Welcome to CLMOOC Summer 2018!

(Image credit: created by Sarah Honeychurch with original image from wikipedia)

Another summer comes around, and with it another opportunity to come together and connect across the globe. This year CLMOOC is going to tap into the activities organised by the National Writing Project and the National Park Service, who are running a #Write Out open learning project from July 15 – 29, 2018.

As a prelude to Write Out, and then as an accompaniment to it, we’ve put together some activities along a similar theme which we hope you’ll engage with over the course of the month of July.

Image credit: Sheri Edwards

Daily “Doodle”

As some of you will know, over the last few months we’ve been encouraging each other to produce a daily “doodle” and share it with each other in our various spaces (see below for some of these). For the month of July, we’ve put together a list of daily creative prompts which you can see in the image at the top of this post. Although we’re calling this a daily doodle activity, we hope to encourage a myriad of multimedia responses – sounds, photography, doodling, poetry, collage, writing, etc. – whatever the prompt moves you to create. If you’re looking for some inspiration, here’s a month’s worth of doodles by our very own Susan Watson, which you can hack, copy or use to write your own stories about – whatever takes your fancy.

The Daily Connect

The Daily Connect is a riff off the DS106 Daily Create and offers a daily invitation to create and to collaborate. The Daily Connect site has gone through a few iterations, starting as a site for Connected Courses, and then revamping for Digital Writing Month, and now periodically being a part of CLMOOC. This summer, each day’s doodle prompt will be sent forth from The Daily Connect as a reminder to get your colored pencils out. Since The Daily Connect is a WordPress site, you can sign up to get email reminders for the posts as well if it is helpful, but all posts will also be shared via Twitter, too.

Map/photo/poem activity

Another place for connections is found on this Padlet wall, which was was inspired by Margaret Simon and Molly Hogan’s work. Take a picture (or two or three…) of place(s) that speak to you. “Place” could reflect your local geography, somewhere you like to hang out, a spot elsewhere in the world that is significant to you. Maybe “place” includes some local flora and fauna, landmarks, or a local spot not typically known by casual visitors. The possibilities are endless! Add the photo(s) to the Padlet wall here, with a brief explanation. Others may want to dig deeper!

Once you’ve posted your photo(s), browse through the Padlet wall and find a photo that catches your attention. Write a poem that expresses your reaction and stick it to the wall. Like all definitions in CLMOOC, “poem” is a loose term. We invite you to use any form(s) that appeal to you: verse, multimedia, sound, image, animation.

Finally, establish a “connection” so that we all know which poems go with which photos. To add a connector in Padlet: Hover the cursor at the top of the Padlet post of your poem.

Click on the three dots (…).
Click on “Connect to a post.”
Select the photo you want to connect to, and optionally add a label to the link. A suggestion is to include a social media “handle” as your label so that photographers and poets can find each other for further conversations.

We also invite you to write your own poem about your photo(s). Once another person has posted their poetic reaction, add your poem to the wall and also connect it to your photo.

Bonus Postcard Sharing

We thought it would be fun to join all of this up with our monthly postcard theme, and so we invite you to share your doodles, poems or images on a postcard. You might:

Take one of the daily doodle prompts, and share the results in postcard form.
Print the image you added to the Padlet, and send it into the world.
Write out or print out the poem, and share that with somebody in postcard form.
Draw us a picture of your home, or a place that means something special to you.
Do anything else that reminds you of doodles, or poetry, or places.

To join us, go here to sign up (and add more topics if you wish!). (Make sure you’ve signed up for our other CLMOOC postcard list first so you have postal addresses.) The way you share your postcards is totally up to you — mail just one data postcard to one person on the list or make some for a few people. We don’t expect you to send a postcard to everyone on the list — you can, but that might be a lot of work. We’ll be engaging with this throughout the month of July with the hopes of getting something in the mail by the end of the month (more or less – no hard rules!).

Places to Share

Whatever you do this month, we encourage you to share it with CLMOOC. Some of the regular places are listed below.

In Google Plus, you can join our CLMOOC Community;
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #clmooc hashtag this summer;
And/or post to the CLMOOC Facebook group;
We also have a CLMOOC Flickr group for photos.
You can post your thoughts on your own blog (and then consider posting a link to one of the above);