Hello and welcome to the website for the DGST 101: Intro to Digital Studies! This website provides a repository of information about the course in general, and it will also be where I post detailed descriptions of daily tasks. This course website supplements our Slack workspace where we'll discuss the assigned readings and shared work. Think of this website as the backbone of the course structure, so make sure you check it often.
In this first post, I want to reflect a little about my approach to this class online and how it might differ from the many times I've taught DGST 101 in face to face classes. This is the third online class I've taught -- I taught DGST 101 online for the first time in Summer 2017, then again in Summer 2018.
It's an interesting experience, but it's one I've grown to look forward to, even though as I tell everyone who asks, I think teaching online takes quite a bit more work than teaching face-to-face, economies of scale notwithstanding.
What I assumed when I adapted the online class from the face-to-face version I've taught for many years was that much of what I think of as "The Class" actually takes place in the day to day conversations in the classroom. In other words, when there are really important things that I hope students will learn, I can emphasize verbally and with body language to drive the point home. Or, when there are simple fixes to HTML bugs, I can help find and resolve these pretty quickly by looking at a students' screen to see where they went wrong. And when students work in small group discussions that report conclusions back to the whole classroom, I can usually synthesize and sum up those ideas into a hopefully coherent conclusion.
But each of those opportunities real-time interactions must be replaced in some way by the generally asynchronous formats of communication enabled by the web. So I'm using this blog and Slack to hopefully accomplish this. Does it work? I hope so. It went pretty well last Summer, but it was far more work than I expected. I know I'll do a lot of typing, and I'll definitely make a few videos.
I've come to believe that ethos is an important feature of my teaching (that's the sense of who I am as a person that I bring to the class), so if I'm going to employ that here, I'm going to have to find ways to get my personality and identity across. I know I can re-use some of the material I prepared for last Summer, giving me more time to invest in the day-to-day personality of the class, but there's a risk of the content feeling stale. Hopefully I can figure out the right balance!
To get started, let me try and answer some questions you probably have.
Now, about this class. Even if you're a student who has signed up for the class eagerly, you may be wondering what "Digital Studies" actually is. It's a question I get asked often, or at least that I see it in the blank stares at social events when someone asks me what I teach. It's not self-explanatory, I'll admit. One answer I sometimes give is that it's like how Film Studies involves studying and sometimes making film, Digital Studies involves studying and making digital things in a cultural context.
As I've said elsewhere, I take this work to be expressed in three general branches, with much overlap between: digital creativity (using digital tools to make art, literature, or whatever), digital culture (learning about how digital technology influences, shapes, or creates the human world), and digital methodology (using digital tools to answer questions about the world).
Threading all of these things together is the idea of a digital identity, which is the version of self you create, hopefully, by exploring these three branches of digital studies in this class. The culmination of this class, your website, is the most concrete manifestation of your digital identity, but it would be a mistake to conflate the two. Not only does your digital self have footprints in many places (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), but the identity you develop -- already digital whether you intentionally embrace that or not -- is really part of you. Sometimes the hard part is just taking that step to intentionally embrace it, but that's what this class is here to hep you do.
My plan is to post something every morning on this website (four days a week) by 9:00 AM. That post will be, for example, "Week 1, Day 1", and in that post I'll explain what you should accomplish for that day. Bearing in mind that this compressed summer schedule means we need to accomplish in four days what would normally take 3 weeks, these daily instructional posts may be long.
In almost all cases, these daily posts will include instructions for sharing or discussing something in Slack, or if a major assignment is due or coming soon, I'll explain how and when to turn that in.
I'll post in Slack whenever I update this website, and you can also subscribe to a feed in your favorite RSS reader, if you're so inclined.
I'm sure you'll have questions as we go along. In most cases, Slack is the best place for those questions, and if it's the kind of question that others would benefit from hearing an answer to, please post that in the #general-chat channel, mentioning me @zachwhalen so that it gets my attention.
Hopefully this all makes sense, or it will soon!
~zw