Syllabus

Contents

ITCP 70020 / DHUM 74500 Spring 2019
ITP Core 2 – Interactive Technology and Pedagogy II: Methods and Practice

Course Info: Meets Mondays 4:15-6:15pm (see exceptions below) in room C196.06 (in the basement of the Library) at the Grad Center

Course group: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/itp-core-2-spring-2019/

Professors

Michael Mandiberg (mmandiberg@gc.cuny.edu)
Office hours: Mondays 2-3:30pm and by appointment (contact Julie Fuller to schedule)
Office: Room 3204.09

Julie Van Peteghem (jv41@hunter.cuny.edu)
Office hours by appointment

Course Requirements

All students should be members of the CUNY Academic Commons and users of Twitter (where lurking is acceptable). Remember that when you register for social networking accounts, you do not have to use your full name or even your real name. One benefit of writing publicly under your real name is that you can begin to establish a public academic identity and to network with others in your field. However, keep in mind that search engines have extended the life of online work; if you are not sure that you want your work for this course to be part of your permanently searchable identity trail on the web, you should strongly consider creating an alias. Whether you engage social media under your real name or whether you construct a new online identity, please consider the ways in which social media can affect your career in both positive and negative ways.

Course Assignments

This semester we will be working on three major assignments, with continuous blogging throughout.

Exit Questions and Discussion
We’ll continue the practice established in Core I of writing reflective/response posts about the class discussion, or readings that we didn’t manage to cover in the class discussion. We will ask you to post responses to some/all of these questions by the Wednesday after class:

  • What ideas would you like to discuss or research more?
  • What ideas were compelling?
  • Which were problematic?
  • Can you explain why they were so?
  • What did you understand today that could teach or explain to someone else?

Project Abstracts/Short Proposals
Your midterm assignment is to create a project proposal (or two, if you’re still deciding between projects) that has at least two scope variations: one full and one reduced version. Details on the full assignment will be presented April 1 (and due in writing April 4).

Collaboration and Assignment Design
You will collaboratively craft, with at least one student from another discipline, the scaffold for a final project in an undergraduate course that engages with one or more of the core ideas explored to this point in your ITP experience. We’ll discuss the details for this assignment in class on March 18, and the assignment plan is due on April 18.

Final Project Proposal and Proof of Concept
Your final project is to turn in a proposal for a larger project that includes a proof of concept. Your goal is to convince us that your proposal is relevant and productive AND that you can actually pull it off. The details will be discussed on April 1. You will present your projects at the end of the semester, and the written proposal will be due by May 24th.

Labs, Workshops, and Support

ITP Lab Schedule

TLC Workshop Schedule

TLC Staff Office Hours

GCDI Workshop Schedule

Digital Fellows Office Hours

GC Library Workshop Schedule

Course Schedule

This schedule is a living document, expect it to evolve over the course of the semester.

1/28 – CLASS 1: INTRODUCTIONS

Assignments for 2/4 in addition to reading

  • Write a group forum post with your introductory project ideas
  • Write a brief bio for posting on the People page of our course site (don’t forget to categorize)
  • Make sure you’re part of the course on the Commons (join on our Group page): http://cuny.is/group-itp-core-2-spring-2019

back to top

UNIT ONE: Preparing a Project

2/4 – CLASS 2: CONTEXTS AND PRACTICALITIES, AND HOW TO GET THINGS DONE

Topics: In this class we will explore ways of thinking through and analyzing a project before it begins, and discuss issues that can arise along the path of the project. Context: Thinking about the What, Where, When, Why and How before you begin a project. The four little B’s (build, buy, borrow, beg). Which one is the right fit for your software project? When starting any media or digital project this is often the first consideration. Do you build it yourself, buy it off the shelf, use free and open source software (borrow) or use some of the free web services out there (beg)? We will also discuss collaboration, scope creep, and minimal viable products.

“Less is more” is both an aesthetic principle of modernism and a functional spec of agile development–as well as a politically-charged phrase when applied to publicly-funded activities. Agile development has a long history. It takes its most recent, and quite popular form in Ruby on Rails, 37Signals (AKA Basecamp), and their Getting Real PDF. We will look at what it means to make less.

Readings:

back to top

2/11 – CLASS 3: SUSTAINABILITY AND PROJECT PLANNING

Topics: In this class we will continue thinking about project planning, and focus on questions that make reflect on the content, context, and structure of your project: What is the scope of your project? Who is it designed for? What are its significant properties?

Readings:

back to top

2/18 –  NO CLASS

2/25 – CLASS 4: PRELIMINARY PROJECT IDEAS

Topics: Taking advantage of the early semester 1+ week break, we’ll aim to do some initial thinking/writing about your proposed projects and discuss them in class. Specifics of this assignment will be posted ahead of the 2 class.

Guest speaker: Kimon Keramidas

Readings:

back to top

UNIT TWO: Digital Pedagogy

3/4 – CLASS 5: TEACHING, LEARNING, TECHNOLOGY

Topics: This session will explore the evolving roles of technology in teaching and learning. What pedagogical opportunities does the integration of technology into the classroom make possible? What challenges does technology create for the student, the instructor, the institution? How do we understand the politics of educational technology that is both a field of inquiry and an industry? How do we locate our own values within all of this?

Readings:

Suggested:

back to top

3/11 – CLASS 6: CREATING SUCCESSFUL AND ACCESSIBLE ASSIGNMENTS

Topics: Crafting purposeful assignments is one of the biggest and most persistent challenges faced by faculty, and college classrooms are rife with prompts that confuse students rather than enlighten to them to the expectations of an assignment. In this session we’ll explore what makes an assignment effective, discuss how technology fits into the process, and translate these principles to our own disciplines and contexts.

Readings:

Suggested: Student Project Examples

back to top

3/18 – CLASS 7: OPEN ACCESS, OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (FUTURE OF THE TEXTBOOK), AND IMAGES

Topics: Debates on the access to and use of information — text, images, video, etc. — have always been important in higher education. Where do these debates stand now, and how are they manifest in different academic spaces?

Readings:

Guest speakers: Ann Fiddler and Andrew Mckinney

back to top

3/25 – CLASS 8: FAILURE

Topics: All successful digital projects have moved through moments of failure and frustration. Such experiences are common in the classroom as well. In this session we’ll explore how to anticipate failure and how to lower its costs.

Readings:

Suggested:

back to top

4/1 CLASS 9: Mid-semester Projects Discussion

Project Abstracts/Short Proposals Due.

4/4/19 – Midterm assignment due (posted on our course site)

4/8 – CLASS 10: HYBRID AND ONLINE LEARNING

Topics: Over the past two decades universities have pursued a range of strategies to support online and blended learning. These strategies implicate interests and conflicts that go beyond the pedagogical affordances of a particular technology or approach. In this session we’ll explore some of these strategies and trace their implications.

Readings:

Suggested:

UNIT THREE: Technology and Society

4/15 – CLASS 11: THE BIASES OF TECHNOLOGY

Topics: Most conversations about technology and education concern how to use computers in the classroom. And while software and connectivity may enhance many courses when used appropriately, their deeper value may be in the example they provide of how different technologies influence labor, learning, interaction, and thought. What are the biases of the technologies we are using, and how can we interrogate those biases from within the environment they have created?

Readings:

back to top

4/22 – NO CLASS

4/29 – CLASS 12: WIKIPEDIA: A COLLABORATION AND A SOCIETY

Readings:

Suggested:

back to top

Th 5/2 – Collaborative assignment due 

5/6 – CLASS 13: DIGITAL ETHICS: PRIVACY, TRANSPARENCY, PLATFORM CAPITALISM

Topics: As digital technologies and the internet continue to develop and change our lives inside and outside of the classroom, conversations about approaches to research and teaching now necessarily include digital ethics. We will discuss access to digital technologies and support in using them, the implications of corporate development of digital technologies and the internet, and privacy and data transparency considerations for ourselves and our students.

Readings:

back to top

FINAL PROJECTS

5/13 – CLASS 14: STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

5/20 – CLASS 15: STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

5/24: FINAL PROPOSAL DUE

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.