Course Expectations: Issues in Digital Technology & Learning
- Intellectual Productions 50% (Posted To Your Website)
- Wikimedia Speculative Fiction Workshop (Collaborative) 15%
- Multimedia ‘Issues’ Production Pedagogy Project: 35%
Individual Intellectual Productions (Total 8) *includes close-reading of all assigned articles)
These weekly projects are based on the readings AND our zoom discussions. The first production is the creation of a website to host your future work productions. Intellectual productions may include critical/formal essays and reflections on course readings as well as experimenting creative artefacts and new media. http://seriousplaylab.com/courses/7001/resources-gizmos/
All productions should be posted to your website by the assigned due date (your website can be taken down as soon as the course is completed, or you can save it for future courses you may have, or repurpose your site as a blog, learning site, personal gallery, etc). If a production is created using another media tools (e.g., video work, digital story map, timeline, ibook) you can post the link on your website (to YouTube, Google Drive, Soundcloud, Vimeo, KnightLab, etc).
Speculative Fabulation: Wikimedia Collaborative Project 15%
This project has been cancelled. Given the short (6-week) format of this course – and the fact that it is a fully online – only one collaborative/group project will be required. This will be done through our Wikimedia system. Most articles about Wikimedia position Wikimedia tools in relation to established encyclopedic Wikipedia conventions.
Rather than engage/read about conventional ways of using wikis in education, we will use wikimedia to explore the educational opportunities of speculative fiction for collaborative ‘world-building’ and for developing critical literacies: a means of exploring the opportunities of wikimedia tools while leveraging ‘speculative fabulation’ for a literary re/imagining of educational ‘realities’ – or for creating ‘encyclopedias’ for possible futures).
Detailed expectations for this project will be posted by Week 5 (following our reading and workshop/guest speaker visit). This is a low stakes / hopefully fun opportunity to explore alternative uses of Wikimedia, while engaging educational theory creatively and critically. You will be asked (in small groups / 3 people max) to work together to:
- imagine a future world or alternative (“counter-factual”) present that explores issues relating to technology and pedagogy and society (i.e., extrapolates on current educational and technological trends, ecological problems, and social justice questions, including events like Covid19 or other global challenges).
- look back at our present state of affairs from a point in the future to “re-see” and critically analyze what we take for granted in educational and learning spaces (and to analyze issues relating to technology and pedagogy and society from that “distant” perspective).
- genre forms are flexible: encyclopedic, (counter)narrative, arts-based/literary, journalistic, ‘memoir’, etc.
- fun opportunities to work with other easy-to use tools (timelines, story-maps).
Multimedia ‘Issues’ Production Pedagogy Project: 35%
(Individual or Small Group / Up to 3 People Max) 2 Options
OPTION 1) For this final project option, the goal is for you to pursue some inquiry question or “issue” of interest to you and produce a final document using digital technologies for learning (based on media engaged during the course, or based on media tools that fit your needs or your creative purposes). Your project might culminate in a multimedia iBook, (digital) graphic novel/research document, video work, simulation/game, and so on.
OPTION 2) For this final project option, you have the opportunity to do something with technology you always wanted to do (learn a new practice, experiment with new media, or do something you never imagined you might do with technology: create a digital game, an app, a video work of some kind, work with sound/audio and music-making software, author a graphic novel or iBook.
Option one offers the opportunity for inquiry-driven or topical approach to the final project (using technology tools to present your research findings, art and/or narratives); option two offers an open-ended ‘tool-driven’ opportunity to learn a technology-based practice. For both options, you can direct the project to your own research interests, professional goals and or creative/personal ends. The aim of both options is not only to engage in relatively open-ended inquiry on your issue or technology-learning challenge, but to promote fluency with digital technologies and to situate you in the role of creative/critical maker and “participant” within digital cultures.
The basic idea, here, is that 1) you are using technology and new media to inquiry, learn and to advance your own purposes 2) and you reflect on and document on the processes of your own learning (and connect to course theory when possible).
During the course, ample prompts and models and modes of inquiry will be offered to help you focus in. Final projects can build upon tools learned and projects engaged during the course.
Given the shorter (6-Week) course format (and the general increase in stress people are facing during the Covid19 pandemic) the expectations will be reduced from a typical 12 Week format.
While open-ended, inquiry-driven projects can lead to some anxiety (due to the absence of uniform outcomes), my hope is that the creative path you choose for the final project will be both useful and satisfying and playful.
I will check in with you during the semester and ask for some kind of VERY BRIEF project proposal by Class 6/7.
Course Forum (Non-Mandatory Resource)
Have course-related questions?
Want to post an interesting quote from one the readings to discuss in class or on this forum? Or link out to related “issues” in digital learning and technology? Want to share interesting tools or useful media (applications, software, cloud-based tools)? Want to share and get feedback on any of your course creative products/artefacts?
Feel free to ask questions or start a conversation!*
*This is “non-mandatory” (non-graded; will not impact marks) zone for questions to be asked or conversations to be started.
If you want to start your own thread, feel free. This is an open forum to explore course-related questions or “issues” that lay outside the purview of the syllabus.