Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning is intended to assist anyone embarking on open teaching. It offers foundational methods, examples, and explanatory theories for how to set up the practices of a class, how to determine guiding principles, how to theorize what you are doing in the classroom, how to design the class, how to include multimedia elements and approaches such as games, and how to ensure that you have designed a class for inclusion, not exclusion. Finally, the openness of the learning should continue even after the book is published/goes public, and the chapters in the “Invitations” section offer advice on how to extend your open practices to the world beyond the classroom. This is by no means the only way to set up peer-to-peer teaching, but it is an account of the way we have done it, with as much detail as possible to encourage others to try, in whatever way suits their community and purposes.

We expect the audience of our book to be multiple. We anticipate it will be of use to seasoned teachers and professors who have practiced peer-to-peer forms of teaching in the past as well as those new to the methods and who want to try it for a first time. We see this method working for high school students, undergraduates, and graduate students in many fields as well as for lifelong learners of all ages, in any setting. Our method and our topic happen to match—a collaboratively produced, peer-written book about open learning. However, we are convinced that the methods of open learning and peer-to-peer collaboration work in courses as diverse as writing courses, ethnographic courses, history courses, or in such fields as computer science and engineering. After all, the World Wide Web exists because Tim Berners-Lee and others believed in the power of open collaboration, and designed HTML and the open architecture of the Web to take advantage of the best that open source programmers could offer to one another. It is our goal to take that method and translate it to the classroom. It worked for us. We hope that by providing “field notes” from our experience others will be inspired to try as well. We hope, in turn, that they will offer their own contributions, their own notes from whatever field they are in.

We are publishing this book on multiple platforms. On the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC, pronounced “haystack,” at hastac.org), we tie into an 11,000-person networked community already committed to open online learning. On hastac.org, our book will allow for chapter-by-chapter commentary. On Rap Genius (rapgenius.com) anyone of the millions who wish to be part of that community may annotate in any medium line-by-line or in sections. On Github, the most popular open source code repository site, we hope our book will find an audience among programmers and others invested in the open Web. And as an open Google Doc, anyone will be able to comment and also to download a pdf of the whole book and remix and fork and hack it any way you wish. Finally, Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies is also available as a bound, printed book from CreateSpace, an Amazon site, and it can be downloaded as a pdf from a Google Doc that we will share openly.

This book was written collaboratively over the course of the winter semester 2013 by graduate students at Duke University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University who enrolled in a course taught by Prof Cathy N. Davidson and offered by Duke’s English Department and its Program in Information Science + Information Studies. You can follow us on Twitter by searching for the course hashtag, #Duke21C.