Syllabus

ITCP 70020 2023
Interactive Technology and Pedagogy II: Methods and Practice

Course Info: Meets Mondays 4:15-6:15pm (see exceptions below), in person in room 6495. Labs meet in 6418.

Course group: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/itp-ii-spring-2023/

Professors

Michael Mandiberg
Office hours: Mondays 2-3:30pm and by appointment (contact Lucia Dikaczova to schedule)
Office: Room 3204.09

Robert P. Robinson
Office hours by appointment: [email protected]

Course Requirements

All students should be members of the CUNY Academic Commons and in the past we suggested you be users of Twitter, but maybe that is Mastodon now? 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.

Official Course Learning Goals

  • Students will develop the ability to employ digital tools and methodologies in their scholarship and pedagogy.
  • Students will be able to contextualize their own work within theories, histories and political economy of the contemporary digital present.
  • Students will be able to produce a project proposal for a technology‐based project.

Our Learning Goals

Our Strengths:
  • Attitude and outlook
  • Ability to synthesize ideas and information
  • Previous research experience
  • Organization
Our Weaknesses:
  • Time management (and organization)
  • Doing too much, and getting caught up in the details
  • Confidence
  • Tech skills
Our Goals:
  • Learn new technical skills
  • Make something
  • Make it through the semester
Our Needs:
  • Dialog and constructive feedback
  • Practice with hard skills
  • Room for intellectual space

Course Assignments

This semester we will be working on three major assignments, with continuous blogging throughout.

Collaboration and Assignment Design
You will collaboratively craft, with at least one student from another discipline, the scaffold for a final project in an undergraduate course that engages with one or more of the core ideas explored to this point in your ITP experience. We’ll discuss the details for this assignment in class 4, and the assignment plan is due the week of class 7.

Project Abstracts/Short Proposals
Your midterm assignment is to create a project proposal (or two, if you’re still deciding between projects) that has at least two scope variations: one full and one reduced version. Details on the full assignment will be presented in Class 6, and due orally in Class 9 and in writing a few days later).

Final Project Proposal and Proof of Concept
Your final project is to turn in a proposal for a larger project that includes a proof of concept. Your goal is to convince us that your proposal is relevant and productive AND that you can actually pull it off. The details will be discussed Class 10. You will present your projects at the end of the semester, and the final written proposal will be due on the day of the last final presentations.

Weekly Low Stakes Writing

We will ask you to write every week in a low stakes mode, in order to engage with the class readings from our lived and present tense. We ask you choose one or more of the readings and think about how these texts and ideas apply to our lives today. Some were written a long time ago, many were written in the last decade, and some were written very recently. A lot has changed in the last three years, and yet a lot has remained the same for better or worse. We want you to use these texts to reflect on the present, or use the present to reflect on these texts. You may write in response to the readings and/or in response to the posts about the readings. You can find and present new writing or projects that address the issues raised in our readings. We want this prompt to be open and flexible to allow you to think through your experience of this moment as teachers, researchers, and/or students. And we encourage you to incorporate your own lived experience as a form of knowledge.

This is a low stakes writing assignment, and there is no specific word count requirement: we ask you to write what you want, and feel capable of writing, even if on some weeks that may only be a link and a couple of sentences. There is no wrong way of doing this. We will be posting these in the discussion forum in the Commons group. We ask you to complete 9 of these, which means you can skip 2 of the 11 weeks of readings. We will discuss the timing of when you should complete these during the first class.

Labs, Workshops, and Support

Course Schedule

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

1/30 – CLASS 1: INTRODUCTIONS

Core Readings (to read during class):

Assignments for 2/3 in addition to reading

  • Write a group forum post with any introductory project ideas you have, or the issues and themes you are interested in pursuing.
  • Make sure you’re part of the course on the Commons (join on our Group page, link above).

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UNIT ONE: Preparing a Project

2/6 – CLASS 2: CONTEXTS AND PRACTICALITIES, AND HOW TO GET THINGS DONE

Topics: In this class we will explore ways of thinking through and analyzing a project before it begins, and discuss issues that can arise along the path of the project. 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 project. When starting any media or digital project this is 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)? We will also discuss collaboration, scope creep, and minimal viable products.

“Less is more” is both an aesthetic principle of modernism and a functional spec of agile development–as well as a politically-charged phrase when applied to publicly-funded activities. Agile development has a long history. It takes its most recent, and quite popular form in Ruby on Rails, 37Signals (AKA Basecamp), and their Getting Real PDF. We will look at what it means to make less.

Core Readings:

  • 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.
  • 37 Signals, Getting Real (2009). Read pages 13-74 of the PDF strategically. That seems like a lot of pages, but you will find it to be a fast read. PDF posted in our course group under Files. (Link in menu above)

Additional Readings:

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2/13 –  NO CLASS

2/20 –  NO CLASS (Class meets on Tuesday)

2/21 – CLASS 3: SUSTAINABILITY AND PROJECT PLANNING

Online / Conversion day

Topics: In this class we will continue thinking about project planning and focus on questions that reflect on the content, context, and structure of your project: What is the scope of your project? Who is it designed for? What are its significant properties?

Guest speaker: Wendy Barrales, Urban Education at The Graduate Center & Manifold

Core Readings:

Additional Readings:

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2/27 – CLASS 4: PRELIMINARY PROJECT IDEAS

Topics: We’ll do some initial thinking/writing about your proposed projects and discuss them in class. Specifics of this assignment will be posted ahead of the class.

Assigned: Collaborative Pedagogy Design assignment.

Guest speaker: Anders Wallace, Senior UX Researcher, Google and ITP Alumnx

Core Readings:

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UNIT TWO: Digital Pedagogy

3/6 – CLASS 5: TEACHING, LEARNING, TECHNOLOGY

Topics: This session will explore the evolving roles of technology in teaching and learning. What pedagogical opportunities does the integration of technology into the classroom make possible? What challenges does technology create for the student, the instructor, the institution? How do we understand the politics of educational technology that is both a field of inquiry and an industry? How do we locate our own values within all of this?

Guest speaker: Allison Cabana, Critical Social Psychology & Personalities, GC

Core Readings:

  • Chapters 1-3 in Maura Smale and Mariana Regalado, Digital Technology as Affordance and Barrier in Higher Education, New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2017 (posted to course group).
  • Audrey Watters, A Hippocratic Oath for Ed-Tech, January 2015
  • (My) Three Principles of Effective Online Pedagogy, Bill Pelz, JALN Volume 8, Issue 3, 2004, pp. 33-46 (This is almost 20 years old, but the core principles still apply, as a discussion forum is still a discussion forum. Also, none of the links work!)
  • Carmen Kynard, Black Feminist Pedagogies (Peruse Site and Syllabi)

Additional Readings: 

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3/13 – CLASS 6: CREATING SUCCESSFUL AND ACCESSIBLE ASSIGNMENTS

Topics: Crafting purposeful assignments is one of the biggest and most persistent challenges faced by faculty, and college classrooms are rife with prompts that confuse students rather than enlighten them to the expectations of an assignment. In this session we’ll explore what makes an assignment effective, discuss how technology fits into the process, and translate these principles to our own disciplines and contexts.

Guest speaker: Sara Vogel, Associate Director of Computing Integrated Teacher Education, CUNY

Assigned: Abstracts/Short Proposals.

Core Readings:

Suggested Readings:

Suggested: Student Project Examples

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3/20 – CLASS 7: challenges and successes

Topics: All successful digital projects have moved through moments of challenge frustration. Such experiences are common in the classroom as well. In this session we’ll explore how to anticipate failure and how to lower its costs.

OPEN ACCESS, OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (FUTURE OF THE TEXTBOOK), AND IMAGES

Topics: Debates on the access to and use of information — text, images, video, etc. — have always been important in higher education. Where do these debates stand now, and how are they manifested in different academic spaces?

Guest speaker: Cynthia Tobar, Associate Professor and Head of Archives at Bronx Community College

Due: Collaborative Pedagogy Design assignment.

Showcase: During the second half of class we will host a Independent Study Showcase

Readings:

Suggested Readings:

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3/27 – CLASS 8: OPEN ACCESS, OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (FUTURE OF THE TEXTBOOK), AND IMAGES

Topics: Debates on the access to and use of information — text, images, video, etc. — have always been important in higher education. Where do these debates stand now, and how are they manifested in different academic spaces?

challenges and successes

Topics: All successful digital projects have moved through moments of challenge frustration. Such experiences are common in the classroom as well. In this session we’ll explore how to anticipate failure and how to lower its costs.

Readings:

To be presented as a larger process based assignment, will be posted to the assignments section in February.

Additional Readings:

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4/3 CLASS 9: Mid-semester Projects Discussion

Project Abstracts/Short Proposals presented in class.

April 6 – Midterm assignment due in writing (posted on our course site)

4/10 – NO CLASS Spring break

4/17 – CLASS 10: HYBRID AND ONLINE LEARNING

Topics: Over the past two decades universities have pursued a range of strategies to support online and blended learning. These strategies implicate interests and conflicts that go beyond the pedagogical affordances of a particular technology or approach. In this session we’ll explore some of these strategies and trace their implications.

Assigned: Final Project Proposal

Readings:

Suggested Readings:

Due Thursday April 14th: Collaborative Pedagogy Design assignment.

 

UNIT THREE: Technology and Society

4/24 – CLASS 11: THE BIASES OF TECHNOLOGY

Topics: 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?

Readings:

Suggested Readings:

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5/1 – CLASS 12: WIKIPEDIA: A COLLABORATION AND A SOCIETY

Background Readings (read these for high level comprehension, not detail):

Focused Readings:

 

Other Readings:

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5/8 – CLASS 13: My Journey to a new project: Black Education History, digital archives & databases, and oral history

Topics: Looking at the development of a research project.

Readings:

Other Sources/Resource Links

Suggested Reading:

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5/15: CLASS 14: final presentations

5/22 – FInals period: Final presentations

5/22: FINAL written PROPOSAL DUE

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