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what is a writer?" (I must admit I didn't come up with this brilliant idea, but adapted it from a suggestion from another instructor.) Students would always come up with different ideas about what that meant, but more often than not they never talked about themselves as writers. They thought of published authors as writers. They thought of people who sat in a sunlit room all day with a stack of white pages (or in front of a computer) as writers. They thought of people who were paid to write as writers. My students often did not think of themselves, or their instructors, as writers.

tell students on a regular basis that writing isn't only important because they need to graduate or pass a class but because it is the key to engaging other scholars in conversation. Even in informal media such as Twitter or Facebook we write to get our ideas across or to interact with other academics. And even though we can argue that academic writing is not the same as tweeting, the rules of engagement are similar: we value clear, well-argued writing in each case. We value thoughts that are well articulated. We value creative, interesting posts that steer away from the clichés. Therefore, I think the most important advice I can share with my writers is this: think of yourselves as writers.

I believe that thinking of yourself as a writer can change the way you feel about writing in general

How exactly do they think knowing their grade is going to help them improve??

'In other words,'' says Dr Sue Thomson, of the Australian Council for Educational Research, ''larger proportions of students can be described as 'strong performers' in the digital medium than in the print medium.''

If anything, what the new technologies will do is provide more opportunities to engage with long-form texts. The distribution mechanism will allow greater access. If you wanted to read almost anything on anything, I can almost guarantee there'll be 5000 words that someone's written about it somewhere, that you can get your hands on in an instant.'

''Everybody's either on a Kindle, emailing, texting, reading the news on their iPads. The digital revolution is not destroying reading. It's changing the shape, the form, the context and maybe how we do it, but I don't think it's diminishing it.''

Unlike traditional assignments where mistakes are marked wrong, this project will mark your mistakes as learning steps.

I encourage you to take risks and seek out information beyond what you think may or may not be right. In this forum, being right is hardly the end goal. Rather, the pursuit of greater understanding while exercising all of your options within a moral and ethical framework.

What happens when you take notes within a notebook? You eventually close that notebook and put it into a bag, or drawer. Only you possess that information. This is hardly the way our world works today and hardly the way we will conduct our research for this project.