Digital Academics

Examples of Digital Learning Projects

Multimodal Project: Digital Exhibit

In my Multimodal Composition course (ENGL414), I collaborated with a research librarian to develop a digital exhibit assignment in which students use the popular library software LibGuides to create dynamic digital exhibits on the rhetoric of social movements. Drawing from ongoing conversations in both Rhet/Comp and Library and Information Studies around open pedagogy, student-led content creation, and multimodal composition, the assignment asks students to curate collections of multimodal rhetorical examples and analyses made available for public use through the campus library. The assignment aims to encourage student agency in the creation of intellectual property and educate students on the challenges and rewards of generating usable, responsible resources for other researchers.

Online Tutoring: DE-Nursing

As Summer Director of the Ott Memorial Writing Center, I developed a partnership with the coordinator of the Direct-Entry Masters in Skilled Nursing Program. Through our partnership, we developed online tutoring strategies to help online nursing students improve their writing and research skills. Online appointments, allowed us to reach distance-learning students working at the program’s other campus and create a common experience for all students in the program. The partnership resulted in a 33% increase in writing center appointments from the College of Nursing, less time spent grading for participating faculty members, and better student outcomes.

Social Media Assignment: ENGL2000

In my literature class, Millennials and the Lost Generation, students engage with one of the authors from the course to explore how that author’s aesthetics, themes, and values are consistent or in conflict with Millennial culture and values. The project uses various social media platforms to represent Lost Generation texts in digital forms. Several students used the assignment as an opportunity to explore social change over time. Examples include a student who rewrote Hemingway quotes from A Moveable Feast in the style of Donald Trump tweets to construct an argument about toxic masculinity. Another student used Ida B. Wells’s journalism on lynching in digital dialogue with social media movements like #BlackLivesMatter. These projects encouraged students to broaden their definitions of “literary texts” to include multimodal and digital genres and find parallels between disparate historical experiences.

Digital Mapping: “Don’t Go Past 22nd Street”

Developed in response to Marquette University’s 2015 Campus Climate Survey, this project looked at the intersection of campus policing, institutional commitments to service, and race relations to highlight the paradox that exists when urban campuses try to engage in community-based service work. Like many religious institutions, Marquette University seeks to promote the “development of leadership expressed in service to others,” executed often through a service learning program. However, this institutional commitment to service is in direct conversation with the rhetoric of public safety published by the Marquette Police Department that defines the boundaries of the campus community through patrol maps and campus escort services. My project mapped the MUPD patrol boundaries in conversation with the locations of over 100 service learning placements to highlight a paradox for the university as its service-based mission is in direct conflict with the rhetoric of campus safety. By exploring this paradox, I investigated how the university defines the surrounding community as simultaneously criminalized and deserving of service.