The open gallery introduces variation–a lift!–to the withering paces of the
semester. I’d never tried anything quite like it before, and to be honest,
even though I listed it on the course schedule for WRT302, I considered a
reversal of plans right up until two days before. The open gallery
emphasizes circulation, conversation; whatever the compositional pieces,
there’s a gathering, music, movement, laughter. A lightness.

Eleven students are now enrolled in the course. They’d been working on their
"combinatorial scenes" (imagework and logics of association and juxtaposition)
applied to arrangements of image and text (other conceptual hooks in Barthes’
studium and punctum). Tabblo, Flickr, Wayfaring, and Flash. We meet
in the computer cluster (a lab, basically). Guests passed through much like they
would at any other sort of gallery, browsing, taking in glimpses, chatting
informally: "What have you done?". And there was a bowl of Halloween candy for
ramping up the blood sugars.

To be fair, I agreed to do what I could to encourage attendance provided
everyone else brought a guest. Many students arrived with guests; a few did not.
My own emails to the department and graduate program listservs persuaded a few
colleagues to drop by (although acknowledgements were off on my listserv
account, and I was unconvinced that the invitation had been distributed, so I
re-sent it…for some it poured, like a good sp&m, into their inboxes three
times, and still, they didn’t attend the gallery).

We planned to hold the open gallery for just thirty minutes, 1-1:30, although
our class ordinarily convenes for 80 minutes, from 12:45-2:05. The
narrowed time-frame allowed us to meet for a few minutes before people started
showing up, and it left us time at the end of things (around 1:40) to talk about
how it had gone, what would have been better had we done it another way.
We could have promoted it more aggressively by chalking the quad and posting
fliers, but too large a crowd might have upset the cadence in the room. In
other words, with just 20-25 people (including class members), everyone was able
to move at a reasonable pace from station to station and take it all in without
being hurried.

I would do this again. I like the idea of opening up the classroom,
especially opening it to students who might be interested in taking a course or
the proximate but distant colleagues who have only a vague sense of what happens
in a course called "digital writing." Because it went well, I want to continue to look for other ways to generalize the open gallery to other courses, other occassions to feature what we do.