Sample Assignments

All of the following are potential assignments that could be used in an Open Source composition classroom. Currently, only one of the projects fully conforms to the Open Source pedagogy. The other assignments lack the class discussion that went into the process of completing the projects and so they qualify as Open Access, but not yet Open Source projects following our method for the composition classroom. Open Access itself is an important step towards completely shared and collaborative resources, so all of these are excellent examples for further development.

Assignments that have been implemented

Websites for Local Non-profit Agencies (Jeff Rice, Mike Pennel, and Jim Dubinsky)

In Jeff Rice's Advanced Business Writing class, students designed and developed web pages for local non-profit groups. The class assignment is available here, and the class web logs which provide a record of the process of student work and their thoughts on the process are linked from this page.

Mike Pennell's 2002 Business Writing Class also featured assignments that required students to work with businesses or community organizations in order to improve those entities' web presences. Pennell's course materials, aside from the class discussion and class work, are available online here.

Similarly, Jim Dubinsky's class Teaching Technical Writing also featured an assignment for assisting a local museum in grant writing. Dubinsky's class writing samples and discussion are also not available online; however, his syllabus, resources, and other excellent course materials are available here.

MOO Assignments

UF's NWE hosts a brief lists of potential MOO assignments for use by other teachers. In addition to these Open Access assignments, the assignments also provide directions on how to view and interact with the projects as they exist in the NWE's MOOville. The list of assignments is available here and one assignment, the "Trials in MOOville" also has the class discussion during the process of the class and this assignment available here.

University Documentation (Blake Scott and Bradley Dilger)

In 2000, Blake Scott and Bradley Dilger organized one class in developing tutorials for the University of Florida's Networked Writing Environment (NWE). These tutorials fall under the Open Access guidelines, but the class project and class discussion are not available, so it remains and incomplete example. The tutorials are available here.

Professional/Technical Writing Documentation (Jennie Marie Blankert)

Jennie Marie Blankert's Spring 2003 class projects are available online and the projects are documentation for software that many people use. The documentation examples, syllabus, and class calendar are also available, here. Like Dilger's projects, the class discussions are not available and it is unclear whether these projects were collaboratively written and designed, so this is also an incomplete example. However, Blankert notes that her students wrote about a sense of fulfillment from giving back to Purdue through their writing: "Many of the students commented on the nature of this assignment allowing them to give back to Purdue and their majors because they created documents that would help future students" (2003). This inherent desire to share with the community underpins much of Open Source and of an Open Source Pedagogy.

emerAgency: Combining Academics and Communities (Greg Ulmer)

Ulmer describes the testimonial project in this way: "Major premise: the internet and world wide web, in the context of an increasingly predominant electronic culture, create new communications possibilities capable of supporting new relationships across the institutions of society. For these possibilities to be realized a new general writing practice is needed. The Testimonial is intended to be such a practice." (1998, "prospectus")

He also provides these instructions for internet researchers—emerAgents—constructing their own testimonial:

1—Research and document a community or public problem
2—Document the details of a memory associated with a personal problem.
Design a website in which 1 functions as a metaphor for 2 (or vice versa).
Base the format of the site on the structure of advertising. (1998, "instructions")

For more information, see the online documentation.

Other potential assignments

Community Cultural Map

This project, aimed at students in their second year (or later), asks students to construct a collaborative, interactive "map" of their college's community. Students would build a hypertext "atlas-web" directed to help incoming students acclimate to college life. The specific topics, locations, and formats would be selected by the students, with the instructor guiding them in the development and implementation of the atlas-web. In particular, the instructor could emphasize elements of rhetoric, style, and presentation during the peer review process.

This assignment has several potential benefits. First, the metaphor of the "map" ties nicely into the dominant metaphor of the World Wide Web (navigation) and to post-modern understanding of identity formation in the electronic age (as with Jameson's "cultural mapping"). The design aspects of the project can spur students to examine the rhetoric of new media, and perhaps to innovate their own rhetorics. While students will shape the project, the instructor can encourage students to use another dominant form of the Web, self-documentation (as in Blogs), to document the "nodes" on the atlas-web; such self-documentation also ties nicely into expressionist or autobiographical theories of composition. Finally, the atlas-web meets Faber's requirement that projects be extensible. Since the project "maps" the community, it can easily integrate new information and be updated by later classes, using input from new students as "halo" reviews.

Later classes could create maps of the wireless network areas, which would lead to a discussion of layers within spatial domains.

Course journal

Many instructors already implement a version of this assignment as a collection of work done for the course. This assignment suggests that students could choose a specific theme—or use a course-specific one in the directed reading/writing courses—as a topic for an issue of a "journal" to be published at the end of the semester. The project would require that students divide the editorial work of journal-production as well as the authorial work. The work of the course would be to prepare the journal for press, ending with publication of the journal for distribution on and around campus.

This project has the added feature that it can be done in a traditional classroom or in an electronic one. By publishing a journal for public distribution, students would engage with external readership. Students in later semesters could build on the project started by the first group, doing follow-ups, later issues of similar journals, or heading off in new directions.

Technical Writing Documentation

As more schools implement Open Source software, the need for documentation and tutorials on that software increase. With this increased need, this project suggests that technical writing classes orient themselves around solving this need. Initial assignments would mirror traditional technical writing assignments such as writing business letters and memos. For this project, those letters and memos would be written to actual Open Source Software developers to begin the process of writing, editing, and maintaining documentation for that OSS. Later assignments would include:

• Keeping a blog on the progress of the project;
• Creating maintenance notes so that the later writers would be able to easily modify the existing pages;
• Writing the actual OSS documentation;
• Communication back and forth with the developers and the OSS community to make sure that the documentation is accurate and efficiently designed;
• And, while all projects would be web-based, the collaborative groups would also make decisions on whether or not to provide printable PDFs of the pages, other sorts of handouts for students learning about the OSS, slides for teachers teaching this project or the software, and tutorials for installing.

Writing Video Game Walkthroughs and Help Files

Like the technical writing documentation project, this project would be geared towards writing documentation for a specific program. In this case, the program would be a video game. The initial class assignments would center around writing about playing and exploring the video game as a text and keeping a course journal of that play, of the game design, and the game's failings. Later assignments would include writing game plot summaries, character explications, and walkthroughs for how the game is played and how to best succeed at the game. All of these assignments would help students to view the video game as a text to be explored while also allowing students to work within the video gaming community that frequently creates code patches and game walkthroughs as part of its gift culture. The video gaming gift culture provides both a complement and a foil to the gift culture of Open Source because some video game cultures are gift cultures of skill and shared resources, while others are gift cultures where cultural ranking is a one-upmanship process based on how much the person gives to the culture.

Using the video game writing assignments, students would investigate these different computerized writing cultures while also investigating the internal language known as 'l33t speak' in many of these cultures. L33t speak ("elite-speak" — the language of elite users) provides students with new ways for investigating community conversation and writing, especially because l33t speak is often written with combinations of letters, numbers, and other ASCII characters making the writing heavily textual yet heavily stylized.

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