"Class-sourcing" Assignments

In his article, "Class-sourcing as a Teaching Strategy," Gleb Tsipursky provides examples of rich multimedia assignments produced collaboratively by teams of his students. Tsipursky's students produced Pinerest boards on topics as wide-ranging as an analysis of Super Bowl ads to Art and Ideologies of the 19th and 20th Centuries through his "class-sourced pinterest project."  This assignment could be adapted for use in developmental education. I believe that such project work provides students with a rich opportunity to develop information literacy as well as digital literacy skills while focusing on specific content -- students would engage in the critical process of identifying, evaluating, and citing sources as they work to choose and cite resources to pin.

Imagine developmental writing students, for instance, working collaboratively to create Pinterest boards on compound sentences or on specific thematic content such as climate change or social inequity in higher education, all the while practicing the writing process skills of editing or revision as they succinctly analyze and summarize their "pins" within Pinterest's constraints of 500 characters or less. This approach is consistent with the ideal of a liberal approach to education, building students' skills to engage in a critical debate and analysis of ideas before they synthesize them for a broader audience -- a set of skills that could even facilitate students future work in the emerging field of digital humanities.

Image by mkhmarketing