Throughout its history the Digital Writing and Research Lab has maintained a commitment to digital pedagogy. In his history of the early days of the lab, John Slatin mentions one of our first projects, a digital archive.
[blockquote cite=”John Slatin 1998″ type=”left” style=”font-size:16px”]…we have assembled a unique collection of computer-based, pedagogically-related materials composed by students and instructors. This archive consists of InterChange transcripts, draft essays, completed essays, assignment files, messages posted to the classrooms’ electronic bulletin boards, and other materials created over the years in conjunction with teaching in the computer classroom; this enormously valuable record of changing pedagogical practices and linguistic habits now runs to well over a gigabyte, over 100,000 pages and millions of words.[/blockquote]
Two of our previous publications continued in the same vein as this database. Blogging Pedagogy and the Lesson Plan site provided our staffers with a venue with which to publicize reflections on the teaching that happened in our classrooms and guides for specific, digitally informed and oriented lessons.
Blogging Pedagogy began in 2005, and as such, was one of our longest running publications. It was as much an experiment in the potential pedagogical application of blogs as it was a resource and soapbox for new instructors.
The Lesson Plan site began as a series of pages on the DWRL’s website that were organized and linked to through a .pdf. These lessons were also packaged together and reproduced in a printed and bound handbook that was given to DWRL staff members. Eventually, though, a discrete lesson plan site was constructed. This site made it much easier for staff members to both access and create lessons.
In many ways the decision to retire Blogging Pedagogy and the Lesson Plan site was the outcome of this past year’s restructuring. By creating a single DWRL website with one main publication stream we intend to more cohesively integrate the different strands of the DWRL’s mission–practice, pedagogy, and theory.
The spirit of both retired sites persists in this new vision; we’ll still have lesson plans and reflections on pedagogy, but they’ll be posted alongside responses to scholarly work and updates on staff member’s research projects.
