Welcome and thank you all of joining us as followers and participants in this study group.  We hope that many of you will decide to shift your role from follower to participant in order to contribute directly to the conversation but either way, we are happy that you are here!

As you will see as you begin to consider the structure of this study group and tasks is that our main objective is to enrich the discussion of the "digital" through the sharing of ideas, provocative questions, and critical thinking.

We are excited to begin our inquiry into what "digital" means for writing and the teaching of writing.  We expect that our discussion and tasks will enact the collaborative and participatory process that is indicative of digital communication and that through the act of writing and reflecting, we will deepen our understanding of digital literacies.  We will use the rich and evolving Digital Is website to inform our discussions and hopefully carry ideas back to this site in order to contribute to the complex and engaging conversations already underway there.

We have aimed to keep the tasks manageable throughout our three-week study group and to allow time for exploration, development, writing, and the sharing of ideas.  The tasks for each week build on what has been presented the week before.  During week one we ask you to explore resources and to share your discoveries, during week two we ask you to think about contributing to the conversation through resource development in draft form, and week three we ask you to think about the connections among resources and ideas and the best way to represent and reflect on these connections.

Today, on the first day of this study group, we’d like to encourage you to jump in here and introduce yourself to the whole group. Tell us a little bit about yourself – Where are you from? What do you do day to day? What are you passionate about? What brings you to this study group?

We would also love to know what your goals are for this study group – both what you hope to get from the group and what you believe you can offer too. 

Once you have introduced yourself then we’d encourage you to spend some time getting to know the P2PU forum if you aren’t familiar with it so far. Karen Fasimpaur, one of the organizers of the School of Education, has posted a few videos that will give you a little overview. And if you have done work in P2PU before and have some ideas and suggestions to share, we’d love to hear about that too.

On Wednesday, March 7th, we will post the next task so keep an eye out for that too! 

Excited to be here together!

Christina, Katherine and Troy