“Reimagining Student Writing with Medium”
Dr. Scott Ortolano, Professor of English, Florida SouthWestern State College, www.ScottOrtolano.com, Follow me on Twitter @FL_EnglishProf
This Medium essay was created as a companion for a video presentation for the Teaching and Learning Center at Florida SouthWestern State College. If you have found this essay by chance, consider watching the video presentation as well. It includes some bonus content (like a guided tutorial of how to use the program).
Medium is a program that pulls items from the general internet or from your computer/mobile device and easily weaves them into a unified document. The program allows students to create a multimodal digital essay with relative ease. As such, it presents a wonderful opportunity for faculty to help students demonstrate their understanding of course content beyond a traditional essay or PowerPoint presentation. Perhaps more importantly, the essays they create will better reflect the kind of digital content that they encounter and create in the “real world.”
Your Course is Completely Transformed!!!!
Okay, maybe there’s more to it than that, but current assignments can be modified into a digital essay with very few adjustments or this can even be presented as an opportunity for ambitious students to have an alternative, more challenging version of an already established assignment.
We exist in a world where the idea of literacy itself is undergoing a rapid transformation. As Daniel Keller notes in Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration, “Literacies include a diversity of language and culture as well as a range of expressive modes offered by various media. Instead of literacy being tied to alphabetic text and a set of encoding-decoding skills, literacy is recognized in a range of semiotic modes and in the various life domains of schools, homes, workplaces, and public spaces, where literacies are valued and used in different ways” (32–3). Projects like Medium essays are an essential component of helping students become fluid communicators in a world in which communication relies upon knowing how to employ the written word in conjunction with a host of other digital elements.
This is one of the reasons why Medium projects make such frequent appearances in our composition and literature courses. Such projects help students write in a mode that is more truly reflective of the sort of public-facing informal and formal compositions that occur in the world at large. In the process, they answer the call that scholars like Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks make in Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments:
“Writing instruction appropriate for the world today requires us to consider what new skills and dispositions students might need for the digital age” (11).
Students exit assignments such as this with a deeper understanding of what an effective digital text looks like, how images, videos, document design, hyperlinks, etc. can and need to be used effectively to deepen the effectiveness of the text that they are creating. In learning these skills, they also create a product that more fully engages the content they are discussing than would be possible via a traditional media.
You do, of course, want to think through how you use the program so as not to oversimplify things. Makes sure that this is a project in which the opportunity to employ digital elements can actually improve the work students are doing. You also wouldn’t want to use a Medium assignment in a course where a project needs to be formatted in a specific way (e.g., with an appendix, etc.).
Keep in mind that these documents also exist in the cloud so you won’t be able to mark them up like you would a PDF or Word Document. Students turn in the link to their finished Medium essay and you then view the project on the web.
The program is widely used by a variety of professional writers across a host of genres. In fact, you can find work from some of FSW’s own faculty members on Medium. If you look at the story below, you’ll see work from Professor Leonard Owens, a new full-time faculty member in the English Department:
The benefit of so many professional writers writers using the platform is that it means that you may find readings for students that have been created in the program that you are asking them to compose in. As such, they effectively can serve as readings and model assignments for students.
How I Use Medium in My ENC 1101 (Composition I) Course
This project concludes my Composition I course by capping our explorations of the interconnections among writing, narrative, the world, and the self. Just as importantly, the project lays an essential foundation for Composition II’s emphasis on digital literacy. This project focuses on their development as students and/or writers throughout the semester. To move beyond the written word, they integrate multimedia at every stage of your journey to function as a digital parallel to their growth. These digital components reinforce themes and dominant impressions about their experiences during each phase of the semester. Students enjoy this opportunity to take a step back and reflect on a significant moment in their journey as writers and college students.
You can find and download the assignment guidelines for this project here:
Because you can’t mark up the document as you would a traditional essay, I free write comments in each section of the grading rubric and leave a final note in Canvas. You can see the rubric that I use for my Comp I courses here:
I use the following Medium essays in the course as we build up to this assignment so that students can see a sample of what professional writers have done in the medium:
The program is remarkably easy to use and also has a free smartphone app.
Click here for Medium’s tutorials on how to use the program on a desktop or smartphone.
Keep in mind that the video version of this presentation also includes a detailed walkthrough about how to use the program:
Just as importantly, the program allows students to easily caption the content that they integrate, and its built-in image search feature uses free-to-use images via Unsplash, which offers an opportunity to talk about fair use.
Finally, Medium gives students the option of making the project unlisted so that only people with the URL can access the program, and you can find a quick explanation of how to do this here by clicking here.
As I noted at the start of this essay, Medium can be used to expand a current project in a plethora of courses across every field and discipline. Really any PowerPoint or essay could easily be transformed into a Medium assignment. It provides a far more organic way for students to create and present this sort of blended content.
Prof. Eleanor Bunting, for example, uses Medium in the English department’s main LIT 2000 master course as a fun late-semester assignment that provides students with the opportunity to explore a book that has left a significant impact on the world.
You can see the assignment Guidelines for this project below as well as the sample assignment that Prof. Bunting created for the class (both items shared with permission):
Quick Tips for Assigning Projects in Your Own Courses:
- Tip 1: Try to reserve a computer room for the day that you assign the project.
- Tip 2: Create some sort of quick in-class assignment that will push students to use a variety of tools.
- Tip 3: Show students how to make the project private when you do the initial walkthrough. Have them do this for the project that they make for the in-class exercise. It is important to make sure that they know how to do this, and it will save you many emails down the road.
- Tip 4: High schools block Medium. Some students may have issues if they rely on a high school Chromebook for computer access. You can remind students about the free smartphone app as well as the availability of technology at FSW (via the library and computer labs or through their ability to check out laptops). Still, if a student has a significant hurdle here, my advice is to work with them as much as possible and allow for alternative versions of the assignment — in Word, PowerPoint, etc.).
In short, Medium is a fun, easy-to-use, and engaging program that can help your students produce a nuanced and creative assignment. Furthermore, because of how easy the program is to use, it presents an ideal stepping stone project for folks who are interested in using more digital projects but unsure about how to start.
For those of you who are interested in learning more about digital pedagogy and its use in the classroom, please consider joining one or both of the following groups!
Digital Pedagogy Reading Group
You can also request to be added directly to our Microsoft Teams site by clicking here
Community of Practice in Instructional Technology
The Community of Practice in Instructional Technology is a wonderful transdisciplinary group that comes together the second Monday of each month to discuss how we use technology in the classroom as well as in other aspects of our professional lives. We are always on the lookout for new members, and feel free to email me at SOrtolano@fsw.edu if you want to join our Canvas group. Joining this group gives you access to all of our resources and lets you be the first to receive updates about upcoming events or other important group business.
Congratulations! You Made It to the End!!!
If you’ve stayed with the essay this long, let me just say thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to learn a little bit about this program. Feel free to message me at SOrtolano@fsw.edu if there are any questions or concerns that I can help you with.
This work has been published under an Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
- for any purpose, even commercially.
