Assignments

Assignments

Assignment	Type	Points	Total
Engagement	Pass/No pass	1 pt/week	10
Labs	Pass/No pass	1 pt/week	10
Unit 1 project	From labs	From labs
Unit 2 project	Rubric	9 points	9
Reflection	Pass/no pass	1 point	1
		Total	30 points

Policies

Grading

With the exception of the final project, all assignments in this class will be graded on a pass/no pass basis. To pass an assignment, you will need to meet all of specifications/expectations listed, including the due date and method of delivery.

If you do not pass an assignment, you have the opportunity to revise through the use of tokens. You have 3 tokens to use on revising assignments throughout the term. If you receive a “no pass” on an assignment, email the professors to declare your use of a token and to discuss a new deadline. Using a token does not guarantee that you will receive a pass on the re-submission. Tokens should be requested within a week of an incomplete or missed assignment.

Attendance

We get it, life happens. If you need to miss class, please email us in advance (before noon on class day if possible). It helps us plan our activities if we know how many students will be attending and keeps us from worrying that you’ve fallen in the river.

That being said, the way we’ve designed this course means that if you’re not in the room, you will miss a lot of learning that can’t be made up by the reading. Once you have more than 2 absences, it will affect your grade. Every subsequent absence will decrease your final letter grade by one step (B to B-, B- to C+, etc.)

And while I want you to succeed in the next stage of your career, please try to avoid scheduling meetings, interviews, or extra-curriculars during class time. Missing more than 45 minutes of class will constitute a full absence.

Engagement

Demonstrating engagement in this course does not mean being the loudest voice in the room. This term, we’ll ask you to practice different types of engagement with the readings and material of the course. Each week you’ll assume a different role - question asker, discussion leader, synthesizer, and presenter - and participate in our discussion block on Thursday afternoons.

The expectations of each role are listed below. Note that depending on your role, you may be doing work early or late in the week. Regardless of when your work occurs, you will turn in a short Canvas assignment by Friday at 5pm. Each role is worth 1 point.

If you miss a Thursday class, you can make up the points by taking on an extra role in a future week.

Need help with your role? Talk to us! You might also want to consult resources by Stephen D. Brookfield:

• Workshop Resource Packet - see page 43 for example questions. Otherwise, lots of strategies in here.

Question Asker

As question asker, it is your job to carefully read the assigned reading and think about what will spark discussion among your classmates. Think beyond questions with true/false answers, instead, try to think of questions that prompt reflection and analysis.

By Wednesday at 5pm, you should:

• Read the assigned material carefully.
• Write 5+ discussion questions or prompts.
• Share those discussion questions with your group’s discussion leader.

During class on Thursday, you should:

• Participate in discussion!

After class on Thursday, you should:

• Share your questions in the Canvas assignment due Friday at 5pm. Note which questions worked particularly well in class.

Discussion Leader

As discussion leader, it is your job to facilitate the discussion that happens for ~35 minutes on Thursdays. That means you should be prepared to be “on” in class and ready to listen to your classmates and prompt them to share.

Before class on Thursday, you should:

• Receive questions from question asker.
• Read the assigned material.
• Select and design 1-3 activities.

During class on Thursday, you should:

• Ask questions of your classmates about the material and topic for the week.
• Listen carefully, making connections between answers and material.
• Avoid presenting or summarizing the readings, especially if there’s a lull. This is hard!
• Keep your discussion group on topic.

After class, you should:

• Reflect on your role. What worked well? What went a little sideways and why?
• Write 2-3 sentences in the Canvas assignment due Friday at 5pm. Respond to the questions: what went well? What will you do differently next time?

Presenter

Your job is to share the highlights of your discussion with the rest of the class on Thursdays. You don’t have to record everything that everyone said, but be prepared to summarize and synthesize what you talked about. This job requires active listening and verbal presentation skills.

Before class on Thursday, you should:

• Read the assigned material.

During class on Thursday, you should:

• Participate in discussion!
• Take some notes, paying attention to themes in your discussion or unique perspectives and comments.
• When prompted, share the results of your discussion with the entire class.

After class, you should:

• Note that you served as the presenter in the Canvas assignment due Friday at 5pm.

Synthesizer

You are the note taker! It will be your job to turn in a longer summary of what your group talked about.

Before class on Thursday, you should:

• Read the assigned material.

During class on Thursday, you should:

• Participate in discussion!
• Take good notes, paying attention to themes in your discussion or unique perspectives and comments.

After class, you should:

• Write a 200-300 word summary of your class discussion in the Canvas assignment due Friday at 5pm.

Labs

DCI courses have two goals: 1) make sense of our digital culture and 2) equip you with practical tech skills. To meet that second goal, we will have active lab time in class each week and most weeks your homework for the week will be to complete the activities started in class.

Lab assignments will be worth 1 point.

Unit 1 Project - Digital Museum

In the first four weeks of class, we’ll be learning how the internet works and what digital culture really means. We’ll do this through reading, discussions, lecture, and labs with a focus on hand coding your own website in Neocities. This website will be on a topic of your choosing - we encourage you to be a fan of something in the style of the 1990s internet. We’re evaluating you on whether you have learned the technical aspects of website creation, not on whether you have selected an important and worthy topic to society at large.

Your Digital Museum project will not receive its own grade, but will be constructed from each week’s lab assignments. You will present on your museum in Week 5.

Unit 2 Project - Research Project Prospectus

For the second portion of the course, we will focus on how to actually study the internet and all the ways it is shaping behavior. We’ll do this by first observing changes in our own lives and the world around us. How does social media create/enrich/harm certain groups? What is the cost of handing over decisions to algorithms? Is it possible to retain your privacy in the age of surveillance?

Next, we’ll look at how scholars are studying these changes and behaviors. How do they capture and access data when feeds are personalized and profiles are private? How do they make sense of results when there are more comments than anyone can possibly read? What happens when major platforms change their architecture or access rules? How do we study something that makes the rules about how it study it? We’ll look at projects and scholarship to understand the various approaches and how they differ by discipline.

Along the way, you’ll craft your own research questions and select an object of study. While it can be related to your Digital Museum topic, it doesn’t have to be. What types of platforms, cultures, or phenomena are you interested in? What kinds of questions does your field (major or intended major or job) ask? What has been studied already and what might be so new that you need to be the one to ask the question?

Like Unit 1, each week’s lab homework will contribute to this final project. However, this project will be graded on its own merit at the end of the term. You will be asked to contribute additional pieces to this project, but we are not asking for a complete and polished research project. This assignment is a called a prospectus because it will take the results of your experiments and suggest an appropriate path forward for a more complete project. You will be asked to create/gather data using the tools we’ve used in class, create exploratory visualizations, offer research questions, and share the lessons learned and future directions for this project. We do not expect that you will be successful in all of these experiments! However, your project should be honest and thoughtful about what you tried, what worked and what didn’t, what barriers you faced, and what the project could look like with more time and resources.

The prospectus should include the following sections:

• Introduction (based on week 9 proposal)
• Lit Review (based on week 8)
• Data (both your object of study + gathered/collected data)
• Tools/methods (from what we’ve used in class)
• Research questions (informed by literature and some close reading of data)
• Experiments (I tried this and it worked/failed. I got some data and visualized it).
• Conclusion (next steps, reflect on choices, tools, costs, ethics etc.)

Your project will be presented on a website. It can be hand-coded or created using WordPress, but it should live on your domain.

Reflection

Tip

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