For the past year and a half, Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing has been providing editorial and technical support to the Generative Literature Project, which is producing a crowdsourced, gamified digital novel about a murder. Hybrid Pedagogy is publishing a series of weekly updates and reflections about the project, collaboratively authored by several of the student and instructor participants. In this installment, Matt Jacobi and Mia Zamora reflect on the process of creating a character profile for Mike Sterling to support the class’s collaborative mission of bringing to life the character of Dr. Rachel Behar.
Mike Sterling, by all accounts, is a mild-mannered small business owner who lives and works in Theopolis, Maryland, not far from the esteemed college of the same name. Mike runs a small bookstore, which he inherited from his late aunt, specializing in old and rare books. He has a golden retriever named Duck whom he tries to take on runs in the mornings, but he usually ends up sitting on a bench in the park and throwing things to the dog for half an hour before going to open up the shop. The thing about Mike, and Duck, and Theopolis, is that they’re all fictional. Mike, and a cast of other characters who are part of the Theopolis College community, are all products of student work in Mia Zamora’s Writing Electronic Literature course at Kean University, as part of the Generative Literature Project.
Read the full post here: Creating Mike Sterling for the #GenLit Project