#293 Poster/Demo

Monday 16 April 16:30 - 16:45 Armitage Room

WritingCommons.org Demonstration

Zachary Dixon, University of South Florida, US

Conference Theme: Collaboration

Summary: WritingCommons.org is an original OER designed to provide a free creative learning community for all college-level writers.

Abstract: In this demonstration of WritingCommons.org, we will be presenting the writing centered content as well as how to navigate the site live via monitor. By navigating and interacting with the open peer reviewed text of WritingCommons.org live for the audience, we can display the high degree of usability that makes WritingCommons.org valuable as a digital, open access writing resource that goes far beyond what traditional textbooks are capable of.
The first part of the presentation will involve a brief discussion of WritingCommons.org’s mission statement and the qualities that make WritingCommons.org unique from other digital OERs. By focusing on the “Home Page”, which streams updates and new materials, and the “FAQ” page we will discuss the mission statement of WritingCommons.org: “To help college students improve their writing; to provide a creative space for teachers to develop a free writing textbook.” We believe that by creating a free open space specifically devoted to college-level writing, we represent a valuable tool in any college course.
 In the following part of our presentation will demonstrate how to navigate through the “Open Text” part of WritingCommons.org which is divided into five main sections: Writing Process, Research, Genres, Collaboration, and New Media. For the sake of brevity, one section will be highlighted in depth. By clicking through the hyper-text of a specific section, we will show the intuitive design of the digital textbook but, more importantly, we will demonstrate how we incorporate multimedia into the text in order to create a more multimodal and enriched experience which stretches the fabric of what is normally considered a textbook. During this part of the presentation, we will also demonstrate how to use the “Search” feature of the WritingCommons.org digital text to quickly find short-cuts to specific information.
After demonstrating how to navigate through the digital textbook environment of WritingCommons.org, we will highlight the Social Media and interactive features of the digital text. The ability for users to “comment” on specific sections of text, the available interactions between users’ facebook and the text, the ability to “rate” the user relevance of articles, and the various RSS feed and e-mail subscription possiblities made available through the DISCUS interactive community feature will be discussed and presented.
Next, we will demonstrate how physical, more traditional, textbooks can be custom created and printed from the open digital text. Without actually printing a customized textbook, we will briefly discuss and demonstrate how to create one.
Finally we will direct our audience to the “Contribute” section of WritingCommons.org and describe how interested users can create and contribute new content. Briefly, we will speak about the peer-review process at WritingCommons.org and the kinds of content we are interested in receiving. We want to emphasize our belief and commitment to creating emergent knowledge through the open cooperation and interaction of the world community.
In ending our presentation of WritingCommons.org, we will also direct attention to the various ways of keeping up with our development and connecting with us through social media.