MixedInk is seeking high school social studies and English teachers in the tri-state area interested in testing standards-based collaborative writing projects in their classrooms.

Here is a brief overview of our plan:

1. Brainstorm project ideas. After a brief phone call to discuss your preferences, you can choose from a range of collaborative writing project ideas.
2. Design lesson plan. We will create a customized lesson plan based on the content you are teaching.
3. Software demonstration. If desired, a MixedInk representative will demonstrate our collaborative writing platform via screenshare.
4. Start project & in-class observation. As you implement the lesson plan with your class, we will conduct a one-day classroom visit to observe and provide support with the software if necessary.
5. Student & teacher surveys. You and your students will each complete a brief online survey.

Your feedback will provide a valuable resource for other teachers and help to inform MixedInk’s development. In thanks for your cooperation, MixedInk will provide you with one year of free access to our soon-to-be-unveiled premium educator features for the number of classes in which you test it.

To find out more or to sign up to participate, please contact Bryan Rosen at Bryan@mixedink.com.

I had the great pleasure of co-leading a conversation about “the remix” at the EduCon gathering on January 29-31. Held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the conference focuses on innovation and the future of schools & education. Here is the description of our session, The Art of the Remix in the Social Media Classroom, from the conference website:

Remixing is as old as art itself. As digital technologies expedite the transition from passive consumers of text to an engaged, read/write culture, we explore the pedagogical benefits of the remix in relation to literacy and tackle the thorny issues of plagiarism and illegal appropriation.

I worked with Leif Gustavson, a professor from Arcadia University, who teaches pre-service graduate students studying education. His students regularly use MixedInk to craft collaborative reflections on their field work, remixing their unique ideas into one collective piece.

Leif started our EduCon conversation with an experiment in collaborative writing: the exquisite corpse. The exquisite corpse is a game that originated with the Surrealists in the 1920s, and, as André Breton describes, is a “game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations.” The game was named when Surrealists first played the game and came up with this phrase: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” Reflecting on the exquisite corpse, Breton says: “What excited us about these productions was the assurance that, for better or worse, they bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone…”

We played this game during our conversation at EduCon, resulting in a wonderful (or shall I say exquisite) set of exquisite corpses. Check out a few of my favorites below!

1.
A trampoline of brain sparks
Staring into the abyss
Ring fingers
Panicked
Snow crunches beneath me
I want more cake
Chocolate, melted and sticky
Groceries on the mind
Sense of wonder
Time
To engage completely
The unexpected fate

2.
Time stood still
Cold nose wet paw
A warm buzzing
Singing loudly
Yellow sunshine
Dynamism between rabblerousing
A little too close for comfort
Another knuckle sandwich
Rabbit poop
Group effort, one mind
Nice!

3.
Pressured body
Hidden by an open window
Missing myself, feeling old
Stinky grids
Through the wind
Showing creativity
Leaping off twitter cliffs
Tiny little redundancies
Stillness

4.
Falling lightly
Patience
Snowflakes dancing underneath
It became so important
A vast! Below!
Lithesome beauty
Feeling relaxed with green
With fallen leaves crunching beneath my feet
Quiet
Change the channel!
Breath of air
The pen explodes on paper

Pretty impressive! When we started the process, I noticed a bit of nervousness in the group. Very quickly, though, the process erased the stress, since we shared responsibility for the end product. The weight of writing was broken down into something manageable – and fun. In the end, we were struck by the surprising cohesion of the poems we created – what Nicolas Calas described as the “unconscious reality in the personality of the group.”

MixedInk enables exactly this sort of interaction – by encouraging people to build upon each other’s ideas, it removes the barrier of getting a first draft on paper. With MixedInk, original versions are just a foundation, the building blocks for something new. As one of Leif’s students said after using MixedInk, “In the end, you have this amazing explosion of thoughts and ideas that belong to a group of people.” I love how the exquisite corpse process leads to the same end – what another student described as “creating new meaning through the mixing of everyone’s words.”

Many thanks to Leif for helping us discover MixedInk’s surrealist roots!  If you have a collaborative writing experiment for us to try, please leave it in a comment.

MixedInk is excited to be participating in the Innovation Incubator Program at this year’s SIIA Ed Tech Summit in San Francisco. We’ll be presenting at the conference and demoing in the exhibit hall – there’s also a virtual exhibit set up at: http://k-12.veplatform.com – check it out!

For those of you who have been tracking MixedInk’s progress, you might be surprised to see us at an education-focused conference. While our platform was originally designed as a tool for citizen engagement, we’ve been excited to see a lot of use among educators. We have also had other positive feedback from educators; aside from being selected for this conference, we’ve been covered enthusiastically by a number of education blogs, the service is being included in MIT’s New Media Literacies learning library, and – most importantly – teachers have given us great feedback.

Within the classroom, it generally works as follows: First, a teacher sets up a project for their class describing the collective text the students will create. Then, students submit their own versions of the text, edit their peers’ work, and weave different versions together to form new ones. At the same time, students comment on submissions and rate different versions to bring the best written, most popular ideas to the top. At the end, the class can explore the strengths and weaknesses of the top-rated collective text(s).

Using a democratic and collaborative system, the tool encourages students to take creative risks in their writing, understand varying perspectives among their peers, evaluate the quality of what they are reading, and gain experience working as members of a team. The process increases student engagement by building on their online behavior outside the classroom, fostering a sense of community among students, and enabling peer-to-peer learning.