This is not a “class.” And it wasn’t intended to be. It’s a collaborative independent study. I’ve never taught a class like this and don’t consider myself to be teaching a class this term, only offering opportunities, guidance, and lots of infrastructural support as students self-organize and collectively organize themselves around the projects I made available to all of you to participate in: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/tutorial-thinking-digital-age-students-welcome andhttp://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/peer-apprenticeship-new-teaching-model-digital-age
Cathy Davidson, response to the listserv after I called us a class
]]>I am a tinker-er. The video on this site is also a documentation of me going through the process of learning a new software platform (the video software that shall remain unnamed) through playing and tinkering so please judge kindly.
I joined the class in search of a way to enable online collaboration in a class setting. I was looking for a solution that was scalable, both public and private and had the ability to manage course and conversation workflow. Anything else was just a perk. After doing a bunch of research, and speaking with the project lead for the UNC Digital Commons Project, I decided to try buddypress. With the blessing of the class, and the aid of the Director of New Media Strategy at HASTAC, I was able to get the site up and running in time for the class to use it pre and post Drumbeat.
Of all the feedback I could have received, I think the best feedback was from members of the class who had been weary of a public class blog. All of the people became quick converts to the buddypress platform. They attributed the comfort with a stronger community feel.
The goal of this site is to tinker with the information I gathered at Drumbeat to try and find a way to create an ethnographic archive of the experience, that is augmented with links, video and imagery in a way that a flat ethnographic document could not be. I am playing with the form of the field journal here.
I guess technically, I am the lead website manager of both. I developed nothing and broke everything (everything you see is thank to push button installs).
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