Category Archives: announcements

Assignment Run Down for Weeks 1 & 2

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Screen Shot 2014-08-28 at 10.05.08 PMDomain/Web Hosting and Blog Setup

Ok, so here is what you should have done already:

 

After you have your blog setup, add the URL to your site in the “Add link” section of the sidebar.

Brainstorming & Research Assignment

The brainstorming session in Thursday’s class was excellent. You took the topics in some directions we did not expect, so we’re impressed already.

Here are the topic assignments and at the very end of this post are the images of all the brainstorming we did on the whiteboards (thanks to Emily for the images):

  • Dalina – how it works, social/economic/cultural impactsclass_board_1
  • Kaitlin – how it works, how it has evolved
  • Gabby – how it has evolved, creation/consumption
  • Sean – how it has evolved, intellectual property/fair use
  • Peter – how it has evolved, privacy/openness
  • Thomas – where it’s going, digital identity
  • Matthew – where it’s going, how it works
  • Bridget – creation/consumption, how it has evolved
  • Thomas – creation/consumption, where it’s going
  • Justin – creation/consumption, intellectual property/fair use
  • Sheldon – intellectual property/fair use, creation/consumptionTIC104 White Board Brainstorming
  • Josiah – intellectual property/fair use, digital identity
  • Campbell – privacy/openness, social/economic/cultural impacts
  • Max – privacy/openness, how it works
  • Emily – privacy/openness, how it has evolved
  • Erin – digital identity, where it’s going
  • Douglas – digital identity, creation/consumption
  • Desiree – digital identity, intellectual property/fair use
  • Christopher – social/economic/cultural impacts, privacy/openness
  • Meredith – social/economic/cultural impacts, digital identity
  • Hannah – social/economic/cultural impacts, how it works

You will be responsible for finding and summarizing 3 readings on each topic, 6 readings in all. Apply the lessons of the CRAAP test when selecting your readings. Readings that you find through the library are more likely to be good to go. Readings that you find through Google generally need a closer evaluation. Anything that doesn’t list the author will probably be rejected.

Peter Catlin from the Simpson Library put together a research guide for this course in the Spring and he may update it based on your brainstorming. This will be a very helpful tool for you.

Enter the readings you select in the form on the course site. They will populate the spreadsheet also on that page. You should be able to see if the reading has already been taken. We will mark the readings green (good), yellow (okay), or red (rejected). You will want at least half of your readings to be green.

There is further information on summarizing and tagging the readings that you should adhere to for specific guidelines. Your readings need to be entered into the form and each of them needs to be summarized in an individual post (6 posts in all) no later than 9/4 to get full credit.  Any questions, let us know.

Additionally, you should be reading and blogging about the first four chapters of Where the Wizards Stay Up Late for next week.

For Thursday, 8/28

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For tomorrow, Thursday 8/28, you need to have your domain and web hosting setup, and an instance of WordPress installed. Here are a series of tutorials that will help you explore your own domain that: http://docs.umwdomains.com. Let us know if you have any questions or issues with that.

Also, in preparation for our brainstorming session tomorrow, please watch this five minute video on CRAAP:

Finally, for next Tuesday, September 2nd, read through chapter 4 (up to page 137) of Where the Wizards Stay Up Late—there were 12 copies left in the bookstore this morning.

Day 3: Research, Summaries, and WordPress

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1980 Commodore Pet Lab

Pacific Science Center, Seattle, Washington, 1980. (Photo: Unknown)

Hope the research is going well, let us know if you ‘re running into issues.  Here is a quick breakdown of what to expect in class tomorrow:

Be sure to bring a computer tomorrow, or let us know via email if we should bring one for you.

Day 2: Assignments, Tutorials and Slight Change of Plans

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It was great meeting all of you today. and looking forward to day two. As a heads up, we will actually be meeting in duPont 215 tomorrow, Tuesday, May 20th, at 10:15 AM, not Simpson library. The library classroom is undergoing some work, so it would be best to start in duPont 215. As a follow-up to today’s class, you will all be expected to watch the CRAAP video, read chapters 1 and 2 of Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, and setup your domain and install WordPress in a subdomain titled internet. Below are some useful links:

Additionally, below are tutorials for navigating cPanel, creating a subdomain, and installing WordPress through Installatron:

Have fun, and let us know if you have any question or issues.

The Internet Strikes Back

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Tomorrow starts the second session of The Internet Course. But instead of the leisurely twice-a-week over 15 weeks, 75-minute class pace of the Spring session, we’re doing two hours a day, four days straight every week for five weeks. “Heading north at 110 per,” to borrow Bud’s phrase. And hopefully, when it’s done, we’ll look back and say, “That was intense!”

I’m co-running this thing with Jim Groom, but due to the schedule my presence will be more virtual and asynchronous this time around. That means I don’t get to be a slacker with the blogging and commenting. No one else does either.

We’re paring the course down for the time frame, so we’ll be looking at four main points about the internet: where it comes from, how it works, its social, economic and cultural impacts, and where it’s going. How we approach those topics will be driven by the students’ interests. They will brainstorm ideas on what we need to know about each topic and do research based on that. That research will form the bulk of the class reading. The class will build weekly projects, creating knowledge artifacts representing their research. They will have as much input as they want on what those projects will be. I like the idea of using Timeline JS to show where the internet comes from. I also like the idea of building a series of interconnected HTML pages to describe how it works – it seems to make sense on a meta level. The idea of the projects is to create resources on the internet about the internet, feeding back into the machine so others can learn from what we’ve learned. Videos are another option for projects.

The whole class will be involved in all the projects. That’s a nice benefit of having a small group – we’re all in this together. We’re going to rotate group leadership through the class, a different pair each week, so everyone gets a chance at the helm. It will be intense, but life on the Internet is always intense.

 

The Internet Course Summer Edition

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Apollo Workstation

Apollo Workstation

The Internet Course that Paul Bond and I taught last semester is getting another go round. I was scheduled to teach it the first summer session—which starts tomorrow—but for much of the spring it only had three students registered. A summer course needs at least seven students, so I was pretty certain it wouldn’t run. Well, my being too sure of anything provides a perfect opportunity for the cosmos to illustrate my capacity for fallibility :)

The course will be running, and Paul and I will be back at the helm…well, as much as we ever are in this course. We did some pretty intense work designing a student-driven course from beginning to end, and the evaluations we got back last week suggest that it wasn’t all in vain. I’ve never gotten such positive feedback for a course taught the first time. The evaluations were so encouraging that we’re pushing forward with the students designing the course as we go for the summer edition.

As you can see from the syllabus, the first week is pretty tightly planned:

  • they’ll be reading Katie Hafner’s 1998 popular history of the internet Where the Wizards Stay Up Late,
  • brainstorming and then researching the four overarching course topics (Where it came from, how it works, where it’s going, and the social/ecomomic/politic impacts),
  • finding and submitting twelve acceptable articles (3 per topic) for approval,
  • and summarizing all twleve of their articles no later than this Saturday night.

Damn, that’s a ton of work. Oh yeah, I forgot, they’ll also have to get up and running with their own domain and web hosting, install WordPress, and start blogging! But, to be fair, come this Thursday they’ll also have the ability to plan out what the next four weeks will look like.

As of now, the course is managable with six students taking it for credit and two auditors. While planning the summer edition with Paul, the idea came up that the entire class would work together on each topic for a weekly project wherein they create some product of what they learned that week. For example, week two they might do a timeline for the where it comes from topic, week 3 a full blown HTML site for the how it works topic, etc. What’s more, each week will have a different project director managing the week’s work. They’ll also be responsible for seeing the week’s project through.

I’m pretty excited about the additon of a weekly project and director for the summer edition. I think some pretty awesome things could happen if we treat the next five weeks as a collaborative learning laboratory. I also love the idea that each week will be focused on making something that documents the topic in some fashion, and I really am interested to see what they all come up with. Avanti!

Don’t Cyberbully the Internet Course!

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HaHaA quick note on The Internet Course Paul Bond and I are teaching: it’s ruling! Paul blogged last week about how many chances we took with this course, and how much that has paid off. It’s really been an eye-opening experience. I have to admit it’s hard to come off a class like ds106 and not be tempted to try and reproduce that magic. I think we have smart to avoid making #TIC104 in the image of ds106 too early on. This course has to find t’s own identity, and we did that by really giving the reins over to the students.

Tonight was an excellent example of that. Since week three students have been running ever single class session. Through week ten every class featured panels of five to six students discussing various topics like the history of the internet, the infrastructure, copyright, digital identity, openness, etc. Since last week, students are working in groups of three and presenting on their final projects. Tonight, while Paul was in Pennsylvania and I was in Texas, Elizabeth, Melissa, and Kimberley did an amazing job bringing us in via Google Hangout and running the entire class for an hour and fifteen minutes.

What’s more, they live tweeted all the tweets, and even playacted bullying on Twitter in the background during the presentation using the hashtag: #ticfakecyberbully

They presented on their research on the emerging definition of cyberbullying, and how that is being framed legally in different states. What’s particularly interesting is how so many of these laws are mediated through schools. They did a nice job framing a working definition, exploring the popular media reaction, and looking at the actual legislation. The used another Twitter hashtag (#ticcyberbullying) to capture the cyberbullying resources they were discussing during the presentation:

The class discussion around this topic was intense. The differing viewpoints around legislating cyberbullying, the difficulties of context online, media exploitation, and the question of schools as the catch-all for today’s social problems, including cyberbullying, all came up. During the last few minutes there was a ground swell of what can people actually do to stem this kind of behavior. Some real raw emotion about pushing beyond the talking—love that.

Interestingly enough, we had at least four visitors who weren’t in the class come to tonight’s presentation because they were interested in the topic, and they they were an active part of the conversation. It was awesome.

Taking chances

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slot-machineWe took some chances with the way we set up The Internet Course. The skeletal syllabus in particular was a big risk. It meant that the whole course hinged upon the students putting the effort into finding, analyzing, synthesizing and sharing good material. We assigned some additional material to complement that, but overall the class built a solid reading list. That part of the course worked out well

I was hoping to use the Cmap Tools as the thread to stitch all the readings and discussions together, and that was only partly successful. It worked pretty well on an individual basis, as everyone mapped their selected readings, but the collaborative part seemed to be a problem. But the Google Docs that the panels put together made an effective substitute in tying together the readings on the weekly topics. That part of the course worked out after we made some adaptations.

Half of the course time was given to weekly panel discussions, led by groups of students. This might have seemed risky, but after our experience in the True Crime course, we were confident that this would work out. As I envisioned it originally, we would have been part of the panels, bearing some of the load and taking some of the pressure off of the class.  But that ended up being unnecessary – the panel discussions have been generally amazing, with great participation from the rest of the class. So that part of the course succeeded beyond expectations.

I’m not big on tests, but Jim’s idea to have the students create the midterm was brilliant. It made perfect sense too, since we had put the students in the driver’s seat for everything else. By having the students make up the questions, and by making the test open web, it turned it from “just a test” into a real learning experience. I have to give the class a lot of credit on this part – they could have made it easy on themselves, but instead created a really challenging assessment.

Now we’re entering the home stretch. Students will be presenting on their group research projects, one group per class period, for the remaining weeks. They’re also building projects, which will be due by the end of the semester.  Based on what we’ve seen so far, I know they will be awesome.

We took some big chances, but I think we (as in the whole class, not just the instructors) have gotten a big payoff. I’ve always thought my job as a teacher should be less instruction and more facilitation – creating an environment for learning and helping students along, with the ultimate goal being that they’re better able to do it on their own by the end. And by experimenting, I get a little bit better at it along the way.

 

Week 11: Social, Economic, and Cultural Impacts

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This week our student panel will be discussing the social, economic, and cultural Impacts of the internet—a broad swath of potential topics. To focus the discussion, the summarized readings provided by this week’s panelists can be found here: http://theinternetcourse.net/category/impacts/

Also, for this week’s discussion, I want everyone to blog about at least one social, economic, or cultural impact of the internet and how it has directly effected your life by before class tomorrow, Tuesday march 25th. Be specific, tell a story. Don’t write a technology down and be done, narrate specifically how the one particular emmanation of the internet you chose has effected you. Tag this post “impact” (no quotes).

Panelists:
Jack E
James
Melissa
Will

And here is the Google document containing the panelists specific sub-topics, talking points, resources, links, and discussions questions. It is empty yet, but I’m sure this panel will rectify that shortly, or reap what they sow!!!

See you all on tomorrow!

Week 10: Digital Identity

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This week our student panel will be discussing digital identity as it pertains to the internet. Summarized readings provided by this week’s panelists can be found here: http://theinternetcourse.net/category/digital-identity/

Also, read this interview with author, researcher, and digital identity theorist dana boyd in which she discusses teens, identity, and the future of digital communication.

Panelists:
Elizabeth
Amber
Kim
Eun Jung
Melissa

And here is the google document containing the panelists specific sub-topics, talking points, resources, links, and discussions questions.

See you all on tomorrow!