Material Detail

Our primary goal is to provide the resources and community students need to improve their writing, particularly students enrolled in courses that require college-level writing. We aspire to be a "commons-based peer production" community. By this we mean that we hope that crowds of people--from experts such as professors and professional writers to undergraduate students--can collaborate with us to revise the pages we've already written as well as write new pages. By working collaboratively, we are hopeful that we can develop a new kind of writing textbook, a textbook not written by a single author in the old-school way but by us, by a crowd of people out there who think we need a new kind of writing text, one that is more interactive.

We believe learning materials should be free for all students and teachers–part of the cultural commons. Hence, we provide free access to an award-winning, college textbook that was published by a major textbook publisher and awarded the Distinguished Book Award by Computers and Writers, an academic journal. In the spirit of the cultural commons, we invite our members to revise and expand this text, so that it meets the needs of students and teachers in diverse writing courses, such as introductory composition courses, creative nonfiction workshops, poetry seminars, or workshops on new media.

We also believe that students learn best by sharing their writing, so if you are a student or an aspiring writer we invite you to use our community tools to discuss readings, drafts, and ideas for writing projects. Please feel free to blog, chat with classmates, and share pictures and notes. Teachers, you can use the group tools to establish discussion spaces for your classes and students in your classes can friend one another."