Inspired by some wonderful discussions with colleagues at other institutions---notably Rob Deemer's composition pedagogy community on Facebook---I have decided to place as much of the documentation of my own composition curriculum in public in the hopes that others might find it useful and correct my errors or omissions. This similar to the philosophies underlying open-source software, and I'm using the same tools.
I write most of my documents in Markdown (see further information below), a plain-text format. I use Git (via Atlassian's free SourceTree application) to track changes in my curriculum.
This may seem super-geeky, and frankly, it is super-geeky. But I think it's a valuable way to keep myself organized and provide a resource to the community. I would be happy to help you set up your own similar repository (the name for this kind of space) if you're interested. Contact me via email (davidjohnmacdonald@gmail.com) or on Twitter (@davemacdo).
These are documents I originally developed for the Composition Area at the University of Central Florida. The files are written in Fletcher Penney's MultiMarkdown, which is mostly (but not completely) compatible with Github-Flavored Markdown. Notably, footnotes and file transclusion don't work. So if you seem some weird-looking stuff in the MD rendering on Github, that's why. I'm planning to set this stuff up on GH pages as well so that it will render correctly there, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
I am happy to read and consider pull requests. However, this is my main repo for my actual course documents, so my personal pedagogical proclivities will carry the most weight here. Please fork this repo and share your own work. I'd love to read it. If nothing else, please file an "issue," which is a bit like a discussion board thread. No geekitude required (outside of setting up an account).
A few things about the degree program that goes with these documents:
- The courses included here are private lessons for upper division undergraduates and graduate students.
- Most students will be working with this curriculum for six semesters: two semesters of Comp 1-2 class and four semesters of lessons.