Carey Sargent and Christopher Gilman (Occidental College)
When teachers and instructional designers leverage digital platforms to make undergraduate students write (or visualize) for “the public,” who is the public that students imagine, and to what pedagogical effects? We present a brief case study of how students have used Global Crossroads*, a custom-built media sharing and annotation platform that publishes to a large-scale media installation at the center of campus. We explain how Global Crossroads, in its design and the ways students have chosen to use it, generates a legible public that is both imagined, through how students see themselves in relation to their peers, and enacted, though the intentional sharing and display among peers within and across courses. For this interactive presentation at #BUDSC15 we entreat our colleagues to a collaborative assignment design challenge: What can we, as teachers and instructional designers, do to expand students’ critical reflection on how particular platforms (e.g., wordpress, tumblr, twitter, story maps, etc.) organize communication, authorship, and audience, while also intentionally constituting public audiences for student work?