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DCI 271 New Dark Age

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Virtual Instruction Resources

Welcome

Well here we are! I recognize that this is not the optimal way to experience spring term. As your instructor, I had hopes and dreams for what this class could create in an on-campus environment. But I am committed to making a virtual classroom that is supportive and generative. Plus, this is a class about technology! We’ll have plenty to talk about as we use technology to talk about technology (so meta!).

I also recognize that the distractions you’ll face during this term may be different than normal. Please prioritize your own mental/physical health and safety. I have altered this course to accommodate the various lives you are now living, but please get in touch with any concerns you may have. Take time to go outside, talk to friends and family, exercise, work on art or a hobby. Relatedly, some of the course content can get heavy (climate change etc.). It is okay to step away and take a break - I definitely have while preparing. I hope we can use this course as an opportunity to develop personal and collective tools for perpetuating hope and action, not just doom and gloom. Fundamentally, this course is about upping our technology literacy in order to make informed choices.

Protocols

In order to build a classroom community in a variety of ways across time and space, we will use multiple tech tools. Below is a brief outline of what we’ll be using and why. Please reach out with any questions! Don’t stress about using each technology perfectly. My goal is to create multiple venues for participation so that everyone can find the balance that works for them. The following is a list of the major communication tools we’ll use in class. We will use other websites for individual assignments and those instructions will be within the assignment.

Tool Use
Course Website All syllabus, schedule, and assignment info lives here. You will post some assignments here as well (instructions below).
Canvas Assignment delivery and feedback. Recorded lectures and video are available in the YuJa section of Canvas.
Zoom Live course meetings + office hours. For security reasons, I’ll be posting access info in Slack.
Slack Announcements + discussion + general chatter. This is the place for the questions you’d ask after class or to share videos we might play during class. We’ll have daily icebreakers to get to know each other. We will run discussion here and I’ll be available for office hours. I recommend downloading the app to your computer or phone and adjusting your notifications settings.

How to post to the course website

Our course is built with the static site generator Jekyll. In the early days of the Web, most sites were static or fixed, rather than dynamic and automatically generated. If you wanted to make a website, you had to code everything by hand. Today, even simple looking sites are powered by databases, Javascript, and other tools that make websites more complex and take longer to load. Static sites have come back around in popularity as folks seek ways to make websites that aren’t so resource-intensive. If you want to learn more about this movement, check out this website on minimal computing.

Posting to our course website will be a little different than using WordPress or SquareSpace. While it might be easier to use those platforms, since this course is about the impact of technology, I want you to get a feel for what it’s like to contribute to a static site. When I work on the course website, I do it all on my local machine, then I upload the changes to the web. I use a site called GitHub to publish the website to a domain. You’ll be contributing through a different website called Prose.io that makes it easy for you to just write content.

Workflow

Watch a screencast of this workflow

Here’s the general workflow:

  1. Create an account with GitHub.com, a website for sharing code.
  2. With that account, log into prose.io, the “content authoring environment.”
  3. Create a new document for your post in the appropriate folder.
  4. Write your document in Markdown, a plain text formatting syntax.
  5. Add appropriate metadata to your post (author, tags, title).
  6. Save changes and publish. In a few minutes, you should see your post on the course website.

GitHub

  1. Create an account at GitHub.com. To make life easy, use your W&L email and W&L user name to create the account. You will likely need to confirm the account via a link in your email.
  2. Send me your GitHub account name so I can add you to the repository (or repo in GitHub terms) for the course website.
  3. You shouldn’t have to come back to GitHub for anything else.

Prose.io

  1. Visit prose.io and select Authorize on GitHub.
  2. You will see folders for our assignments, “deadtech” or “map.” Double click to enter the folder.
  3. Create a new file by clicking on the green new file button.
  4. Click on the grey text _posts/deadtech/2020-03-18-your-filename.md and change the “your-filename” bit to a relevant title for your post. You need to keep the date in the filename, but it doesn’t matter too much what the date is. This will become the URL so it must have the dashes and it must end in .md.
  5. Compose or paste your essay. Use the editor tools to insert links, images, etc. The editing screen uses Markdown, so you may have to learn the Markdown syntax!
  6. Add metadata to your post using the Metadata icon on the right. Add the following:
    • title: Title of Your Post/Essay
    • author: Your Name
    • tags: deadtech OR map (no spaces!)
  7. Save your post using the save icon on the right. You will need to write a commit message to describe your changes. This is standard practice when using GitHub. This is not a case where hitting save every five seconds is good practice!
  8. Once you’ve saved, publish your post using Publish button in the editing toolbar.
  9. After a few minutes, your post should appear in the relevant section of the website. If it doesn’t, make sure you’ve formatted the metadata correctly, especially the tags.