Since taking Richard Miller’s Writing as a Naturalist, I continued to meet with him on a regular basis as I learned to publish ideas effectively. I learned to study complexity. I thought to myself, “There should be more people publishing their meaningful experiences”.
The city was full of vibrant communities, but there was no digital access to information. Students did not know about the happenings of the city, and the city wasn’t concerned with the students. I wanted to bridge this gap of town/gown relations. So, I started a blog.
I began teaching students how to publish with meaning. I wanted to teach the students how to use the tools and then provide an environment which encourages their imagination to create uniquely personalized work. To my surprise, eight Rutgers undergraduates enrolled in the Spring 2010 program. Each required to work 120 hours for moxieTODAY and in return they were awarded three credits towards graduation.
I held weekly meetings with the interns at the Plangere Writing Center, provided a collaborative work space for them on Facebook, created user accounts for them to have access so they could log in and make posts, and I provided them with contact information of local community members that were interested in bringing new media to their projects.
The students learned about blogging, social media campaigns, email marketing, video editing, and various creative tactics to drive traffic to moxieTODAY. I leveraged the website traffic by selling adspace on moxieTODAY.com. I signed 13 local businesses that purchased adspace for 4 months for a total of $560. It wasn’t an outrageous amount of money. But this was a success being that the blog was only a month old when we started.