Digital Textuality Spring 2011
The story of two classes, one undergraduate, one graduate, and their journey to investigate shifts in textuality enabled by digital and networked tools and environments.
- The goal with these courses is to both analyze and produce digital textuality. As the instructor I had a really difficult time articulating my vision and explaining how the various assignments would all come together into theoretically-informed, student-produced multi- or transmedia portfolios. So I developed a map to visualize how things connected.
I think next time around I might actually turn this map into the official syllabus. - Because the classes ask a lot of students - to use tools other than writing to compose ideas with media they have not yet mastered, it is important to me to have everyone's buy-in and to really establish the learning environment as a space for which everyone is responsible.
Right away we started out by crowd-sourcing course material. We collaboratively decided upon criteria for assignments and also worked together to choose a book, around which the portfolios will be organized. 
#digitaltext Topic Response Poll closes today at 5pm. 13 people left to vote - still anyone's game. ow.ly/3KLJB
What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
~ Roo Rogers (author)More about this productList Price: $26.99 Price: $17.81 You Save: $9.18 (34%) - Not surprisingly, the notion of digital textuality takes on layers as even many of the course texts are available in digital format.
- Ha! We hooked one! @academicdave gets involved in discussions of the Author/author and brings Foucalt's author function into the mix.
It is really difficult for me to stay out of these conversations. It's a wonderful exercise in online restraint! 
@producerarose a lot of people use Barthes to talk about hypertext, digitaltextuality, but I think one also has to use Foucault- Ugh! Ice storm shuts down campus for two days, one of them being one of the days that the graduate class is supposed to meet. There is no cushion built into this syllabus so outright canceling isn't really an option. Rather than trying to coordinate everyone's schedules for one makeup session, I offered three options for making up the meeting - online chat during regular class meeting time, shortened meeting in person on campus a few days later, or attending the undergrad class.
- Create 6374Main « TodaysMeethelps you connect with the room in realtime. Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs. Name your room ie: http://todaysmeet.com/ Delete the room in how long will the room data be saved? Twitter hashtag Tweets with this hashtag will be pulled into the room. By submitting this form you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms.
- Much like the subzero windchills, the chat rooms were an "invigorating" experience. The only way to make it work was to divide students up into different rooms and put them in charge of the conversation - I loved that aspect of it. But it was difficult for me to juggle the five discussions happening at once. Ultimately I think it worked well for an occasional meeting type, but I wouldn't want to run all classes that way.
- Week four (and rescheduled week 5 for grads) brought about the start of the tool workshops. As it turns out, students have time to listen to at least 2 presentations before using workshop time to experiment with the tools.
Tagxedo seemed to be an immediate hit and lots of students immediately started experimenting: - Visualization from Alice in Wonderland by M.M.
- Tagxedo - hacked together my own example. 2011 SOTU on top of archtype shot of Obama. #digitaltext yfrog.com/h420mp
- A Tagxedo of "In My Veins" by Andrew Belle - messing around with visualizations of words for #digitaltext twitpic.com/3xvo38
- Summarizr - http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/digitaltextArchive for courses on digital textuality and writing, led by Kim Knight at UT Dallas.TwapperKeeper archive URL: <http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/digitaltext> Total tweets: 1796 Total twitterers: 185 Total hashtags tweeted: 144 Total URLs tweeted: 441 80% (1436) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 12% (23) of the twitterers. The top 10 (5%) twitterers account for 62% (1116) of the tweets. 65% (121) of the twitterers only tweeted once. 54% (975) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were @replies or mentions. 40% (74) of the twitterers who tweeted as part of this TwapperKeeper archive received an @reply and/or mention....
