1/16/24-1/19/24

All work is due by midnight on Friday, 1/19/24

Welcome to ds106! This first week is dedicated to getting set up: set up your domain and Web hosting; install your WordPress site; and create other social media accounts such as Mastodon, and Discord. The sooner you get started, the better. If you run into trouble after looking through the supporting links, the Digital Knowledge Center is a great place to go for help.

This course will run on the open web. Some people may not be comfortable putting themselves online. You are welcome to create personae and pseudonyms, and you are not required to put any personal information online. You may find it useful to use your web presence as an online portfolio though.

We will be using a general theme of artificial intelligence this semester. The purpose of working with a theme is to give us some common ground for collaboration and interaction. Where we go with this theme will be determined largely by you. We see the topic and tools as offering many options for creative investigation, interaction and expression. As part of our storytelling adventure you will be creating characters which you can use to engage with the course, and to build stories around. More on this next week.

Here is a detailed list of what to do this week:

1. Review the Syllabus

You should carefully read through the syllabus. This course is different from most. The syllabus will help you understand the work and activities of the course. If you have any questions on the content, send them to me via  email.

2. Schedule a meeting We want to meet online with everyone in the class during the first two weeks. Sign up for a noon time slot on this form. If none of the times work for you any day, give us some alternate times and we’ll work something out.

3. Password management One skill that will prove critical to keeping up with the various services and accounts you setup over the semester (and life online in general) is a password management tool. There are many, 1Password and LastPass are two of the more popular, but they cost money. So if you are new to password management and don’t want to go out of pocket before you explore the approach, Bitwarden is an excellent, open solution for managing passwords and other keys safely. Managing your logins and passwords effectively will change your online life! This Youtuber will take you through the setup in detail, and trust us, it is worth the time invested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkYKb0Sx-XA

4. Set Up Your Accounts
This course runs on the open web and in various social media venues. I am assuming everyone knows how to be safe online. How you choose to present yourself, or what you choose to present as yourself, is entirely up to you. You will be creating a persona for the course in coming weeks, so you may want to start with a pseudonym here.
a. Domain Sign up for your own domain name and web site (free through UMW’s Domain of One’s Own project). Detailed instructions can be found here. Don’t skip the domain verification step! If you already have a domain through Domain of One’s Own, then you are one step ahead.
b. Mastodon https://social.ds106.us/home Mastodon will be one of our channels for communication in ds106. Send your first message of greeting and be sure to use #ds106 hashtag in your tweets. Follow the #ds106 hashtag.
c. Discord Join the class Discord server. You should have received an invitation email.

5. Install WordPress
You’ll be using this installation of WordPress to share your work every week, all semester. So you’ll want to get this installed and get comfortable with it ASAP. You should install it either at the root of your domain (www.yourdomain.com) or on a subdomain (ds106.yourdomain.com, for example). If you already have WordPress installed on your UMW Domain from another course, you can use your existing site (and just tag or categorize your ds106 work accordingly) or choose to create a new WordPress site in a separate subdomain.

We have three online guides that I recommend you review as you tackle this task:

Brief Introduction to cPanel: This guide will help you learn to navigate cPanel (the control panel for Web hosting on Domain of One’s Own).

Creating Subdomains and Subdirectories (optional): If you want to install WordPress somewhere other than at the root of your domain, check out this guide.

Installing WordPress: Learn how to get WordPress installed on DoOO.

WordPress Basics: Orient yourself to the WordPress environment.

Find out what a subdomain is and how to set up a subdomain on our documentation site.

NOTE: Do not use wordpress.com or wix or weebly or tumblr or whatever other third-party services are out there. You have to set up your own domain, or use a domain you already have (see Step 2, above), and you have to install WordPress on it (this step).

6. Register Your Blog at the Main ds106 Web Site
Once your blog is available on the web (it should be almost immediate) register yourself and your new blog on the DS106 site. We will add your blog feed to the course site. You MUST do this in order for everyone to see the posts you’ll be writing for the class.

7. Watch. We will be working with a theme of artificial intelligence this semester, exploring questions like: How can we use AI applications to enhance human creativity in storytelling and making art on the web? Should we use AI at all? What is our role in preventing the apocalypse? Can we save the world from oblivion? In order to inspire our thinking around these questions, we’re asking you to watch an AI related film of your choice. There is a list here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films), and also an overview of AI in fiction here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_fiction). Some can be found through various online services, and some, like Bladerunner, may be available through the Simpson Library. Pick one of the films, watch it and write your thoughts, reactions and reflections in a blog post and tag it film review. Need to know how to add tags in WordPress? There’s a help page for that.

8. What do you want to get out of this course?
This course involves a high degree of self-evaluation, so you should think about your goals at the beginning in order to consider how well you have achieved them down the road. You will have opportunities to re-evaluate your goals along the way, because they may change as we journey through the course.

Many people take this course to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement. This is the official language for the ALPP outcome:

General Education Requirements Learning Outcomes
ARTS, LITERATURE, AND PERFORMANCE –PROCESS

• Students will be able to speak about work critically, both process and product.

• Students will be able to evaluate the work’s effectiveness in conveying the student’s message or intent and/or achieving the student’s goals.

• Students will reflect or explain how they created a work of substance and value.

• Students will identify the process to achieve the goals of the creative project,and how successful the process was.

• Students will reflect on the value of the creative process.

That is what the University says you have to get out of this course. You will gain experience in producing digital media and discussing your creative processes, and through that discussion, meet these outcomes. You will learn about digital media by producing creative works. You have a great deal of freedom for creative expression in this course though, so I hope that you take advantage of that freedom to achieve something more.

Write a brief blog post on what you think you would like to accomplish with this course. Tag this post ds106goals

9. Write your Weekly Summary
You’ll be completing these summary posts on your blog every week. This week, write a post that shares your reflections on the first week. Tag this post WeeklySummary. Submit the URL for this post to Canvas by Friday at midnight. These posts are REALLY important. We use them to grade you every week, so you need to link to other posts you’ve written, embed media you’ve created, and narrate the process of learning that you went through this week. What did you learn? What was harder than you thought it would be? What was easier? What drove you crazy? Why? What did you really enjoy? Why? NO EXCEPTIONS. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED.

Welcome to ds106! This first week is dedicated to getting set up: set up your domain and Web hosting; install your WordPress site; and create other social media accounts such as Mastodon, and Discord. The sooner you get started, the better. If you run into trouble after looking through the supporting links, the Digital Knowledge Center is a great place to go for help.

This course will run on the open web. Some people may not be comfortable putting themselves online. You are welcome to create personae and pseudonyms, and you are not required to put any personal information online. You may find it useful to use your web presence as an online portfolio though.

We will be using a general theme of artificial intelligence this semester. The purpose of working with a theme is to give us some common ground for collaboration and interaction. Where we go with this theme will be determined largely by you. We see the topic and tools as offering many options for creative investigation, interaction and expression. As part of our storytelling adventure you will be creating characters which you can use to engage with the course, and to build stories around. More on this next week.

Here is a detailed list of what to do this week:

1. Review the Syllabus

You should carefully read through the syllabus. This course is different from most. The syllabus will help you understand the work and activities of the course. If you have any questions on the content, send them to me via  email.

2. Schedule a meeting We want to meet online with everyone in the class during the first two weeks. Sign up for a noon time slot on this form. If none of the times work for you any day, give us some alternate times and we’ll work something out.

3. Password management One skill that will prove critical to keeping up with the various services and accounts you setup over the semester (and life online in general) is a password management tool. There are many, 1Password and LastPass are two of the more popular, but they cost money. So if you are new to password management and don’t want to go out of pocket before you explore the approach, Bitwarden is an excellent, open solution for managing passwords and other keys safely. Managing your logins and passwords effectively will change your online life! This Youtuber will take you through the setup in detail, and trust us, it is worth the time invested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkYKb0Sx-XA

4. Set Up Your Accounts
This course runs on the open web and in various social media venues. I am assuming everyone knows how to be safe online. How you choose to present yourself, or what you choose to present as yourself, is entirely up to you. You will be creating a persona for the course in coming weeks, so you may want to start with a pseudonym here.
a. Domain Sign up for your own domain name and web site (free through UMW’s Domain of One’s Own project). Detailed instructions can be found here. Don’t skip the domain verification step! If you already have a domain through Domain of One’s Own, then you are one step ahead.
b. Mastodon https://social.ds106.us/home Mastodon will be one of our channels for communication in ds106. Send your first message of greeting and be sure to use #ds106 hashtag in your tweets. Follow the #ds106 hashtag.
c. Discord Join the class Discord server. You should have received an invitation email.

5. Install WordPress
You’ll be using this installation of WordPress to share your work every week, all semester. So you’ll want to get this installed and get comfortable with it ASAP. You should install it either at the root of your domain (www.yourdomain.com) or on a subdomain (ds106.yourdomain.com, for example). If you already have WordPress installed on your UMW Domain from another course, you can use your existing site (and just tag or categorize your ds106 work accordingly) or choose to create a new WordPress site in a separate subdomain.

We have three online guides that I recommend you review as you tackle this task:

Brief Introduction to cPanel: This guide will help you learn to navigate cPanel (the control panel for Web hosting on Domain of One’s Own).

Creating Subdomains and Subdirectories (optional): If you want to install WordPress somewhere other than at the root of your domain, check out this guide.

Installing WordPress: Learn how to get WordPress installed on DoOO.

WordPress Basics: Orient yourself to the WordPress environment.

Find out what a subdomain is and how to set up a subdomain on our documentation site.

NOTE: Do not use wordpress.com or wix or weebly or tumblr or whatever other third-party services are out there. You have to set up your own domain, or use a domain you already have (see Step 2, above), and you have to install WordPress on it (this step).

6. Register Your Blog at the Main ds106 Web Site
Once your blog is available on the web (it should be almost immediate) register yourself and your new blog on the DS106 site. We will add your blog feed to the course site. You MUST do this in order for everyone to see the posts you’ll be writing for the class.

7. Watch. We will be working with a theme of artificial intelligence this semester, exploring questions like: How can we use AI applications to enhance human creativity in storytelling and making art on the web? Should we use AI at all? What is our role in preventing the apocalypse? Can we save the world from oblivion? In order to inspire our thinking around these questions, we’re asking you to watch an AI related film of your choice. There is a list here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films), and also an overview of AI in fiction here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_fiction). Some can be found through various online services, and some, like Bladerunner, may be available through the Simpson Library. Pick one of the films, watch it and write your thoughts, reactions and reflections in a blog post and tag it film review. Need to know how to add tags in WordPress? There’s a help page for that.

8. What do you want to get out of this course?
This course involves a high degree of self-evaluation, so you should think about your goals at the beginning in order to consider how well you have achieved them down the road. You will have opportunities to re-evaluate your goals along the way, because they may change as we journey through the course.

Many people take this course to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement. This is the official language for the ALPP outcome:

General Education Requirements Learning Outcomes
ARTS, LITERATURE, AND PERFORMANCE –PROCESS

• Students will be able to speak about work critically, both process and product.

• Students will be able to evaluate the work’s effectiveness in conveying the student’s message or intent and/or achieving the student’s goals.

• Students will reflect or explain how they created a work of substance and value.

• Students will identify the process to achieve the goals of the creative project,and how successful the process was.

• Students will reflect on the value of the creative process.

That is what the University says you have to get out of this course. You will gain experience in producing digital media and discussing your creative processes, and through that discussion, meet these outcomes. You will learn about digital media by producing creative works. You have a great deal of freedom for creative expression in this course though, so I hope that you take advantage of that freedom to achieve something more.

Write a brief blog post on what you think you would like to accomplish with this course. Tag this post ds106goals

9. Write your Weekly Summary
You’ll be completing these summary posts on your blog every week. This week, write a post that shares your reflections on the first week. Tag this post WeeklySummary. Submit the URL for this post to Canvas by Friday at midnight. These posts are REALLY important. We use them to grade you every week, so you need to link to other posts you’ve written, embed media you’ve created, and narrate the process of learning that you went through this week. What did you learn? What was harder than you thought it would be? What was easier? What drove you crazy? Why? What did you really enjoy? Why? NO EXCEPTIONS. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED.

Hello and welcome to the online, Spring version of Digital Storytelling (CPSC 106). If you are receiving this email, it means you are currently enrolled to take this course in Spring 2024.

Please read this post in its entirety!

The purpose of this post is to orient you to how this course will be run, and to make you aware of the commitment that this course demands.

In short, you will be required to:

• set up and manage your own web domain

• create digital works in a variety of media

• work collaboratively with your classmates on projects

• narrate the process of all work – blogging several times per week

• comment on classmates’ work – several times per week

• do all of this on the open web

 

All of this work will require a significant commitment of time and effort, but it is easily manageable with good time management. Procrastinate at your peril.

This course is somewhat different from most online classes in that you will be required to narrate your process of learning over the course of the semester. You will be required to setup and manage your own domain and web hosting space (details forthcoming). We plan to experiment with various fediverse services, potentially including Mastodon, PeerTube, etc., so be prepared to create accounts there as well. Note that even though we are running this course on the open web, you are not required to expose any personal information there. Feel free to use a pseudonym if you want. You will be expected to regularly update your own web spaces where you will be installing, designing, and customizing your own site. More specifically, you will be asked to use these spaces to create digital narratives both individually and collaboratively over the course of the semester—so please be prepared to work together.

Also, it is very important to keep in mind that a lion’s share of the course work, and by extension your grade, will be focused around the regular updating of your own site as well as commenting on those of your classmates. We cannot stress strongly enough how essential both posting and commenting are to your success in this course.

Another issue that comes up again and again with this course is the time commitment. We will be creating a variety of narratives across a wide range of media, experimenting with everything from digital photography to digital audio to web video. These forms are often quite complicated and time consuming, and while the students who have taken this class in previous semesters enjoyed the process tremendously, they almost all noted it demands a significant amount of time. If you took this class as a 100-level filler and expect to get by with minimal work or engagement, you will quickly realize that it’s far more than that—and the dangerous part of the course is you will greatly enjoy the work. Don’t be seduced!

The main sites for the course are located at http://ds106.us and https://ds106.ai/. Please go there and take a look around to get a sense of the chaos. The syllabus is online in Canvas. If you have any questions let us know.

Something to keep in mind about that course site is that it may not only include the posts of students from UMW, but also from others beyond the boundaries of our school. ds106 may be taken by people from outside UMW as well as at UMW. Your work as a class will happen alongside other people with a wide experience and interests—some of whom have no association with UMW whatsoever. This serves as a microcosm of the web, we will not be working within a siloed learning management system for this class, rather we will be doing our business out on the open web.

This course is designed to get you to both think about and interact within the digital landscapes and networks that everywhere surround us. Narratives and storytelling provide the frame we need for exploring and experimenting with emerging forms of creative expression in the digital realm as well as means for interrogating the digital environments we are increasingly dependent upon. To this end you will be asked to steward your own website, and one of your first assignments will be to setup your own domain —and by extension your own digital identity.

Before the semester begins you will receive another missive with a link to instructions for getting your own web host, domain, and installing a couple of open source applications. You will also be expected to get accounts on some other sites (details forthcoming) as soon as possible. (Note: we think we all know there are problematic people on the web and on social media. While we haven’t had a problem with them in ds106 in the past, you are perfectly welcome to use pseudonyms for this course if you have privacy concerns.) Additionally, we will be explaining more specifically how this particular version of ds106 will work.

Finally, if you have significant issues with any of the above listed points—which we’re sure some of you do— feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] and/or [email protected].

Best regards,

Paul Bond and Jim Groom