collaborative writing

gaming, world building and narrative

Interested in using gaming theory to shape your classes and web 2.0 technologies in your classes?

On Thursday, April 21, Trent Hergenrader will discuss his experiences teaching English 236: Intro Topics in Creative Writing: Gaming, World Building, and Narrative this spring.

The course was divided into three roughly equal sections:

• discussing post-apocalyptic narratives across media (short stories, films, and the video game Fallout 3)
• using a wiki to collaboratively create a fictional post-apocalyptic world
• tabletop role-playing sessions where students explored this fictional world as player-characters and wrote stories about their characters’ experiences.

Trent will talk about the pedagogical theories behind this approach, the successes and challenges in using gaming theory, and exciting new narrative possibilities afforded by Web 2.0 technologies.

Feel free to take a sneak peak at the course wiki and a Google map of post-apocalyptic Milwaukee, which Trent will reference during the talk.

introduction to wikis

Here are downloadable PDFs of the handouts from this workshop: main handout and Wikipedia screenshots.

Links from handout

Wikipedia: Wikis and Wikipedia articles

Hannah H. Reeves: What’s a Wiki?

Wikipedia

• About
• Content criteria
• Critical Pedagogy
• Professional Writing
• Create an account
• Request a new article
• How to edit a page
• Suggestions for writing your first article
• Suggestions for starting an article
• Learning community rules: Five pillars of Wikipedia

Wikis

Available platforms include Google Sites, Wikidot, UWM Pantherfile, MediaWiki and more.

Additional resources

Baldwin, Peter and David Price. Debategraph. A “wiki debate visualization tool” and online Creative Commons project: “Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.”

Boggs, Jeremy. A sequence of writing assignments in Wikipedia for a US History survey course.

Cummings, Robert E. “Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?” Inside Higher Ed. March 12, 2009.

Garza, Susan Loudermilk and Tommy Hern. “Using Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools: Something Wiki This Way Comes–Or Not!” Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Hood, Carra. “Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy” Computers and Composition Online.

Kairos Praxis Wiki. A collection of articles about wikis and other digital technologies in rhetoric and composition.

School and University Projects. Secondary and higher ed teachers using Wikipedia as an assignment space.