Maria Garcia's List: On e-learning and digital cultures course (Coursera)

• What do you mean by digital artefact?
   We mean something that is designed to be experienced digitally, on the web. It will have the following characteristics:
  
   
   
  • it will contain a mixture of two or more of: text, image, sound, video, links.
   
  • it will be easy to access and view online.
   
  • it will be stable enough to be assessed for at least two weeks.
   
   Try to have fun with this and use it as a chance to think broadly and creatively: anything goes in terms of the form of this essay. As long as you keep the assessment criteria in mind you can be as experimental as you wish.
• digital environments are multimodal by nature - they contain a mixture of text, images, sound, hyperlinks and so on. To express ourselves well on the web, we need to be able to communicate in ways that are "born digital"
• What online tools are available for making my digital artefact?
   There are many online tools you could use to create and/or publish your artefact. Here are just a few ideas:
  
    Voicethread: http://voicethread.com
   Storify: http://storify.com/
   Xtranormal: http://www.xtranormal.com/
   Pixton: http://pixton.com/uk/
   Issuu: http://issuu.com/
   Storybird: http://storybird.com/
   Weebly: http://www.weebly.com/
   Animoto: http://animoto.com/
   Prezi: http://prezi.com
   Wikispaces: http://www.wikispaces.com
   TedEd: http://ed.ted.com
   Google Sites: https://sites.google.com
  
   or any blog, web space or wiki site!
• This wiki has more ideas:
   ‘50+ web 2.0 ways to tell a story’: http://50ways.wikispaces.com/
  
    Other possibly useful resources:
   Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/
   Bubbl.us: http://bubbl.us/
• What topic should I choose?
• ‘utopias and dystopias’, or on the theme of ‘being human’.
• Try to build your artefact around a specific topic or question of interest to you. 
  
   Some broad areas you could consider:
  
   
  • humans, machines and animals
   
  • surveillance
   
  • communication technologies
   
  • ubiquity
   
  • open (and opening) education
   
  • human nature
   
  • the meaning(s) of learning
   
  • the evolution of information technology
   
  • the future of learning institutions
• How should I submit my assignment? 
   
  1. Make sure your assignment is publicly visible on the web, without having to log in anywhere (ask a friend to check).
   
  2. Make a note of the web link.
   
  3. Go to the assignment page and paste or type the web link in to the submission box.
   
  4. Double check to make sure the link works and that you’ve typed it correctly!
   
  5. Press the ‘submit’ button.

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• how digital culture and digital education are often described as either utopian (creating highly desirable social, educational, or cultural effects) or dystopian (creating extremely negative effects for society, education or culture).
• Utopian claims Dystopian claims
• intrinsically de-democratizing properties
• ntrinsically democratizing properties
• end themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic control).
• democratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.
• Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.
• Cyber-politics is essentially one of resisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the technology in question.

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