Project One, lead by Nirmal Trivedi, is a re-design of Georgia Tech’s first-year reading program — a hybrid experience focused around a common reading (The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang) and building digital community. It hopes to introduce new students to the campus community and to help cultivate their academic identity. I’ve been helping to develop this program over the last several months, but I’d like to use it as an example of the concepts of connectivism — an educational theory born out of the earliest MOOC experiments of the last decade. In this session I would introduce some of the principles of connectivist learning and how they’ve filtered into the construction of Project One in order to prompt a larger conversation about how “using technology in the classroom” is distinct from pedagogical approaches that attempt to understand and harness the affordances of digital culture.

Domain of One’s Own, an initiative out of the University of Mary Washington and lead by Jim Groom, Tim Owens, and Martha Burtis, provides a unique opportunity to promote digital literacies and the principles of connected learning across a class, department, or program. A Domain (for short) program provides web domains and name registration for students and builds curriculum around students’ use of their publishing space. Currently, David Morgen and David Fisher at Emory University are running their own application of Domain, and I’m admin’ing a pilot at my university (SPSU) this fall. Domain is not a platform or tool; it’s a bundle of web literacy initiatives that focus on multimodal composition, faculty development, and student agency. I propose to introduce Domain, show some of the resources helpful to get a program started, and facilitate a discussion on its utility (and challenges) with the group.

Janine, John, and I (@allistelling) would like to engage THATCampers in a play session — part Twitter game, part investigation of the Twitter hashtag aggregator Nurph. After a brief description of #TvsZ, the game that Janine and I am admin’ing this weekend, we’d like to play the game with everyone in the room. #TvsZ is part Twitter-tag, part apocalyptic narrative construction; it’s designed to teach digital literacy and multimodal composition. We’re going to adapt the rules for a short game and play for about 20 minutes (maybe the game will extend beyond the session?). Afterwards, John will be showing how Nurph can be used to aggregate hashtagged tweets for display and real-time rendering. This session would be a good introduction to Twitter, but also fun for folks who use Twitter often in class and want to see it used in a new way. Have a Twitter account ready for play. Our fourth Internet-wide game of #TvsZ begins this Friday and runs until Monday.