SONJA BURROWS, PhD | Portfolio
Digital Book Club | A reading community pilot
Project Description: This is a pilot online book club community space created as a collaboration within Middlebury’s Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry between Sonja Burrows and a student intern interested in researching digital communities of practice. The result of the collaboration was the creation of an online book club where members could reflect on scholarly texts. The book club began its work with the text Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya U. Noble, PhD, published 2018.
Design: This space is built with a full-installation of WordPress and designed as part of a mentorship created between Sonja Burrows and a student intern. The site consists of prompts based on each chapter of the text, as well as additional space where members can contribute food for thought so as to further develop ideas based on the shared reading and processing of the text. Members of the digital book club could then collectively post and comment on chapters of the chosen text.
Additional Features: Although the space was originally created to discuss Algorithms of Oppression, a text which was highly relevant to the work of the Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry at the time, the idea behind the creation of this space was that eventually it might incorporate meaningful online discussions about a multitude of texts. The intention of the pilot was to design and implement a book discussion space where members could freely connect and reflect on texts in a way that invited connections and discussions in an informal, friendly, scholarly environment. As a result of this pilot community space, the student intern was given the opportunity to process the design and use of the digital book club through a public blog post published for the wider Middlebury campus community to read.
Sonja Burrows served as Instructional Designer and Mentor on this project as part of her work with Middlebury’s Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry. Please send a message to request further information.
