Category: Assignments

Blockages, and Iteration

The readings planned for this week are about blockages and redirections, revisions and adaptations, taking risks and learning from experiments, iterations and roundabout solutions. They reframe what might be considered failure as a normal and necessary part of the creative process.

They take as a starting point our (ITP’s) decade long iterative attempt to teach this concept, and our slow movement towards something effective. Our failure to teach failure. This year, we want to present that process in itself.

As Robert and I planned the syllabus, this set of readings were the most difficult to resolve. I told Robert about some of our previous challenges in trying to teach these concepts. We brainstormed, and I proposed some routes, that in turn Robert pointed out had their limitations. I thought it over, and wrote an email to a group of trusted peers, asking for their guidance. In effect, we were enacting the very process we were trying to elucidate. So we have decided to present that process itself as the framework for the readings on this topic.

We have posted in the commons group library:

  • the email I sent to my peers (I was writing to the Eyebeam alumni list, which includes about 500 artists, technologists, designers, organizers, and activists who have done residencies/etc there. Apparently there is now a complete list!)
  • my summary of the dozen+ responses I received
  • Three key readings they suggested that are not on the web or in databases:
    • Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
    • Pauline Oliveros’s essay “Software for People”
    • John Sharp and Colleen Macklin, Ten Lessons in Design and Failure (coming soon! probably Tues/Weds.)

We would like everyone to 1) read chapter 2 from Sharp and Macklin 2) choose an additional suggestion to explore from this list of suggestions in all it’s breadth. Some of these are books (remember our discussion the first week about strategic reading, and don’t read the whole book word for word!), some of these are specific articles, some of these are ideas/practices. You could also choose to explore additional chapters from Sharp and Macklin, if you feel that approach is most relevant to your interests and outlook.

For your writing this week, try to focus on what strategies or approaches you took away from this material. Do they help you reframe or rethink your own past experience with blockages and itteration? What you think might help you in your ITP work, but also in your PhD work, and your larger intellectual, creative, and professional lives.

Final Project and Presentation

Final Paper Assignment for ITP II

Your final work for ITP 2 is to produce a project proposal that includes a basic proof of concept. Your true audience for this proposal are the gatekeepers who hold institutional purse strings, allocate resources and space, approve curriculum, or administer technology resources. Or more concretely: the ITP faculty member who you are asking to supervise your independent study. Your job is to convince this hypothetical reader that your project is intellectually and/or pedagogically vital, builds on but doesn’t duplicate existing work, is done in the most effective and efficient way possible, uses the right tech, and most importantly: that you can pull it off in the time frame that you have available to you: the ITP Independent Study.

Your project proposal should be roughly 12-15 double spaced pages in length. You are welcome to follow the guidelines for the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants, the  NEH Digital Humanities grants, or another discipline specific set of requirements. Generally, it needs to include:

  • an abstract or summary with a clear problem statement
  • a project narrative that gives the practical, historical, theoretical, and technical contexts for the project proposed
  • an environmental scan of projects that operate in a similar technical, scholarly, or pedagogical space as yours
  • a clear, relevant, and detailed work plan or project timeline
  • proof that you have a strategy to complete the project within one semester

Grant proposals typically include a budget; you may choose to include this, but it is not required. You may find it useful to include your personas and your use case scenarios. Some disciplines may have other, discipline specific requirements; please include those if relevant.

The proof that you can complete the project can incorporate your biography, or a description of how the proposed project builds on your previous and related work, but in this instance, you need to complete a proof of concept for the project. This will be different for each of you, but it needs to demonstrate that you have learned enough about the task at hand that you will be able to complete it. Much of this learning is technical, but it might not be exclusively technical.

Some examples of past proofs of concept:

  • When proposing a group wiki assignment, one person created a simulation of one assignment at the halfway state, with the text edited in character by the user accounts for each of the 4 personas described.
  • When proposing an online resource for images for use in teaching theatre courses, one person created a record for one image in Omeka.
  • When proposing a mobile app, one person found an open source quiz app they could build on, changed the text of one of questions, and recompiled the app.
  • When proposing a student assignment to create multimedia historical maps of NYC neighborhoods, one student created a sample map with the Google Maps API that contained a map point for each type of media expected to be used (video, audio, photograph, text).
  • When proposing a game, a student might present a draft of the game’s narrative, or presented one element of its gameplay.

You will be turning in a text, and giving a presentation. The presentation will take place on one of the last two weeks of class. These will be 8-9 minute presentations, with about 8 minutes for discussion/feedback. We will invite all ITP faculty to join us, though we don’t expect all will be able to make it for both of the days.

The text will be due on the last day of class. Please upload it as a Word document to the Forum area of our course group.

Midterm Assignment

Your midterm assignment will be to create a project proposal that has two scope variations: one full, and one reduced version.

One approach to your proposal could follow this structure:

  1. An introductory descriptive paragraph, which should include a problem statement, and say *what* your tool/assignment/archive/paper/etc will do.
  2. A set of personas and/or user stories.
  3. A use case scenario (where would someone find what you made and how would they use it?). Keep it short, and concrete.
  4. How you will make the full fledged version. This is your “ideal world” version that fulfills all of your visions and fantasies (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc).
  5. Your assessment of how much time the full-fledged version will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.
  6. How you will make the stripped-down version. The stripped down version is the minimally viable product. It is the most *bare bones* version to prove that what you are trying to get at is viable. (What tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc)
  7. Your assessment of how much time the stripped-down version will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.

You are welcome (but not required) to repeat the last two steps with scope variations in-between the full fledged and bare bones version.

You could also center what you have already made, focusing your presentation on your draft/proof of concept.

In previous years, this assignment asked you to propose two projects. If you are, indeed, trying to choose between two projects and fleshing them both out would be useful for you, you can fulfill the midterm assignment by offering what’s above for each idea, minus the stripped-down version.

Class that week (on Monday April 3rd) will be dedicated to workshopping the proposals. We will follow the following format: you will have 4 minutes to present your proposal orally (or one of your two proposals, if that applies), and we will have 5 minutes for feedback. Think of this as a pitch. You will want to lay out the project abstract, present very short versions of your personas, give one use case scenario, and then talk about how you would build it, and how long you think it would take. You should practice and time yourself!

You will submit your written proposal to the Forum by  April 7th, which will give you the chance to reflect the feedback you got in class on Monday. You can submit this as a link to a document, or an attachment.

Collaborative Design Assignment

ITP II, Spring 2023: Collaborative Assignment Design Assignment

You will collaboratively craft, with at least one student from another discipline, a scaffolded assignment 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. The assignment should be applicable across both of your disciplines. You may find it helpful to link your work on this assignment link to your own final projects for our class, or your own fields, or classes you actually teach.

We’ll give you some time for initial discussion with your partner during class on Monday, Feb 27th. The assignment plan is due on Monday, March 20th (before class starts), when you and your partner will post a word doc to the course forum with your final project assignment that contains at least three discrete, connected (e.g. scaffolded) tasks, intended for an undergraduate course. All groups will read all completed assignments, and we will discuss them as a group in the first hour of class on Monday, March 27th.

You can design this assignment as an OER or not, but you should articulate your decision either way.

The post should have the following elements:

  • A brief statement of the context of the course (discipline, level, institution type, instructional mode, is it real or imagined)
  • A statement about the place of the assignment within the larger learning goals of the course; why is it the final?
  • A draft of the assignment, addressed to your students. This should include the discrete, connected tasks.
  • A statement of the technologies used in the assignment, and why
  • The criteria you’d use to evaluate the assignment