each other to begin their journey into understanding how culture works. In a liberal arts curriculum that focuses on developing writing skills as well as multidisciplinary and global learning, writing in collaborative online spaces opens a unique space to make and break culture. In blogging our students begin to understand the politics of representation and the complexity of culture and public scholarship both key learning goals of more advanced anthropological research.

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 Blog’s inherently interactive format in particular challenge students to write and re-write culture by moving beyond their comfort zone. The public writing facilitated a dialogue between student and informants. Students regularly reported online interactions as transformative of their ideas and perspectives. The opportunity and space to rethink, rewrite and reflect on their work was often a frustrating experience for students used to handing in research papers for a single audience. Crafting their narratives they engaged with the questions: “Why does this thing go with this other thing and not that one?” and “How will my audience react?” In their narratives and responses to commentary, student-bloggers typically were compelled to make their taxonomies, hierarchies and breadth of cross-cultural experience explicit.

¶ 42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 Curating the knowledge of informants with their own, student-authored blogs challenged the usual approach to undergraduate paper writing. Kyla Baxter (below) used this insight from her informants via online messaging or direct conversation to reflect in April 2008. What emerged is a complex process of thinking and writing that enables students to curate already circulating information in sophisticated ways:

¶ 43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 I was reading through my comments and someone posted a very insightful and interesting comment on the blog I wrote about the man who was an ex-Baha’i turned Christian. They said how it was true about the Baha’i faith as seeking individual exploration but it wasn’t only about that. I think this is true, there is a social aspect to the Baha’i community, but I think the important thing about the individual exploration of faith is that you are able to explore those parts of faith that you most connect with and you can explore other faiths and in that way link the faiths up together. — An Unfamiliar Culture Blog, http://kybblogger.blogspot.com/.

¶ 44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 Kyla’s example is one of many that shows that students can develop, strengthen, and sustain a voice and space of one’s own as it relates to the work and practice of other writers or knowledge producers.

¶ 45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0 Blogs that elicited engaged audience commentary in particular demonstrate the potential of web writing to develop curatorial skills that encourage reflection and public engagement. Students acted as audiences for their peers but their writing was also offered up to an infinite public community. One example of this is found through the exchange that occurred after a comment was posted on Laura Starr’s blog on Ugandan child soldiers. In a thorough and charged comment, Laura Starr’s reader concluded the following reaction to her blog.

¶ 46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 On October 18th, 2007 he wrote:

¶ 47 Leave a comment on paragraph 47 0 I just stumbled across your blog, so first things first, welcome to Uganda (when you get here …) Secondly, I don’t know who the source of your information on Uganda is, but most of it is outrageously incorrect.

¶ 48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 1 After reading this comment, Laura reached out to the audience member and began an offline conversation that became key to her cross-cultural encounter. The learning experience is eloquently represented in the concluding entry to her blog. She writes:

¶ 49 Leave a comment on paragraph 49 0 This experience was the closest I have had to an actual cultural encounter and this encounter, while only communicating online, was what helped me most in writing my blog. I had my first flash of recognition after receiving the comment from Tumwijuke in Uganda. I realized the power that words have, especially when you are writing or talking about something that you are unfamiliar with. I now understand how important it is to dismiss my own beliefs and thoughts before engaging in something I am unfamiliar with and become open to learning about something new. People are not all so different when it comes to war and trauma. Writing this blog has been one of the most eye opening experiences because it allowed me to learn about another culture through my own mistakes, which I believe are inevitable, and expanded by encounters with others outside of my life circle. — Culture of War Blog, http://www.cultureofwar.blogspot.com/.

¶ 50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 2 Comments allowed student authors curate their own voice with a collective sense of shared knowledge that resides in a public sphere. Blogging culture required an understanding of the author’s culture, and it required the search for a collaboratively-inclined ethnographic voice through which we can speak respectfully about others and ourselves. The collaboration in this practice of web writing extends beyond the students own experience and forces students to simultaneously make and break their own cultural knowledge.

¶ 51 Leave a comment on paragraph 51 0 Writing on an encounter with West Point Military Academy, Caroline Letourneay curates information from the course on language with information on West Point Military Academy in print and information from informants to make and break knowledge about the workings of language and culture:

¶ 52 Leave a comment on paragraph 52 0 Within the first dozen pages of Absolutely American, David Lipsky brings up “The Theory and Practice of Huah” (11). Huah? Right. In addition to basing everyday speech on acronyms, apparently the military has its own vocabulary. Lipsky writes “There’s a word you hear a lot at West Point: huah. […] Huah is an all-purpose word” (11). It seems that huah is something that you can say to anyone at any time. It can be attached to the end of a question signifying “right?”, it can be used as an adjective to describe someone who is ready for action, or it can be used as a response to most questions (“How are you doing today?” “HUAH!”). I guess that huah is the military’s version of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” something to say when there’s nothing else to say.

¶ 53 Leave a comment on paragraph 53 0 I decided to bring up the idea of “huah” with my ever-patient acquaintances at West Point. I received an instant response when I uttered the word, but it was not quite the response I had anticipated. I was immediately told that I was spelling it wrong. Apparently the spelling has changed since the publishing of Absolutely American in 2003. Nowadays it seems that this magic word is spelled H-O-O-A-H. Once we moved away from the technicalities of the word, I asked the cadets what hooah meant. I received an absolutely brilliant response: “hooah is everything and anything, but ‘no’” (Anonymous). The cadets then went on to describe how hooah is the Army version of “good,” except if you’re good then you’re alright, but if you’re hooah then you’re motivated, physically and mentally prepared, and ready to perform. It seems that hooah carries more baggage than one would originally think.

¶ 54 Leave a comment on paragraph 54 0 Tying this word into the anthropological study of culture, I think that it serves to create identity. According to the dictionary, hooah/huah is not a word, yet it is quite obvious that at the United States Military Academy it is a word, and a very important one at that.” — Understanding the United States Military Academy Blog, http://whywestpoint.blogspot.com/.

¶ 55 Leave a comment on paragraph 55 2 Conclusion
Curation of cultural knowledge discussed in our case study of blog writing demonstrates that online curation is an art that requires students to foreground audience, sequence and stage the presentation of information. Most importantly, however curatorial writing that makes and breaks culture online requires a self-conscious understanding of student author as culture-maker.

¶ 56 Leave a comment on paragraph 56 0 “Making” and “breaking” work especially well in tandem. Putting students on both sides of the sorts of decisions that content curators make for the sake of their users makes easy answers less satisfying. The point, in our experience with blog writing and beyond, is never that designers and curators are ‘wrong’ to make the decisions they make, but that those decisions involve trade-offs and are too easily obscured for users. As a practice of reflexive writing, curation is not simply an administrative task in information sorting.

¶ 57 Leave a comment on paragraph 57 0 About the authors: Pete Coco (@pfcoco) is the digital learning strategist at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. M. Gabriela Torres (@MGabrielaTorres) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College, MA. She is a teacher/scholar whose innovative work with technology in the teaching of anthropology has been featured through the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and Bryn Mawr’s Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference.

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Barbara Fister October 29, 2013 at 2:48 pm

I have a feeling I’m going to be talking about making and breaking a lot in future. Thanks!

I think you’ve seized on something that is becoming interestingly prominent in the nature of the social internet. Pinterest, for example, got instantly popular because it turns out people like expressing themselves through curation. It also taps into our Western tendency to identify ourselves through what we acquire (so in a sense curate our identities through bricolage) and represent ourselves with things that we display. I’ve never heard the word “curate” as often as I have in the past five years. It’s everywhere.

I wonder if this argument might be easier for some of us to grasp if you provided an example of an assignment from a course right up front, then explained how that assignment involves students in making choices about what belongs and what doesn’t. I think I would have been quicker to grasp the concept if I had an example first.

A total aside: I think we underestimate our tendency as academics to think of teaching as curation: I will assemble the best texts, images, film clips, and pieces of wisdom from the experts and BOOM! learning. There’s a whole lot more to learning than being exposed to a curated body of knowledge but sometimes I think 90 percent of the effort in designing a new course is in picking readings. Curation, in other words.
by the Editors March 19, 2014 at 4:10 pm

The editors invite you to revise & resubmit your essay, “Curation in Writing,” for the final draft of this volume. Through the lens of online writing in a cultural anthropology course, this essay raised several intellectual issues that engaged many of our readers. But we also agree with several of their ideas on ways to rework and enhance the essay for all audiences.

First, Barbara Fister suggested that you consider starting your essay with a vivid example assignment to more effectively communicate your argument. In the current draft, readers do not necessarily grasp what you mean until the sample assignment concepts in paragraph 21 and 33 (which are only quick sketches), or the case study in para 34. See also Kate Singer’s idea about bringing key points from para 9-10 to the front, and Carol Clark’s related point (and again in para 30), and Shelley Rodrigo’s comment in para 55.. Rethinking the essay structure may make your ideas more convincing to our readers.

Based on your response to Amanda Seligman, we expect that the next draft will distinguish between building versus breaking (rather than making vs breaking). Also, do not assume that readers are as familiar with technology as you are, and make better use of our digital platform by inserting links to tools or examples when relevant, as Shelley Rodrigo suggested. Furthermore, we encourage you to dig deeper into reflection questions that you pose in para 23, which clearly resonated with several readers, who want to hear more than just a sentence from you about these concerns.

The current draft word count is 3987 (as measured by WordPress), and the final version should not exceed 4000, so think carefully about making cuts as well as additions. The deadline for submitting your final draft is Thursday May 15th, though sooner is always better. This is a firm deadline, and if you do not meet it, we cannot guarantee that your essay will advance to the final volume. In the next few days, we will post further instructions on how to resubmit and edit your text in our PressBooks/WordPress platform.

0 Comments on paragraph 1

10 Comments on paragraph 2

Amanda Seligman September 23, 2013 at 7:35 am

I am a little confused about why you use quotation marks around “makes” and “breaks” here and then talk about “building” and “breaking” in the rest of the paper. This switch in usage added to the confusion I felt already about these very unfamiliar concepts around which you have built the essay.
Pete Coco September 24, 2013 at 6:01 pm

Thanks, Amanda. “Makes” should in that instance be “builds.” It reflects an earlier conception of the idea before we decided that the term “making” is too easily confused with the concept of DIY making, also popular at our institution. It’s just a mistake that it’s still in there. Sorry for the confusion.

As for the unfamiliarity of the core concepts, I’d love to hear any ideas you (or anyone else) might have for how and where we might make them more clear. The goal here is to offer colleagues a useful frame for assignments that ask students to build or engage critically with digital objects. The usefulness of that frame is obviously limited if people find it confusing!
Kate Singer September 24, 2013 at 9:05 pm

I wonder if getting to paragraphs 9 and 10 more quickly would help to define terms. You might also give a brief background on the terms–are you taking the idea of building, for example, from someone like Stephen Ramsey’s comments at the MLA and elsewhere on building (e.g., http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/11/on-building/)?
1. Pete Coco September 24, 2013 at 9:20 pm
  
  Thanks, Kate! We can definitely move those points up to the very beginning. I can see how framing it in assignments first would be elucidating.
  
  Thanks very much, too, for the link-we’ll find a way to incorporate that into revisions. I think Ramsay is very relevant to our purpose here. In particular, we’re hoping to take a core ethic of DH, unyoke it from the disciplinary specifics and extrapolate to a broader notion of curation and lay the foundation for a pedagogy that can travel into a wide range of classrooms. (That’s not a point that’s really articulated here, I know, and you’re helping me realize how much it should be. Thanks!).
Kate Singer September 24, 2013 at 9:06 pm

Sorry, that’s Stephen Ramsay.
Kate Singer September 25, 2013 at 6:10 pm

Pete, I agree that one of the strengths of the piece is broadening the notion of curation, or, as you say, unyolking it from disciplinary boundaries. (And I think the assignment-building techniques discussed here are very translatable and helpful in that regard.) I would definitely make these stakes even more clear and provocative at the start.
Pete Coco September 25, 2013 at 6:16 pm

Thanks, Kate. I can’t tell you how useful your comments have been! We owe you one.
Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:42 am

I’m responding while reading (however, I have read the comments above); I (too?) agree that “curation” needs to be defined more carefully here (and/or early).
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 11:49 am

I would echo the above comments about defining curation early on and develop in greater detail (in paragraph 3) the relationship you see between curation and the pedagogy of building and breaking. Is your objective principally to have students become conscious and critical curators or to have them employ effectively a building/breaking approach to web-writing?
Holly Oberle October 14, 2013 at 10:19 am

Just my two cents, but I was not confused by the “make and break” versus “building and breaking.” The connection between the two concepts were relatively clear even before I read the rest of the essay.

However, this one sentence was NOT clear: “Blogs as a writing strategy that is creative and encourages students to curate knowledge about culture through reflection on key issues in the social sciences…”

It feels like an incomplete sentence to me. Perhaps you simply meant “Blogs ARE a writing strategy…”.

I might also suggest that you define “curate” in this paragraph.

1 Comment on paragraph 3

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:43 am

To follow up from my comment in paragraph 2, if “curation” is part of your “thesis” in paragraph 3, you’ve got to more carefully define what you mean by it. I’m excited!

1 Comment on paragraph 4

Leigh Wright October 30, 2013 at 11:25 am

Just curious, do you give them guidelines for where to find this content … news sites, blogs, etc., or are they free to define what they think constitutes digital content. Do you have parameters for the academic subject? Or are they free to pick up an entertainment site, for instance, or an academic site. Perhaps it’s mentioned below and I haven’t gotten to it.

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:44 am

When you say “existing” digital content, do you mean content the course has already introduced (aka, it “exists” within the course) or content that already “exists” on the web?

2 Comments on paragraph 10

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:49 am

I’m loving this distinction between building/making and breading/critiquing.

The first sentence of paragraph 10 has the word “make” directly after “breaking.” Considering you’ve already connected the concept and word “make” with your term “building;” I wouldn’t confuse the readers by using it here. Maybe something like:

“Assignments that include breaking outcomes provide students with the opportunity to become critical users of existing digital objects.”

(I’m also wondering if in paragraph 9 you also want to use something like “Assignments that include building outcomes” instead of just “assignments that include building/breaking.” Also, note that you used quotes around “building” in paragraph 9 and not around “breaking” in paragraph 10. Maybe just use italics instead of quotation marks?)
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:00 pm

Can you include a specific example from your own courses that illustrates your argument here.

I also like the distinction very much between building and breaking. I am trying to think about how the two can come together in a synthesis.

0 Comments on paragraph 11

1 Comment on paragraph 12

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:50 am

There is enough scholarship now on curation that you probably want to more carefully/critically develop a definition.

1 Comment on paragraph 13

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:50 am

I <3 the phrase “sublimely massive”!

Kate Singer September 24, 2013 at 9:20 pm

This way of thinking about curation reminds me of Melanie Feinberg’s work on personal digital bibliographies.
Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:52 am

I like how you are framing the complexity of curation; this (again) makes me want to see a more carefully constructed definition as well as an outline/description of how you teach/assign/scaffold curation as a concept and activity to the students.
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 11:56 am

Following on the previous two comments, I am wondering if you might move some of the material from paragraphs 15 and 16 to the opening paragraphs as you develop the notion of curation. I am also wondering if you could include a specific example from undergraduate courses in the three different divisions (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) as a way to make the ideas more vivid.

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:55 am

First, “Popplet” with two “t”s. (I also <3 Popplet and I’m thrilled you mentioned it.)

Second, I’m surprised you didn’t talk about taxonomies, folksonomies, and the power of tagging. I guess I would put more emphasis on the need for a functionality to sort content based on the category/ies students put them in. I am also assuming that any given object might be placed into more than one category.
Leigh Wright October 30, 2013 at 11:27 am

Have you tried Meograph yet? I think it’s fairly new. You can embed video and maps as well as other elements. News stations are beginning to experiment with it. It looks fun!

0 Comments on paragraph 20

2 Comments on paragraph 21

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 9:58 am

I’m not sure how the editors want to handle this; however, I’m a fan of making links to the different technologies you are discussing when you mention them.
Holly Oberle October 14, 2013 at 10:54 am

This is an impressive list and great examples of creative web based assignments. I will be exploring these suggestions as I design next semester’s syllabi. Thanks!

0 Comments on paragraph 22

4 Comments on paragraph 23

Kate Singer September 24, 2013 at 9:18 pm

It’s really great to have this set of very practical questions to help design the intricacies of an assignment.
Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 10:00 am

I’m wondering if you might need to add a bullet along the lines of…

How much scaffolding will students need in selecting and framing the content? Will students need specific curation prompts to help locate, filter, and then critically embed in the new location?

Does that make sense? It’s a question about the intellectual work process (and learning that work process).
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:10 pm

I, too, really like this list of practical issues. I am curious to know whether you share with your students how you made decisions on these issues, as a way to help them understand the objectives and goals for the assignments and why certain decisions were made (i.e., there was a clear purpose and that purpose relates to the course goals).
Holly Oberle October 14, 2013 at 11:07 am

These are all great questions to consider. I might add a few more, which was prompted by some questions that came up in my contribution (Web Writing as Intercultural Dialogue), and that is the question of privacy. I understand that most web writing projects will take place on the public web, which in general is ok and is one of the great advantages of web writing. But are there not some assignments that might take place on a smaller forum, such as a closed invitation-only blog? This also relates to your question of the life span of the project. When students contribute, do they expect their writing to exist forever and forever in that space? ( I realize that even if a blog or project is deleted, it still “exists” and could be retrieved if someone really wanted to do so). What are the implications of this for students? Might there be risks involved if, for example, a student produces a rather unreflective blog post, which future employers find when googling the student’s name? Bein publicly accountable for one’s writing is one thing when you’re a professional academic or a journalist, but should young students who are still learning, be held forever and publicly accountable for the projects they produce at the age of 18 on a subject matter they had never engaged with before? How will students negotiate their social/private/academic lives online? And is it our job as educators to help them separate or even integrate those identities online? Just food for thought.

2 Comments on paragraph 24

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 10:01 am

I can imagine having a final component of the assignment being students suggest other places to find information and describe how/why useful (meta-curation).
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:05 pm

I think this point is very important as it also speaks to keeping assignments feasible for both students and instructors.

0 Comments on paragraph 25

1 Comment on paragraph 26

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 10:02 am

Can you provide an example of what you mean? Both in terms of example assignment design but more importantly in terms of the potential difficulties of what students won’t see (and instructors will).

0 Comments on paragraph 27

1 Comment on paragraph 28

Holly Oberle October 14, 2013 at 11:11 am

I’m just wondering for what sort of class this assignment was given? I can see doing something similar regarding what language and country you search from.

0 Comments on paragraph 29

2 Comments on paragraph 30

Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:13 pm

I am wondering if this paragraph should be moved closer to the beginning of the essay, as it highlights the purpose of using this pedagogy and helps frame the essay for the reader.
1. Holly Oberle October 14, 2013 at 11:15 am
  
  I agree with Carol’s comment. It isn’t until this paragraph that I really understood your entire approach.

Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:17 pm

It’s really nice to see a case study from your own experience. One suggestion I have is to lay out with greater detail in the opening paragraph of this section the project itself. When reading this section I was trying to figure out exactly what the students were assigned to do and how that assignment fit into the course itself. Can you add a little more description? And in this case study, what is the building part and what is the breaking part?

Holly Oberle October 14, 2013 at 11:25 am

This really links up well with my contribution in this ebook. I’m wondering, in more concrete terms, how students actually engage in “cross-cultural” encounters through their blogging? Unless your classroom is particularly diverse or the blog somehow attracts attention from truly cross-cultural participants, how do you really gauge whether students are actually engaging in cross-cultural dialogues?

Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:28 pm

This paragraph is really the heart of your argument, and I am wondering if you can explain a little more about how you reached your conclusions. For example, why is it that the public nature of the process encouraged rethinking and collaborative learning, and in what ways did you see this play out? Or, in what ways are student blogs especially effective in bringing about these outcomes?

At the end of the paragraph, you argue that through blogging your students began to achieve the learning goals that are critical for advanced anthropological research. Can you explain how this works? In what ways does blogging help students achieve these goals better than the more traditional assignments?

Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:37 pm

This is just a question of clarification: did Laura begin an offline conversation, or a separate email conversation with the respondent? The reason I ask is that in her blog she states, “while only communicating online. . . ” I was just a little confused. Thanks.

0 Comments on paragraph 49

2 Comments on paragraph 50

Kate Singer September 25, 2013 at 7:42 pm

This discussion of web writing, blogs, and cultural crossings (via anthropology concepts) is really rich and suggestive, particularly in terms of two larger questions, which I’ve been thinking about in the day after reading this. They may extend outside the scope of a more practical/praxis essay, but I wanted to put them out there.

1) I wonder how the structure of making and breaking cultural knowledge and/or the structure of the blog itself enhances cultural crossings? Is it through a kind of building and deconstruction of the subject via an interaction between self and other? If so, why are blogs so good at this–is it because the public quality and diverse nature of its audience foments this process?

2) The concept of curation takes a really interesting shape, and I wonder how this technique of “information management” is related to both reading and writing (separately and together). I think there are other essays in the collection that brush on this conjunction, and I wonder what you’d say about how “curation” changes our notions of undergraduate writing–or whether undergrad writing should now be understood better as curation?
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:39 pm

I am wondering if your discussion about what blogging culture achieves would be better placed at the beginning of the case study section of the essay. This helps to orient your discussion of the case study itself.

Shelley Rodrigo October 9, 2013 at 10:13 am

I feel like the three major examples you give from the anthropology blog assignment emphasize the building as curation (however, the breaking is there). I’m wondering if you might slow down and tease out the distinctions of what is “building” and what is “breaking” in the blog assignment. And then more explicitly discuss how those moves are both meeting the assignment’s learning outcomes as well as meeting the “curation” objective as well. I think this is all here, I’m just asking for some more explicit connections in the writing.
Carol Clark October 13, 2013 at 12:34 pm

I was also wondering (after reading the second example) how as instructors you help students negotiate the more difficult online encounters. In other words, there are certain risks involved in curating in public, and how do you as instructors help to prepare your students in a way that limits any harm or hurt that may arise in online encounters?

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