Distributed Digital Essay

Academia connects with social media

Abstract

A key challenge faced by higher education is the evolution of assessment tasks to better suit the participatory and collaborative way in which our students use the web. This paper provides a model for a distributed digital essay that incorporates academic rigour with the peer discourse that has become the norm for digitally literate scholars active in social media. Our model is derived from a community of inquiry approach and prioritises students' engagement with the academic literature in their discipline. The model empowers the students to extend their learning community beyond the boundaries of their particular student cohort into a professional network. Students produce a digital artefact in which they expound their evidence-based knowledge and also demonstrate how they have used social media to test and consolidate their understanding. We provide an example that demonstrates how the distributed digital essay task was integrated into an online, postgraduate unit with an inquiry-based approach to learning.