George Station and I are both teaching first year seminars (fys) this term and we have been considering ways to collaborate. My class is called “digital citizenship” and his is “technology and society” but we are both asking questions about the role that connected and networked technology is playing in our various worlds and in education.

Teaching first year seminar is interesting for me (this is my first time) as I am tasked with mixing the conversation that I want to have (digital citizenship) with the questions around fys like what it means to be an educated person, what is the difference between college and high school, and how can students start to learn about how they learn.

In trying to converge those two conversations George and I have been collaborating on a shared project between our two classes and we wanted to open it up to anyone else that might be interested in the practice of digital citizenship, technology and society, or in the experience of being a first year college student.

It all starts the week of October 17th when we will ask students to collaboratively annotate this Washington Post article about about why some students succeed in college while others don’t do so well. We will be using hypothesis so that all of the students can see and respond to each other’s annotations all week long.

Then, on October 25th we will all gather on twitter using the hashtag #fyschat for an all day twitter chat about the article, what it means to be a first year student, maybe what it was like to participate together using hypothesis…

If you are a first year college student, or if you are interested in the experience of first year students, I do hope that you will consider joining us for all or part of #fyschat in just a few weeks.