Syllabus

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

ITP Core 2: Interactive Technology and the University: Theory, Design, and Practice

ITCP 70020, Spring 2016
Class: Mondays 4:15-6:15pm, Rm 3207 at the Grad Center
Labs: Mondays 6:30-8:30pm, Rm C196.01 at the Grad Center

Maura Smale (msmale {a} citytech.cuny.edu)
Office hours by appointment at City Tech or the Grad Center, also available by phone/email
Phone: 718-260-5748

Course Description

This second core course will introduce students to IT in the classroom, focusing on cognition and design. Interest areas include research in digital media; hypertext and narrative structure; visualization and design; modes of learning within and outside the classroom; and conceptualization and production of educational media products. The course also provides a hands-on introduction to key educational uses of new-media applications, including online writing tools, electronic archives, and experimentation in virtual spaces. The class will meet frequently in GC computer classrooms. The course employs an interdisciplinary approach to the application of digital media to classroom teaching and scholarly research and presentations. Students will learn skills and concepts and then will design and prepare a proposal for a multimedia-based project in their discipline, for their final grade. The second core course serves as the “content course” for the certificate. This course makes it possible for participating doctoral students to build on the theoretical insights gleaned in the first core course to begin to conceive and develop an IT project in their own disciplines.

This course as it is being taught this semester will emphasize collaboration and minimal viable product as a means to avoid the scope creep endemic to first-time-makers’ projects. We will engage in weekly technical workshops outside of class, and students will be expected to gain enough competency in an area of technical expertise such that they can deliver a proof of concept in their term project, a proposal for a multimedia-based project.

Course Requirements

Overview of assignments

All students should register for accounts on the following sites: CUNY Academic Commons, Twitter, and Zotero. 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.

Non-digital texts for the course:

Citizenfour, a film by Laura Poitras, available on Netflix (DVD), Itunes, and Amazon

Week 1: Feb 1 – Introduction to the course, faculty, students

  • Intro/bios: faculty and students
  • Review of syllabus/requirements
  • Week-by-week breakdown
  • Wikipedia assignment
  • Proposal abstracts
  • Final project
  • Blog posting
  • Weekly commenting
  • Signing up as class motivators
  • Discussing use of online tools (Academic Commons)
  • Public, private, anonymous
  • Digital teaching and learning
  • New media methods
  • Collaboration
  • Want vs need
  • Scope Creep and Minimally Viable Product
  • Incorporating Failure into your process
  • Learning how to learn
  • Labs, and the need to go (to avoid the bad kind of failure)
  • Wikipedia intro (user accounts, edit tab, basic code)

Assigned: Write a blog post with your introductory project ideas (use category Discussion); add your short blog post introducing yourself (use category Students); email Maura (at least) 2 dates you’d like to sign up as class motivator by Fri 2/5; sign up for Course Group (if you haven’t already)

Lab: Wikipedia training with Michael Mandiberg

Saturday February 6th – Black Life Matters Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

This Black WikiHistory Month event takes place at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, from 12:00-5:00pm. Find more information and sign up on the NYC Wikipedia Meetup page.

Week 2: Feb 8 – Contexts and Practicalities

Assigned: Project abstracts

In this class we will explore ways of thinking through and analyzing a project before it begins. and look into issues that can arise depending on the way in which the project realized.

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 software project this 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)?

Reading: Chris Stein, Contexts and Practicalities
This post is a reading in itself and provides links to the other readings for the week. There are a lot of links and you won’t need to read through and analyze every article thoroughly. They are there to help give context, support and detail to the arguments made in the post.

Motivator: Jojo

Guest: Jen Stoops, Social Paper

February 15 – NO CLASS – Presidents’ Day

Tuesday February 16th – Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Train the Trainer Event

This event in preparation for next month’s Art+Feminism editathon is from 5:30-8:30pm at the Sackler Center Media Lab, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave. RSVP and more info here, plan to bring a laptop.

Week 3: Feb 22 – What does what OR How to get things done

Less is more is both an aesthetic principle of modernism and a functional spec of agile development. Agile development has a long history. It takes its most recent, and quite popular form in Ruby on Rails, 37Signals, and their Getting Real PDF. We will look at what it means to make less.

Every tool has a specific use. You can use a tea kettle to hammer in a nail, but you really shouldn’t. We will discuss some of the basic tools, and languages, and what each is used for.

Readings:

  • 37 Signals, Getting Real (2009). Pages 2-74 of the PDF are required, but you will find it to be a fast read and may want to read the whole thing. PDF posted in our course group under Files.
  • This announcement, made February 5th, 2014.
  • Miriam Posner, How did they make that?
  • Bamboo DiRT, a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Note that this is also available as a plugin here on the Academic Commons — you can access the directory from our course group in the left navbar.

Motivators: Jojo, Sara

Guests: Past ITP students to talk about their Independent study projects: Sarah Litvin, Christina Shane-Simpson, and Pamela Thielman

Week 4: Feb 29 – Teaching, Learning, Technology

NOTE CHANGE! We’ll meet today in the New Media Lab, Rm 7388.01

Assigned: Collaborative Wikipedia assignment plan

Readings:

Motivators: Makeba, Teresa

Guests: Andrea Vasquez and Joe Kirchhof, New Media Lab, CUNY Graduate Center

Saturday, March 5 – Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon @ MOMA

Michael is co-organizing a series of Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathons, with multiple locations worldwide. There will be several events in NYC. The main location will be MoMA from 11:00am-5:00pm, find more details and sign up on the meetup page.

Sunday, March 6 – Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon @ Interference Archive

There will also be an Art+Feminism Editathon at Interference Archive in Gowanus, Brooklyn, from 2:00-6:00pm. Find more details and sign up on the meetup page.

Week 5: Mar 7 – Acculturated Digital Identities

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?

Some examples:

Readings:

Motivators: Makeba, Sara

Guest: Jade Davis, Associate Director of Digital Learning Projects and Assessment, Center for Teaching & Learning, LaGuardia CC

Week 6: Mar 14 – Wikipedia: a Collaboration and a Society

Readings:

Motivators: Achim, Sakina

Guest: Siân Evans, co-founder of Art+Feminism

Week 7: Mar 21 – Mid-semester project conversation

Assigned: Final project proposal

Due: Project abstracts

Workshop of your abstracts

Suggested Reading: Nathaniel Rich, Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine, New York Times, 2013.

Week 8: Mar 28 – Creating Successful Assignments

Assigned: Begin peer review for Wikipedia assignment plans

Readings:

Motivators: Teresa, Tracy

Guests: Lisa Brundage, Macaulay Honors College; Adrienne Brundage, Texas A&M (via Skype)

Week 9: Apr 4 – Open Access, Open Educational Resources (future of the textbook), and Images

Readings:

Motivators: Sakina, Tracy

Week 10: Apr 11 – Digital Labor

Due: Wikipedia assignment plans

Readings:

Please choose one Mission US game to play, try to solve the Lost Museum mystery, and explore at least one CUNY Digital History Archive collection.

Motivators: Anders

Guests: Pennee Bender, Josh Brown, and Andrea Vasquez, American Social History Project, CUNY

Week 11: Apr 18 – Failure

Readings:

Motivators: Anders

Apr 22-30 – SPRING BREAK

Week 12: May 2 – Class attends Edge Tools at NYPL

Meet outside NYPL at 4:45pm

Edge Tools in a Digital Age: New Tools, Methods and Questions for a Networked Age

May 2nd 2016, 5:00pm – 7:00pm
New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street

Please join the Social Science Research Council and the New York Public Library for a panel in the series that probes tools for an increasingly complex and connected world. Original thinkers Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown moderate the discussion. This conversation features game designer Elan Lee, Chris McNaboe of the Carter Center, Terry Young of Sparks and Honey, and former Navy SEAL Officer Coleman Ruiz.

RSVP to Kate Grantz at [email protected].

Week 13: May 9 – Public, Private, Open, Owned

Reading:

Motivators: Achim

Week 14: May 16 – Presentations

Presenters: Makeba, Sara, Teresa, Tracy

Guests: ITP faculty

Week 15: May 23 – Presentations

Due: Final project proposal

Presenters: Achim, Anders, Jojo, Sakina

Guests: ITP faculty