ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that digital writing and design projects can nourish and sustain students reading, particularly in courses in which students must engage with and learn a great deal of new and often unfamiliar content about a subject. Qualley describes a quarter-long, digital literacy curation project using Prezi in her upper level “Studies in Literacy” course. For this project, students become content curators, designers, and information architects as they gradually built their own archive about literacy. Qualley discusses how the project works using examples from student’s projects to reveal the kinds of robust understanding students achieve. Digital writing and design projects that require students to continually backtrack through the course reading in order to illuminate new links and connections between concepts and ideas not only blur the boundaries between reading and writing practices; they also dismantle them. The author also offers a cautionary tale about the risks associated with relying on proprietary software.
