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Over 6 weeks, Mr. Long challenged 57 students to analyze Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — via their copies of The Annotated Alice — by publishing their questions & reflections in real-time on a very global scale.  All student progress was transparently shared with anyone who visited project blogs.

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While Mr. Long was available for one-on-one/small group consultation upon student request, he did not formally lecture or analyze the text in class.

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The goal was for the students’ learning/discovery experience to conceptually mirror Alice ‘finding her way’ through Wonderland.  Instead of directing the curriculum in a traditional manner, Mr. Long shifted to the role of ‘publisher.’  All entries and comments were moderated by Mr. Long, but students were expected to take responsibility for co-editing each each others work to ensure quality submissions.   ‘Audience’ & ‘voice’ was always a central focus.

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Each student joined a team of 3-4 peers to co-publish a team blog, sharing responsibilities as ‘editors’ and ‘authors’ both in and out of class.  Each student was challenged to publish a minimum of 12+ individual blog entries (of two 7+ sentence paragraphs) and to comment at least 15+ times on the other 12 student blogs in order to be guaranteed a “gentleman’s C” at the end of the project.  Additionally, each team was challenged to explore various web 2.0 tools (Prezi, CoverItLive, VoiceThread, etc) to showcase various ideas and conversations, as well as to re-design the team website thematically.

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Finally, each student had access to his/her own wireless laptop, allowing the classroom to become a fully dedicated writing lab and publishing studio.

Multi-Genre Autobiography