Is digital discourse different? Should our writing instruction include preparation for writing publicly online? Could digital discourse help students grasp the rhetorical concepts of purpose, audience, argument, evidence, and the acknowledgement of sources in a more tangible way than more traditional writing assignments? Are there privacy concerns when encouraging students to create and interact with public media? What happens if a classroom assignment goes viral? Are there restrictions on the use of copyrighted material that students need to be aware of? How do you balance technical training with deeper learning? Is it worth it? Put another way, do we owe it to our students to understand public forms of discourse? I seem to have lost all of my punctuation except question marks, haven’t I?
This brought to mind a course at George Mason University entitled Lying About the Past. Their project was to create a hoax, with the goal of it getting picked up and reported as fact. There was an article about it in The Atlantic.
Is creating course projects with the hope of going viral a worthwhile exercise?