Notes / 21 June 2019
Hello and welcome. Thanks to the teaching center. This is really a collaborative work, so I should start acknowledging the awkwardness of me being the only one up here. [slide with Brenta, Lee, Kris, and Jesse] And by "work" I don't just mean the website I'm about to demonstrate, but rather the ways of thinking about this website as a significant statement about pedagogy. It started as something that just solved some problems for me, but as it grew it became more of a statement about open pedagogy and resources for students.
[ .... The homepage of the website directs users to the major content areas with large images. The "information" page, and the "resources" pages are self-explanatory. I'll have a bit more to say about the bibliography page, but the real purpose and majority of the content on this site are the modules, which are symbolized with the large puzzle piece icon.
Accessing the modules this way presents you with a full list with a tag filter that can be used to show only one or more of the three tagged categories of modules: creative, culture, methodology. A bit more intuitively, the navigation menu for the website allows you to jump straight to just one of these groups. The presentation of these module pages is handled via a Toolset Types and Views plugin, and these lists are sorted randomly so that different modules should appear emphasized each time you refresh the page.
On each module's page, the presentation is relatively uniform. [GIFs] There's a large image invoking or in this case demonstrating the main concept, a bit of introductory text followed by some suggested readings and a list of suggested tasks. At the bottom, there's a link to our Slack channel for this module. My students will have two weeks to work on a module, so they'd start by discussing their plans and goals with the group of peers who have also chosen this module. Then, they'd spend the majority of the two weeks discussing the readings and trying out the suggested tasks. At the end of the two weeks, students share and reflect on their work (the format varies) with an emphasis on their learning process, not necessarily the quality or completeness of the projects they chose to work on.
Animated GIFs is an interesting one because of how much it has evolved.
Image Visualization because the name is redundant but also because it might be the most explicitly instsructive.
Most of these are very open-ended. Some are better than others. All are constantly being revised, improved, or in some cases being de-emphasized.
In the dashboard you can see it's a fairly typical WordPress installation.
I chose wordpress for this because of its relative ease of use, though it did annoy a bit that I had to use this quirky and non-free plugin suite called "Toolset" to gain the custom content templates that I was used to working with in Drupal.
I like Drupal, but it would have been too much for this site.
I would really like to move to Grav or something similar for improved performance.
Regardless of the specific platform, it was important from the outset not to use Canvas (our LMS) or anything proprietry or third party that would be supported through ads. The site has always had our students in mind as the primary audience and users, but it is open to anyone with internet access who wants to learn more about these things.
... back to the script ]
As it was originally conceived, the minor in Digital Studies was inherently interdisciplinary, requiring students to distribute a selection of electives across at least two disciplines and between upper and lower level classes. This breadth continues to be the real strength of the program, but the required introductory class, which we felt at the time would be necessary for programmatic coherence, was a bit of a challenge to figure out. It's an introductory class, but how does one provide an introduction to a thing that is inherently not quite one thing but potentially many different things?
We've had DGST 101 since 2013 as part of the Minor in Digital Studies.
Since 2015 we also created the major in Comm and Digital Studies
The intro-level course, DGST 101: Intro to Digital Studies, is required by both programs and has also become a popular general elective, I think because it's closely tied to the domain of one's own program.
101 students in 4 sections this semester another two sections in the Spring, probably one in the Summer
differentiation for technical skills is always a challenge, but most students in this class are actually juniors and seniors. The average earned hours when attempted is 86.21.
The flexibility of the modules is intended to let students self-differentiate within a cohort of similarly-interested peers.
This popularity means that in spite of its 100-level status as an introductory course a majority of students enrolled in any given section are mostly Juniors and Seniors who have priority in registration. Teaching anything technical is more difficult when students are coming to the material from vastly different levels of experience. DGST101 students will typically be more prepared to handle the workload and self-direction of the class, but since they come from different disciplines, they'll have different levels of experience and ability. The way I approach the modules at DGST101.net is to encourage students to find tasks in the list of suggestions that will be reasonable challenges based on their current skill level.
As a program, Digital Studies at UMW began from a recognition that courses in several disciplines were exploring digital culture or developing digitally-intensive skills, and the conversations around the overlapping and complementary courses were enabled and accelerated by faculty who were using a shared institutional blogging platform, UMWBlogs.org. The minor provided a way for students interested in digital media and culture to find a group of related classes and earn some recognition in their transcript for pursuing that interest.
As it was originally conceived, the minor in Digital Studies was inherently interdisciplinary, requiring students to distribute a selection of electives across at least two disciplines and between upper and lower level classes. This breadth continues to be the real strength of the program, but the required introductory class, which we felt at the time would be necessary for programmatic coherence, was a bit of a challenge to figure out. It's an introductory class, but how does one provide an introduction to a thing that is inherently not quite one thing but potentially many different things?
Also, "digital studies" is a bit awkward grammatically. It sounds like but isn't quite the same as "film studies", but whereas in film studies, one studies film, it doesn't mean much to say that a digital studies student is "studying digital".
As some of you recall, we originally considered naming our program "digital media studies" or "digital humanities," but ultimately felt that each of these terms excluded disciplines we wanted to include. We opted for the broader term "digital studies," and thankfully, we are not alone. There are at least a dozen or so universities offering minors in digital studies, although undoubtedly others who use the term will have their differences in what they mean by it.
This includes Rutgers Camden, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Davidson, Grand Valley State, and others. I had conversations with these other programs -- most of which were starting at about the same time as ours -- and I found within the Davidson College description of their program a trinity of focal points that I eventually adopted as the backbone structure of DGST 101.
These are : digital creativity, digital culture, and digital methodologies.
You can see these three ideas reflected in the groups of modules on DGST101.net, and they also provide the backbone for my syllabus.
This, however, was not the first design for the course website. Some remnants of the previous version are still visible at dgst101.umwblogs.org where for the first two runs of DGST 101 I attempted a "gamified" course structure. Students completed "challenges" which awarded them "points" that progressed toward "achievements" which were eventually exchanged for "grades". In one iteration, I used Drupal with some custom coding to handle the logistics of the system, and on UMWBlogs, I used the BadgeOS wordpress plugin. Though I abandoned the gamified approach, the web-based system actually had two important things in common with the present site: 1) the tasks presented opt-in activities in such a way that students could tune their projects to their personal skill level and interest, and 2) the support material and instructions were available on the open web.
The major downside to this early version of the class and its website was pedagogical. I believe faculty are telling the truth when they speak or write about gamification working to improve their classes and their student's learning outcomes, but I have to say that it really really didn't work for me. What I thought would be a fun series of low-stakes activities turned out to be a drag on both my time and my students' enthusiasm. While many of the activities themselves were valuable and successful, the logistics of the pointsification I imposed on the class trivialized the labor that went into their projects by alienating them from the value of their work by translating it into a zero-sum currency exchanged for a grade -- exactly the thing I'd hoped to avoid.
While each of us who teach and have taught DGST 101 use the site differently and have our own philosophies, the looser organization is intended to support a pedagogy that encourages flexibility and accountability from students as they select activities that interest or challenge them.
Building this on the open web was an easy decision, and it matters for at least two reasons. First, it becomes an information resource that anyone can access for free on the world wide web with a short and easy to remember URL. It's part of the non-platform web, which is to say it's not a Google Pages site, or a Facebook page, or an LMS integration, or a e-textbook publisher's portal. On an internet that is increasingly dominated by fewer platforms, it's important to emphasize this discoverability which at least I used to take for granted about building a website.
Second, and more importantly, this website acts like a textbook in some ways, but it does so mainly by sending students back out to the open web for their learning. If they read an ed tech blog or find a relevant youtube tutorial that helps them complete a project, they're engaging in the exploration that once made the web revolutionary as an information resource, and they're learning about that web in a way that bypasses how Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have taught them about how to use (or not use) the web. In this sense, the ethos of www.DGST101.net is not just that is on the web, but that it is of the web, and in this way it is more effective and more valuable than a traditional textook.