Initial digital narrative (5%) Students will write a digital literacy narrative at the beginning of term. It should include the strategies they currently employ in their daily and academic lives for content creation, data manipulation and social interaction. This will make up the page on the student’s own web hosting site. It will be revised both at midterm and at the end of the term and assessed for growth and reflection.
Blog roll (35%) There will be short writing assignments approximately every other week (7 total, i.e. 5% per post). The format for this will be a blog, a key form of 21st-century public writing. They will be either reflective pieces on a conceptual issue that has arisen in class or a report or review about a project or experiment carried out. The main issue here is to learn to communicate ideas in an open forum and to develop a voice for researching blogging. Students will learn how to install an instance of WordPress.org and to choose a theme appropriate to representing embedded digital materials. (Students who are proficient in other blogging platforms may opt for those). Students choose at the end of the term if you keep your blog or if you delete it. NYU Digital Scholarship is piloting a web hosting project until December 2016. Students enrolled in AHC-AD 139 in the Fall 2016 will design their own domain space in which to feature their projects (see http://hosting.nyu.edu) for more details.
Participation (10%) I expect active participation from all students and non-students in the course. This course will require experimentation with new digital environments and a willingness to try and fail. Between the course meetings, students may have to investigate a problem to learn how to do it themselves— taking initiative will be rewarded. In addition, helping out fellow students and fostering a collaborative spirit in the classroom will be rewarded. A laptop will be essential for almost every session. Participation will be assessed by the extent to which the students have prepared for in-class discussion and are ready to address the thought questions found in this syllabus.
Project portfolio (50%) Over the course of the term, we will engage in project-based learning. Each student will do two individual micro-projects and one collective site-specific spatial data project. These projects will be highly experimental and necessarily small in scope (a piece of encoded text, a spatio-temporal narrative, a map, a 3d printed object). We will begin to work on these around Week Five and continue through the semester. They will be assembled in a blog portfolio with reflective essays before the last week of the term.
Around the midterm, students will have the opportunity to collectively renegotiate the assessment breakdown, if they so desire.
In the penultimate week, fellow course members will offer a review of the classmates’ work in the spirit of collegiality and contribution. Students will have the chance to revise their portfolio using this input before the final deadline for class work.