Backwards Story Writing: Using Today’s Meet for writing

I’m not sure how this will work, but I want to try an experiment and I want to invite you along for the ride. Yesterday, I discovered a backchannel platform called Today’s Meet. It’s a nice, simple site to use, and is designed for the audience to “talk” during lectures and presentations, etc.

I wondered if it could also be used for a sort of collaborative writing, although the trick here is that the postings are done in reverse time order, so that the last part of the story has to be written first. That means that the first part of the story — the introduction — will need to be written last.

Do you follow me?

Oh, yeah, and you can only write in 140 character bursts. Forgot about that.

One nice element of Today’s Share is that you can click on the “transcript” link and see the postings in reverse order (so, from latest to oldest) and there is a “presentation” link, too, that shows you what folks have been writing.

So, visit the Today’s Meet that I set up for this writing activity: http://todaysmeet.com/Collabstory and see if you can add a piece to the story puzzle. There is no login or anything. Just create a name and start writing and we’ll see where it goes.

I wrote the ending already:

By the time it was all over, she wondered whether the device would actually work the way it was designed. She honestly did not know.

I have no idea who she is, what the device is, nor what it is designed to do (nor why it needs to do what it is designed to do). And why doesn’t she know? I have no clue.

Thanks for joining me! Spread the link through your networks, too. Not only for the writing, but also to explore the site for possible use in your classroom. That’s what I am doing.

Peace (in the collaboration),
Kevin