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Digital & Multimodal Literacies
Weeks 6 & 7: Sept 21-Oct 5
Digital & Multimodal Literacies
- Sept 21: We’ll start An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube together
- Sept 26: Finish watching and comment in Perusall on An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
- Sept 28: Read and annotate “Four Things Social Media Can Teach You About College Writing–And One Thing It Can’t” AND “Making Science: When Does Spaghetti Become a Light Ray?”in Perusall
- Oct 3: Read and annotate “A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin” in Perusall
- Oct 5: class canceled. New due date: Digital Literacies paper/artifact due Oct 12.
Tracing Our Quantified Self
We’ll turn our attention for this assignment to our digital and multimodal literacies. We’ll skim together in class “Big Mother is Watching You” and explore the Quantified Self website.
Then, for a few days, we’ll gather data about what we track, who tracks us, and how others view and gather data. Ultimately, we’ll consider what we know about digital literacies. Some ideas for tracing your quantified self:
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- Google your name in a web search. Perhaps try incognito mode too: every browser has an option for this if you Google “how do I use incognito mode in X browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc)” Are there differences in the results from when you Google as yourself and when you Google in incognito mode?
- Check My Activity in google
- If you have created websites in the past, check out the Wayback machine and see what your old websites look.
- What can you find out about your Twitter analytics or Snapchat or Instagram?
- Do you notice likes on social media? Number of followers?
- Check your screen time on your phone. The amount of time spent on various apps on your phone. The stats in your activity or health apps.
- Do you keep track of your sleep? Your workouts? Do you go into detail on workouts like keeping track of splits on a run?
- What about school data? Do you keep track of scores, grades, etc?
- Other ideas? Your gas mileage? Your hours worked? The number of books read?
Writing About Our Quantified Self: options for working with our next “paper/artifact”
- Write an informal paper (the Big Mother opening could be a model for getting started on a blog post): reflections on your quantified self.
- Another paper idea: You could compare what your school data says about you and what your school data leaves out? You might consider thinking through all the stats from your school experience: how many tests, how many classes attended (and missed), how many grades, how many hours working or studying? And then what is not accounted for in these numbers: friendships, commutes, homesickness, new places visited.
- Perhaps create a visual essay with images using Adobe Spark. You could represent your data in a series of memes (“what people think I do vs what I really do”)
- Use the Data Detox kit and then write a reflection on the process.
- An infographic (like the Quantify Yourself chart in the Big Mother article). Piktochart could be a great resource for this. You could then add a short piece of writing to expand on the chart: what does your data explain and not explain about your quantified self?
- Watch The Internet’s Own Boy (<–this is the trailer) and write a summary and reflection. Link to full film
- A short film: alternating some day-in-the-life style video perhaps with some narrative and images from you. I would keep this under 3 minutes. And I would compose a film, not simply talk to a webcam.
- A game: design a gaming experience for us that immerses the player into a quantified self. You might even use a site like Super Better to create your game.
- Other ideas?
Oct 5 (before class): Share paper or artifact with me as google doc (or link): kjaxon@mail.csuchico.edu (*NOTE: email slightly different for sharing in google than my regular email.)