Introducing DIGC210: Digital Dissent
This session, I’ve taken up teaching a second year subject in the Digital Communication major at the University of Wollongong (UOW), alongside Sue Turnbull.
I’m planning to experiment with running this subject in Medium as far as I’m able, and I’ve set up a publication to do so. In posts to that publication, where I refer to ‘you’, I generally mean students, but of course others are welcome to comment and participate.
This post includes some of the subject information and, down the bottom, my rationale for leading the class this way.
Subject Information
Precis
Digital communication technologies are developed by researchers and corporations, regulated by governments and used as tools by activists. This subject looks at policy debates about how these technologies should or can be controlled and activist debates about how to use technologies to promote social change.
Topics include gender-related activism, pro-democracy movements, environmental activism, youth and social movements. The subject locates communication technologies in the context of broader processes of social control by powerful interests and their use as part of strategies for challenging these interests.
Timetable
The subject consists of a single 3 hour seminar, Tuesday afternoon from 3:30pm-6:30pm. It runs all weeks (including week 1).
Distributed Learning
This subject will work best with active participation in class and across other platforms.
If you have a laptop or tablet, please bring it along. Please pre-install or signup for a blogging platform like WordPress or Medium, and download Google Drive. I will publish subject updates, extra readings, blog posts and ideas, and republish student posts at http://digc210.net.
We will also use Twitter to share links and communicate as a learning group. Add the hashtag #digc210 to tweets, and follow it on Tweetdeck.
Feedback Form
I’ve established a Google form for students to post any questions, ideas, comments or discussion starters. It is totally anonymous (link in the subject Moodle site). Things you could post:
- Things you don’t understand about a reading or topic
- Constructive feedback for other students during group work, presentations, or conversations
- Ideas about how we can make the class run better, tools to use, and links to view and share
Rationale
Since I’ve taught in the Bachelor of Communication and Media Studies at UOW, a large part of communication with students has happened online via platforms such as:
- the institutional learning management system (LMS) Moodle
- students’ own blogs
This has been led especially by the Digital Communication major. Additionally, I have used a teaching blog with my students, a trick I learned from a fellow tutor, last year. My approach with that blog was quite well-received in the student evaluations.
I mention all of this to show that my approach of bringing this subject over to Medium isn’t that huge of an innovation — it is part of the pedagogical trajectory of our courses and subjects. Nonetheless, I think Medium has a few interesting characteristics that make it a useful place to go.
Firstly, this platform is more visible and more well-networked than some others. One of my aims, which is shared by many of my colleagues, is to help develop students as public writers. Our assumption is that to write well is to think well, and that most or all of our students will go into fields where they will be regularly writing for lots of different audiences.
Secondly, this subject in particular is well-suited to a platform with good networking features (following tags, writers, native mentioning, recommendations) because it is fundamentally a subject about networks. A big focus in our work will be how networks operate to distribute, create, shape, reign in and quash activist movements and moments. We’ll be asking questions like ‘how did that hashtag launch that campaign?’ ‘Why did everyone pile on to this event?’ ‘Who stopped that activity, and how?’
I’m asking students to participate with me in learning about this subject. The aim is to make both the class space and the online learning spaces enquiry- and activity-driven. In practicality, that means giving them space and resources to ask questions and find answers. I will do that by posing interesting case studies from around the world both obscure and well-known, both mundane and revolutionary.
In terms of the content, I have simplified the subject from 13 distinct weekly topics into three streams ‘Culture and Society’, ‘Governing’ and ‘Digital Regimes’. I redistributed the 13 topics under those, and removed a few. However, I hope students use the feedback form and class conversations to guide what topics we discuss and focus on.
If you’re interested in following along with DIGC210, follow the subject publication. Feel free to comment or tweet me (@travisaholland) as we go.
