German 101 Book Publishing Project

This coming fall semester (2012) I’m trying something new with my German 101 class: we’re going to publish a book. I’ve helped other courses publish their work as magazines (e.g. Conexiones), and therefore have an established workflow in the language center for such print and epublication projects. One the student workers does all the layout and uploading of data, so students can focus on language production. We have used lulu with great success, so we will stick with that. The price will be set so that nobody makes a profit, but students and anybody else can buy the print versions if they wish to. The electronic version is free, of course.

Instead of a magazine we will publish a small book containing relevant, authentic stories that the students create. This is based on a constructionist view of learning, which means that the act of creation leads to a deeper underst

anding of and critical interaction with the subject matter. So instead of writing mini essays for me, they will all contribute to an actually published book that hopefully future German students might enjoy. We’ll see what the student come up with! Come back, I’ll publish the final result here on this blog.
If you want to see what previous German students in my classes have created, go here (VoiceThread 101 samples) or here (DST Immigration Project).