Non-digital texts for the course:

Go to see Citizenfour.

Week 1: Jan 28 – 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 (Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.)
• Learning how to learn
• Skills Workshops, and the need to go (to avoid the bad kind of failure)
• Wikipedia intro (user accounts, edit tab, basic BB Code)

Assigned: Introductory project ideas in blog post

Week 2: Feb 4 – Contexts and Practicalities

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 your self, 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.

Motivators: Gwen

Week 3: February 11 – What does what OR How to get things done

Assigned: Project Abstracts

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, Basecamp/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 the CAC group.
• Joe Ugoretz, et al, CUNY AC Kitchen Sink Utilities wiki page
• Miriam Posner, How did they make that?
• Bamboo DiRT, http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/, registry of digital research tools for scholarly use

Guests: Past ITP students to talk about their Independent study projects

Motivators: Patrick: DH tools, Anka: Getting Real

February 18 NO CLASS (Monday schedule)

Week 4: Feb 25 – Teaching, Learning, Technology

Assigned: Collaboratively written Wikipedia article. Please follow Wikipedia assignments on the on wiki syllabus

Readings:

• Cassidy Puckett manuscript uploaded to the Commons Group
  
• “(My) Three Principles of Effective Online Pedagogy,” Bill Pelz, JALN Volume 8, Issue 3, 2004, pp. 33-46
• Browse the “No Significant Difference” site
• Some of you may have already stumbled upon it, but this post (and its comments) on cac.o.phony is an interesting breakdown of the pros/cons/challenges of online learning. You’ll note that Joe Ugoretz (ITP Faculty) is one of the commenters. (please make sure to read all of the comments as that is where the good conversation takes place)
• “Two Roads Diverged in a Wood”: Productive Digression in Asynchronous Discussion – Joseph Ugoretz Innovate 1:3 (2005)
• Maura Smale and Mariana Regalado, “Commuter Students Using Technology,” Educause Review, Sept 15, 2014.
• “A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age,” Hybrid Pedagogy, 2013.
• Maura Smale and Jody Rosen, “Open Digital Pedagogy=Critical Pedagogy,” Hybrid Pedagogy, 2015.
• Audrey Watters, “A Hippocratic Oath for Ed-Tech,” January 2015.

Motivators: Genevieve: Digital Divide, Robert: Online learning, Cailean: respondent.

Guests: Emalinda McSpadden and Cassidy Puckett

Week 5: Mar 4 – Acculturated Digital Identities

DUE: Add one well cited paragraph to an article related to your research. Submit a diff of your work to both Michael and Lisa’s talk pages. If you didn’t make it to the Wikis workshop, please watch this video, and do this training.

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:

• Reassessing Inequality & Reimagining the 21st Century, a POOC
• FemTechNet, a DOCC

Readings:

• “Hashtag Feminism, #Solidarity is for White Women, and the Other #FemFuture,” Susana Loza, Ada: A Journal of Gender and New Media Technology, Issue 5.
• “Quantify Everything: A Dream of Feminist Data Future,” Amelia Abreau, Model View Culture 2014.
• “Responding to No name Life Science Blog Editor who called me out of my name” DN Lee, Scientific American, 2013. (See also “Scientific American’s Troubling Response to Its Blogger Being Called an “Urban Whore,” Amanda Hess, Slate, 2013)
• “All the Digital Humanists are White, All the Nerds are Men, But Some of Us are Brave,” Moya Z. Bailey, Journal of Digital Humanities, 2011.
• Geek Feminism Timeline of Sexist Events
• “The Writing On the Wall” Reply All Podcast Episode 9. Jan 15, 2014.
• Amanda Fillipachi, “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists“, The New York Times, April 24, 2013
• Ayush Khanna, “Nine out of ten Wikipedians continue to be men: Editor Survey,” Wikimedia Blog, April 27th, 2012.
• Gender Gap, on Meta.Wikimedia.org. This is a resource and policy page that applies to all WMF projects.
• Art+Feminism, on WIkpedia. This is a Meetup page where we organize people to meet up in person and edit Wikipedia. We are organizing the 2015 International Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon on this page.
  
• Suggested: Adrianne Wadewitz “Wikipedia’s gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias,” Hastac, July 26, 2013
• Optional Background: Peruse Debates in the Digital Humanities “Critiquing the Digital Humanities“

Motivators: Wikipedia: Gioia , Non-Wikipedia: Rachel – Sara

Guest: Kara Van Cleaf, Macaulay Honors College & FIT

Saturday, March 7 – Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon

Michael is co-organizing a series of Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathons, with over 60 locations worldwide. There will be several events in NYC. The main location will be MoMA, with satellites at the Brooklyn Museum, Columbia, The New School, and Abrons Arts Center.

Week 6: Mar 11 – Wikipedia: a Collaboration and a Society

Readings:

• Review Benkler on Wikipedia, pages 70-74.
• Review First section of Collaborative Futures (you all should have read this in the fall)
• Joseph Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, Chapter 1, MIT, 2010.
• Jim Giles, “Special Report Internet encyclopaedias go head to head,” Nature, December 15, 2005.
• Dan Nosowitz, “Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia,” Popular Science, November 2, 2012
• Categories for Deletion (CfD) discussion on wiki about American Women Novelists. You don’t need to read the whole thing, but try to get a sense of the process, and who the characters are and what their positions are, and how that leads to an outcome.
• WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force. This is a WikiProject on Wikipedia.
• GamerGate’s latest Wikipedia War shows how GG crowdsources harassment, Reddit thread on GamerGate, ARBCOM, and 8Chan.
• Mark Bernstein, “Infamous,” MarkBernstein.org, January 20, 2015. An insider’s blog analysis of the Gamergate Controversty ARBCOM decision
• Michael Mandiberg, “The Affective Labor of Wikipedia: GamerGate, Harassment, and Peer Production,” Social Text, Feb 1, 2015.
• Alex Hern, “Wikipedia bans five editors from gender-related articles,” The Guardian, January 23, 2015
• Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions at GGTF. This is an Arbitration Committee (ARBCOM) case that arose from inside the Gender Gap Task Force. We don’t expect you to read all of this, but see if you can start to see the accusations, the process, and the outcomes.
• Joe Mullin, “Wikimedia Foundation employee ousted over paid editing,” Ars Technica, January 9, 2014.
• Article for Deletion (AfD) discussion for David Horvitz’s attempt to have his Wikipedia page deleted as art.
• ThatPeskyCommoner, et al “Wikipedia:High-functioning autism and Asperger’s editors.” This is an essay on Wikipedia, not an article, policy or discussion.

Suggested texts: Free Culture FTW: Patrick; Dystopia: Joseph. Genevieve.

• SUGGESTED: Lam et al, “WP:clubhouse?: an exploration of Wikipedia’s gender imbalance“
• SUGGESTED: Benjamin Mako Hill, “The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited,” July 21, 2013; A summary of a paper he wrote with Aaron Shaw. Feel free to read the actual paper, if you like, but the summary is sufficient for our purposes.
• SUGGESTED: Joseph Reagle’s “Wikipedia and Gendered Categories,” blog post on American Women Novelists.
• SUGGESTED: Fernando Rodrigues, “Mass Collaboration or Mass Amateurism,” PhD Dissertation. Updates and expands on the Nature article.
• SUGGESTED: Stephen Lurie, The 36 People Who Run Wikipedia, Medium.com, November 5, 2014.
• SUGGESTED:  Michael Sebastian, “Top PR Firms Promise They Won’t Edit Clients’ Wikipedia Entries on the Sly,” Advertising Age, June 10, 2014
• SUGGESTED: Robert Sorokanich, “A Tweetbot Caught the Russian Gov’t Editing Flight MH17 Wikipedia Info,” Gizmodo, July 18, 2014.

Motivators:

Guests: Ximena Gallardo C

Week 7: Mar 18 – Mid-semester project conversation

Workshop of your abstracts

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

Week 8: Mar 25 – Creating Successful Assignments

Reading: 

• Student Project Examples
  • Macaulay Seminar 2 Encyclopedia
  • Year of the Flood Project and planning mural
  • Macaulay Springboard
  • “Students Receive Unique Learning Experience by Creating Online Journal” Texas A&M Entomology Dept, 2014.
• Jade E Davis, “Creating a (almost) Failproof Final Project or Paper,” HASTAC, Dec 12, 2014.
• Browse “Assignments” section of JITP.
• Alex Halavais, “Blogging Course Texts: Enhancing Our Traditional Use of Textual Materials” in Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (ed. Scholz)
• Piotr Konieczny “Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool: Five Years later” First Monday, September 3, 2012.
• Ulises A. Mejias, How I Used Wikis to Get My Students to Do Their Readings in Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (ed. Scholz)
• Suggested: Mushon Zer-Aviv, “When Teaching Becomes an Interaction Design Task: Networking the classroom with collaborative blogs,” in Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (ed. Scholz)
• Suggested: Matt Barton Is There a Wiki in This Class? Wikibooks and the Future of Higher Education in Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom (ed. Cummings and Barton)

Motivators: Projects: Holly; Meta: Jeff

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

Week 9: Apr 1 – Open Access, Open Educational Resources (future of the textbook), and Images

Reading:

• Ashley Dawson, “DIY Academy? Cognitive Capitalism, Humanist Scholarship, and the Digital Transformation,” in The Social Media Reader (ed. Mandiberg)
• http://www.socialtextjournal.org/
• http://publicculture.org/
• http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/
• Suggested for those who are unfamiliar with open access publishing: Open Access to Scholarly Literature: Which Side Are You On? by Jill Cirasella, Graduate Center, and Open Access: Six Myths Put To Rest, by Peter Suber, The Guardian, October, 2013.
• Additional information: Open Access @ CUNY and Open Educational Resources @ CUNY

Motivators: Cailean, Anka

 

April 3-12 Spring Break

Week 10: Apr 15 – Digital Labor

DUE: Wikipedia Article

Readings:

• Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, Minnesota, 2006. (Original text from 1996).
• Richard Barbrook , ‘The High-Tech Gift Economy‘, first written in 1998, republished in First Monday Special Issue #3: Internet banking, e-money, and Internet gift economies, December 2005.
• Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text, 63 (Volume 18, Number 2), Summer 2000, pp. 33-58.
• Laurel Ptak, “Wages for Facebook,” manifesto!
• E. Alex Jung, “Wages for Facebook,” Dissent, Spring 2014. Essay about the manifesto.
• Dorothy Howard, “Thoughts on Wikipedia editing and Digital Labor,” Essay on Wikipedia.
• Suggested: Trebor Scholz, “Introduction: Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, (Ed. Trebor Scholz), Routledge, 2012.

Motivators: Sissi, Gioia, Jeff

Week 11: Apr 22 – Failure

Readings (These may change over this semester):

• Guggenheim Museum, “The Aesthetics of Failure,” Website for Maurizio Cattelan retrospective.
• Richard Gabriel, The Rise of Worse is Better
• Scott Berkun, The Myth of Innovation, hour long lecture based on book.
• Alison Carr, In Support of Failure, Composition Forum, 2013.
• Sean Michael Morris, The Failure of an Online Program, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2013.
• Bonnie Stewart, How NOT To Teach Online: A Story in Two Parts, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2013.
• Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy’s Teaching Fails columns, choose and read two.

Motivators: Sara, Robert.

Week 12: Apr 29 – Public, Private, Open, Owned

Reading:

• Watch Citizenfour, by Laura Poitras
  
• Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet (and How We Can Stop it) http://futureoftheinternet.org/download, Section II pp. 63-148; suggested: conclusion, pp. 235 – 246.
• James Grimmelman, The Google Dilemma. New York Law School Law Review, 53, 939-950, 2008/2009.
• Tim Wu, Why Monopolies Make Government Spying Easier, New Yorker, 2013
• Nick Bilton, Internet’s Sad Legacy: No More Secrets, New York Times, 2013
• Gregory Donovan, “Dataveillance and Everyday Consciousness in the ‘Smart City‘,” recorded lecture, May 19, 2014.
• Deep Lab (watch short film; browse around other materials)

Motivators: Citiznfour: Holly, Rachel; Sissi: Zittrain; Joseph: Surveillance.

Guest: Gregory Donovan, Fordham University, http://cyberenviro.org/

Week 13: May 6 – Presentations

Week 14: May 13 – Presentations

Week 15: May 20 – Presentations