Digital Compositions   Many of the genres in composition courses could take the form of digital compositions. A brochure, white paper, or technical guide could be a website. A proposal could include a slide presentation. A feature article or travel guide could be a video. An interview or manifesto might take the form of an online comic. In addition, one might think about the potential for different kinds of compositional practices that are afforded to writers in blogs, wikis, and collaborative writing environments like Google Docs. As such a digital composition might be a blog that accompanied a research project, where a student wrote about the various pieces of research she uncovered, embedded relevant images, videos and links, and reflected on the research process. Such a blog could be constructed as a formal writing assignment. In that case, you might spend time in class talking about the design of the blog, building a community of blogs, the rhetorical features of a research blog, and so on. On the other hand, the blog could be an informal writing assignment, in which case you might leave it more open to experimentation. Digital compositions are also a good opportunity for students to have experience with multi-author projects. It’s difficult to make a video without others. Wikis allow students to build on each others’ writing. Even a website can be easily shaped as a group project as it can be constructed online where everyone can get access to the document. If taken as formalized assignments collaborative works can be difficult to judge, so you should be prepared to outline clearly what your expectations and grading criteria will be, as well as providing some initial guidance on the ins-and-outs of generating a multi-author text. As the Program Policy memo states, you are expected to incorporate regular informal writing into your courses. In most cases it makes sense that this informal writing would take place online (e.g. in UBlearns). It also makes sense that the informal online writing could and should serve as a foundation for more formal digital compositions. For example, if students use a wiki as an informal writing space, as a place for sharing research for example, that work might serve as a foundation for the creation of websites as a formal writing assignment. The user interface for creating a wiki page is not very different from the interface for creating a web page on a template-driven site like Google Sites.