This first block will consider the over-arching narratives which have driven our understanding of digital culture and its relation to learning.
We gain an overview of thinking on cyberculture via two core readings – Martin Hand’s introduction to Making Digital Cultures, and the second chapter from David Bell’s An Introduction to Cybercultures. We then investigate some of the ideas from these readings via a course film festival and a series of associated tutorials in Synchtube and Twitter. This will take up most of our time over the first two weeks of the course.
In the third week, we move on to consider the more explicitly educational implications of some of this thinking, via the (debatable) alignment of digital culture with visual culture, and the way this is played out in some of the literacies literature – in particular Gunther Kress’s work on multimodality. At the end of week 3, you will produce an online representation of the themes covered, using visual methods only.
You will spend week 4 of the course as a teaching associate within our Coursera MOOC, also called ‘E-learning and digital cultures’. Over this week you will monitor the MOOC discussions and create a response to them (a discussion forum post, a blog post, a video) which will constitute the formal end-of-week summary for the benefit of the MOOC participants. It will also feed into your tumblog.
Finally, in week 5, we will engage in commentary on the visual and MOOC artefacts, drawing together themes from this block and further developing the tumblogs by pulling in these artefacts and commentary.
weeks 1 and 2: the film festival