#DigiWriMo: 50K Digital words in 30 days

…I've been doing #NaNoWriMo since 2004 or thereabouts. First year, my laptop went south on me within sight of the finish line. Since then I've completed every year. I still couldn't say why I do it either except that I've gotten in the habit. It's become a November ritual.

NaNo, as a computer assisted writing project, meets base line blog requirements. The Hybrid Pedagogy folk assured me that DigiWriMo would compliment not conflict with NaNo, so I registered. Come to find out, what they have in mind is different enough that conflict seems inevitable. So am I in or am I out?

Digital Writing Month (@DigiWriMo) is a wild ride through the world of digital writing, wherein those daring enough to participate will wield keyboard and cursor to create 50,000 words in the thirty short days of November. Can’t imagine writing 50,000 words? Drop in anyway! We’ll have lots of exercises to bend your brain, break your habits, and 
basically rock your writing world. 

Still blissfully unaware of the potential wrath of Stephen over using "collaborative" instead of "cooperative," they have also listed it as a MOOC.  My month of writing is less "wild abandon" than solitary, permission to write badly for a month without editing, revising, giving a thought to readers. Since DigiWriMo sponsor and participants have been going on about social media and collaboration, we could be at cross purposes here.

Never mind, it's a mooc and presumably a connectivist one, so I'll just do it the way I want: do their parts their way when it suits but not when it doesn't. Take or follow what I want, ignore the rest. In other words, I am but on my own terms. Now to figure out what those are...and how this turn changes NaNo. Turning social media (whether usual output or created for the occasion) into a plot (even a post modern one) will be the real challenge.

Nor will it all take place or be recorded here either. My #WriMo ~ its own distributed network. I started a Google Reader folder for just plain #wrimo, already populated with a handful of alert and blog feeds. #digiwrimo in Topsy shows significant traffic already and related links. Of the November #acwrimo (for academic writing), the less said the better.

Digital Writing Month for 50K Digital words in 30 days is hosted by Marylhurst English and Digital Humanities program, modeled after NaNoWMo and sponsored by Hybrid Pedagogy.