All assignments will be uploaded electronically to our Dropbox Folder. Please name your file clearly (e.g., LASTNAME_Assignment).

Course Requirements

1. Community Participation (40%)

We will all contribute contemporary examples of many of the principles and theories around digital literacies through our online conversations, posts, and classroom discussions, and we will extend our thinking about these issues together. Specifically, we will:

• Engage in class discussions: You will participate actively in our weekly class sessions, coming to class prepared and ready to discuss the readings in depth. 
• Prepare weekly homework: Each week we will ask you to prepare for class by engaging with the readings in some way. Usually we will have you bring what you have prepared to class but may ask it to be posted/discussed in advance.
• Present one of your projects: On the final night of class (May 1) you will give an Ignite style presentation of one of your projects from the semester. More details about what such a presentation entails will be forthcoming.

2. Three Projects (60%)

There will be three projects throughout the semester that will ask you to delve into some of the key concepts from the course in more depth, each with a particular focus (tools, pedagogies, research). You can choose how you want to represent your project: these can take the form of traditional essays or alternative forms (e.g., podcast, website, video, zine, etc.). One requirement across all three projects is that you should cite and synthesize course readings in a way that signals your learning and understanding of course concepts in appropriate breadth and depth. Beyond that requirement, you have a wide latitude of topics and formats for these projects – if you are uncertain about what to focus on or how to approach any of these projects, please reach out to discuss ideas.

Project 1: Critical Walkthrough of an Educational Platform (20%) – due Feb 25, 2024

You will choose one educational tool, app, or platform to examine closely and engage in a critical walkthrough, following Light et al.’s (2018) process (here is a protocol you may want to use, or you may want to adapt the method individually). Report on your findings about how the app/platform/tool supports and shapes teaching and learning, tracing the ideologies and assumptions embedded in its design.

Project 2: Pedagogical Design Project (20%) – due April 7, 2024 March 31, 2024

This pedagogical design project can take two forms. In the first option, you will design a unit or lesson that incorporates digital technologies in an integral way. This may be for a formal or informal setting (e.g., classroom, club, makerspace), following a design framework or creating your own, and oriented to either students or pre-service or in-service teachers. In addition to including the lesson/unit plan itself (and specifying the context/learners), you should describe why you made the design decisions you did and whether/how they reflected concepts/ideas/readings in the course.

In the second option, you will analyze existing curriculum materials that foreground digital technologies. These materials might be commercial or open-source curricula (e.g., digital citizenship or AI lessons) or materials designed by educators (e.g., via Twitter, TPT, Pinterest, TikTok). You may choose to use some of the course readings or other scholarship to guide your analysis, with an eye toward how the curriculum addresses key issues of technology integration we have been discussing.

Project 3: Research Project (20%) – due May 8, 2024

For the final project in the course, you will craft a short ethnographic research project, investigating either a community of interest to you or following an individual. You will collect observational data for 2-3 weeks (e.g., field notes, artifact collection, interviews, data analytics, etc.) to better understand the digital literacy practices of the community/person.

• In the first option, you will become a member of an online community, moving from observer to participant as you learn to think, act, and talk like a member of this particular “affinity space” (Gee, 2004). You will spend several weeks thinking about the meaning-making practices of this community across offline and online spaces, using your experience in this community to help make sense of the course texts we read and your own scholarly agenda. What does it mean to be a member of this community? What literacy practices are affiliated with and embedded in members’ participation? We will talk during the semester about how to identify a community that interests you, so that you are inspired to participate not just for the purposes of this assignment but because you share an affinity. Some ideas: fantasy, sports, video games, transmedia franchises (e.g., Star Wars, Spiderman), home design, DIY, fan communities, hobbies, politics, information, religion, education, others (e.g., geo-caching, Meetup, etc.). You will want to record what you are learning as a member of this community, illustrating it with screenshots and excerpts from online interactions. You will examine and reflect on the discourses, genres, texts, and literacies of this particular community in relation to your research question (which of course may change as you become more immersed). 
• In the second option, you will choose one individual (e.g., a teacher, a young person, a professional, etc.) and examine their digital practices, looking across the different communities in which they participate and tracing digital literacy practices across them. You are seeking to understand your participant’s world from an ethnographic perspective, which involves investigating how they move in/across spaces. You will want to record what you are learning in your interactions with your participant: What are some central meaning making practices? What beliefs and values are rooted in those practices? You will examine and reflect on the discourses, genres, texts, and literacies of this particular individual in relation to your research question (which of course may change as you become more immersed). 

You will communicate what you learned from your individual or community: what are the central digital literacies you traced, and how does your inquiry help you think/understand course concepts about digital literacy? This representation may take the form of an essay or alternate formats for representing knowledge (e.g., pedagogical zine, webtext, digital story, podcast, etc.).