Maggie Messitt is a Ph.D Candidate in Creative Writing – Nonfiction at Ohio University, Writing & Rhetoric Instructor at Ohio University, she’s taught for 10-plus years in varying capacities including inner city America, rural South Africa, a minimum-security Prison, and the university classroom, and a freelance writer and editor for North American and southern African publications for the last ten years. Maggie has been exploring ways to use Learnist in her university classroom and within her digital classroom on LORE.
Maggie talks about Learnist and it’s place in education. “This absolutely has a place and will definitely engage my students more than handing them a piece of paper. Not to mention, it plays into having a paper-less, green classroom (an aspiration of mine that is likely not to become reality). I will slowly build boards to which my students can refer as they work to tackle their individual grammar and writing rule needs, tackle research on writing constructs, and struggle through the process of writing a fairly intense scholarly research essay. Basically, I’m building a library for my students to reference when they don’t have me at their direct disposal. This library will hopefully ignite action within them and inspire higher-level thinking.”
As an educator at the university level Maggie is looking forward to collaborating with her students on Learnist. Maggie points out, “What I’m most excited about, however, are the lesson plans I have created within which my students and I will use Learnist to learn the process of researching and citing sources. Discuss and question the concept of “idea ownership” and plagiarism. Explore organization and the presentation of clear ideas and arguments. Together, in our class, we will collaboratively build our own Learnist board that mirrors an essay.”
As a professional writer, primarily focused on human rights issues, Maggie is also using Learnist to share information she has learned through in-depth research, often first-hand. Maggie mentions, “These subjects run the gamut, but I’ve started by developing a series of Learnist boards on Prisons in America where I hope Learnist users will not only learn about a sector of our society and population with whom you’re not likely to frequently engage or about which you’re note likely discuss over the dinner table. For me, it allows me to present subjects that would normally be passed up due to their complexity and fringe status. With Learnist I’ve been able to present admittedly dense information with videos, audio, photography, essays, and my own experiential text, and somehow convince more than 1600+ users (over a weeks time) to explore a basic primer of prison issues in America.”
Follow Maggie and her boards on Learnist here: http://learni.st/users/maggiemessitt
