Course Calendar

Course Calendar
Please Note: the course calendar and syllabus are subject to change depending on the way in which the class unfolds. This class is not premised upon coverage, but rather deep, analytic interaction with a series of ideas from a wide-range of disciplines.

Week 1: A Personal Cyber Infrastructure

 * Tuesday 1/12: Course Introduction
 * Thursday 1/14: A Domain of One's Own

Assignments for 1/14
Note: Be sure to track your notes and thoughts about these readings, for they will be the fodder for your first blog post.
 * Kay, Alan. “Personal Dynamic Media.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
 * Read Gardner Campbell's "A Personal Cyber Infrastructure" and watch his presentation "No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable" here.
 * Purchase your own domain name at Godaddy.com (or some other domain registry service, here's a list of all accredited domain registrars)
 * Purchase your own web hosting account from Cast Iron Coding. Instructions and details here. Sign-up page at Cast Iron Coding here

Week 2: Trial by Fire: Creating Your Own Platform
(Both days will be an in-class workshop for installing applications; using CPanel to create your domain; an overview of MySQL databases and PHPMyAdmin; and examining FTP and file management for web servers)
 * Tuesday 1/19: Creating your own space with OSS
 * Thursday 1/21: Creating your own space with OSS (con't)

Assignments for 1/19 & 1/21

 * You will all be expected to blog your process for setting up your own domain and installing applications. Think of it as a tutorial for someone else who is just starting down the same path.
 * Narrate your process for setting up your own blog on a step-by-step basis using visual aids (screenshots) and textual directions for others. You can also make a screencast (or screencasts) using Jing.
 * Be sure to include what snags you ran into along the way, and discuss how you figured out any issues you had? (Be sure to link to resources used.)
 * Also, how are you helping one another out?

Week 3: Digital Storytelling=Digital Identity?

 * Tuesday 1/26: How might the idea of digital identity relate to digital storytelling?
 * Thursday 1/28: Thinking narrative through the lens of identity

Assignment for 1/26
Read and blog about "Digital Identity in Cyberspace" (Various Authors, White Paper Submitted for 6.805/Law of Cyberspace: Social Protocols)

Assignment for 1/28
Questions to think and blog about:
 * Now that we have our personal spaces, what will they look like? What functionality do they need? Why?
 * Now that you have your platform, what are you going to use it for? *What is it you are interested in narrating? What will be the frame/topic/motivation for your ongoing story?
 * How might this personal space be understood as an ongoing act of digital storytelling?

Week 4: Web 2.0 Storytelling

 * Tuesday 2/2: What is Web 2.0?
 * Thursday 2/4: What is Web 2.0 Storytelling?

Assignments for 2/2

 * Read Tim O'Reilly's defining essay "What is Web 2.0?"
 * Read Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine's "Web 2.0 Storytelling: The Emergence of a New Genre"

Assignment for 2/4

 * Explore and narrate stories in at least three applications from Alan Levine's 50 Ways to Tell a Digital Story site

Week 5: Storytelling with Digital Media

 * Tuesday 2/9: Snow day--Class canceled
 * Thursday 2/11: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, the "A Film in Six Frames" assignment and general discussion of the elements of storytelling for digital media.

Week 6: Digital Storytelling Projects

 * Tuesday 2/16: Rough draft of Digital Storytelling Semester long project due.
 * Thursday 2/18: Discussion of projects.

Week 7: Digital Photography

 * Tuesday 2/23: Digital Imagery, Flickr.
 * Thursday 2/25: Examples of Digital Storytelling with Images.

Week 8: Spring Break

 * Tuesday 3/2: No class
 * Thursday 3/4: No class

Week 9 Digital Audio

 * Tuesday 3/9: Ira Glass's This American Life, Audacity overview.
 * Thursday 3/11: Experimenting with your own audio stories (workshop)

Week 10: Digital Audio & Video

 * Tuesday 3/16: Examples of Digital Video Storytelling
 * Thursday 3/18: Create your own example (Workshop)

Week 11: Digital Audio & Video

 * Tuesday 3/23: What is screencasting? (Workshop)
 * Thursday 3/25: Experiment with screencasting (workshop)

Week 12: The Mashup

 * Tuesday 3/30: Brian Lamb's article on the Mashup
 * Thursday 4/1: Create a video maship using footage from the Internet Archive

Week 13: Video games and ARGs

 * Tuesday 4/6: What dos Hlaf-Life 2 have to teach us about narrative?
 * Thursday 4/8: Alternate Reality Gaming: the ultimate art form?

Week 14: Presenting your story

 * Tuesday 4/13: 5 minutes of fame---PechKucha
 * Thursday 4/15: 5 minutes of fame---PechKucha

Week 15: Does the story end here?

 * Tuesday 4/20: Exporting your data, and the portability of your online identity
 * Thursday 4/22: Where do you live?

Final Projects "Screenings" on Tuesday, April 27th from 7:00 pm -10:00 pm