Scholar, Coder, Maker: First Digital Projects

curricular spaces are not the "locations" wherein most students have practiced public or multimodal composing. Affectively charged, socially mediated "spaces" such as Facebook and Twitter provide extracurricular, public platforms wherein students practice multimodal writing, avatar construction, and the collaborative "making" of layout, design, and (what becomes) user-generated content (primarily for corporate sandboxes).

Few students, unless majoring in computation, write code, make media or develop their own rhetorical "spaces" or digital platforms. Further, few students practice "critical making" in the sense that they engage social, political, global and civic dialogues.

Drawing from explicit critical pedagogies of social theory, composition and rhetoric, from emergent DIY and collaborative pedagogies of digital media production and social mediation as public writing, and from the non-invasive compositional theory of "minimal marking, this documentary media argues for a minimal pedagogy in the sense of the classroom as curricular and as an academically enclosed space wherein teaching is primarily delivered through the instructor as conduit and source in either content delivery or student-"centered" formats.

Instead, we search for maximal DIY pedagogy, practices and collaborative/collective network formation in order to bridge curricular and extracurricular writing, to develop as critical and collaborative multimodal scholars, coders, and makers, who are able to create our own digital "spaces" and extracurricular public discourses as critical, multiliterate and engaged makers in the 21st century.

We made these together. for nearly all the participants, the projects that are under discussion in the videos are the first digital projects that these folk have made. as content, we have taken up the abandoned, foreclosed, and strangely made spaces of the city of pittsburgh and stalked a few of them. these are our "places." we are trying to map the #uninhabited and the #inhabitations of this post-steel/rust belt city. for nearly all this was the first encounter with diy pedagogy and diy/diwo (do-it-with-others) projects and hopefully the first of many more to come. click a tab below to view.