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http://experfemlearn.blogspot.com Experiments in Feminist Learning PRELIMINARY SYLLABUS for collective discussion WMST498R or WMST698F; Spring 2014 UMD Advanced Special Topics in Women's Studies; Experiments in Feminist Learning Tu 4:00pm - 6:30pm WDS 0104 or W 1:00pm - 3:30pm SYM 0215 Professor: Katie King KK’s Office: 2101C Woods Hall, University of Maryland, College Park Katie’s office hours: TBA (often available right after each class); drop-in social hours to meet others TBA Office phone: 301.405.7294 (voice mail; but email to katking@umd.edu is best way to contact) Katie's home tel. 301.589.2195, call only 10 am-7 pm Email: katking@umd.edu: USE THIS ONE FOR COMMUNICATIONS (I only look at gmail for assignments). IF YOU SUBMIT ANY ATTACHMENTS BY EMAIL DO IT ONLY TO: katiekin@gmail.com (notice “kin” NOT “king”) KK’s website with MESSAGES: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ You can follow Katie on Twitter @katkingumd & hashtag for our class is #EFLUMD Class Website at: http://experfemlearn.blogspot.com WE USE CANVAS/ELMS ONLY FOR LIBRARY RESERVES, NOT FOR COURSEWORK === course description •Heard about MOOCs? Massive Online Open Courseware? •Do you know about the experimental feminist Distributed Online Collaborative Course or DOCC? How do feminists take up the challenges of non-traditional educational possibilities in a climate of restructuring universities? In this experiment in feminist learning we will all participate in an unusual meta-MOOC on The History and Future of Higher Education that uses the MOOC platforming structures to challenge our understandings of MOOCs and education today. We will also become a DOCC, both meeting intermittently as a face to face class, and exploring these issues and more with other classes at Duke, Stanford, and elsewhere, using Google Hang Outs, Skype, Google Docs, and anything else that will allow us to make alliances and, we hope, an international movement on behalf of our own educational futures. You can sign up for a graduate version or an undergraduate version, you can meet face to face in either time slot, you can work out an independent study or an audit. Contact Katie King (katking@umd.edu) for more details on all possibilities. To create our own community of learners, thinkers, makers, doers, scholars and activists: we want to all get to know each other and work with each other. Ours here is an active and ambitious learning community visioning and revisioning together. All participants please do come to office hours to just talk. I want to get to know each of you personally! I want to know how our experiments are working for you, what touches and excites you, how your projects are going. Let me know in office hours or after face to face meeting times if you need help, or any special accommodations, the sooner the better. Folks with disabilities or who need time from class to observe religious holidays, please contact Katie ASAP to make any arrangements necessary. If you are experiencing difficulties in keeping up with the academic demands of this or any other course, you can also contact the Learning Assistance Service, 2202 Shoemaker Building, 301-314-7693. They have

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educational counselors who can help with time management, reading, math learning skills, note-taking and exam preparation skills. All their services are free to UMD students. === explore our required readings: the Coursera MOOC itself (in addition to our UMD site), an online game, two print books, two online books and two talksites, and various videos, articles, etc. are required reading for this course. >>>first thing to do! SIGN UP FOR the Davidson MOOC (starting 27 January) that will be one anchor of the course distributed across the country: the link, also on UMD class website, is: https://www.coursera.org/course/highered?utm_classid=971553&utm_nottype=class.welcome.before&utm_notid=-1&utm_linknum=7 On Davidson’s MOOC site for each lecture there are specific readings and activities: articles, blog posts, websites, videos, and other resources. The main “texts” for this course will be: • Davidson. 2011. Now You See It: How Technology and the Brain Science of Attention Will Change the Way We Live, Work and Learn. Penguin. This will be made available free online for the first 50,000 students registered for this course and is also available to purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and IndieBound). 9780143121268. IT HAS BEEN ORDERED AT UMD BS & IS ALSO ON RESERVE AT MCKELDIN • Davidson & Goldberg. 2010. Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. MIT. Available for free download as a pdf: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-thinking 9780262513746. IT HAS BEEN ORDERED AT UMD BS & IS ALSO ON RESERVE AT MCKELDIN • The 21st Century Collective. 2013. Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning. [online at: http://www.hastac.org/collections/field-notes-21st-century-literacies ] • The ‘Surprise Endings’ Class. 2013. #DukeSurprise: An Innovative Course on Methods and Practice of Social Science and Literature. [online at: http://dukesurprise.com ] === And we will add for UMD (and some other places): two talksites by Katie: (see also: http://www.pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/) • King. 2011. Social Media Learning: a necessarily altering infrastructure for gender studies. Keynote for at Tema Genus, Linköping University, Sweden. Available online at: http://socmedlearn.blogspot.com • King. 2012. In medias res: living in the middle of (media) things. Katie King's paper for “Entanglements of New Materialisms” (The Third Annual New Materialisms Conference), Linköping University, Sweden. Organized by The Posthumanities Hub and Network: Next Generation, and InterGender. Available online at: http://thingmedia.blogspot.com/ === Everyone at UMD will also be working with Grow a Game from the Tiltfactor game lab in various ways. The (also free) online version is here: • Grow a Game online: http://www.tiltfactor.org/wp_images/wordslots-mf-3.swf We will use Grow a Game cards as well.... The app is now available for free at iTunes App Store too: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grow-a-game/id657244924?ls=1&mt=8 === other websites of interest listed at class website, among them:

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• Values at Play: http://valuesatplay.org/ • Tiltfactor Lab: http://www.tiltfactor.org/ • MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten: http://llk.media.mit.edu/ • Inside Higher Education: http://www.insidehighered.com/ === There are also useful MOOC connection tools for iPhone and iPad: • Coursera on the App Store on iTunes • Coursistant - iPad app for Coursera & Udacity === The two print books are ordered at the University Bookstore and also on reserve at McKeldin Library. They are on 24 hr. reserve. You are required to read these books, not to buy them, or even to own them. Share them, rent them, borrow them, xerox them, scan them. Fair use means producing copies for your own private research use. Of course you can help others in obtaining originals for such fair use copying. Be sure to locate them long before you need to read them! ISBN numbers are included to make ordering them easier if you wish to buy them. Notice that the Davidson book is also available on the Kindle. You do not need the Kindle device to read these, but can download an app for your computer/laptop or smart phone or iPad to read it without one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sa_menu_karl3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771 It is also available as a Google eBook. To learn how to read these on your computer, look at: http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=185545&hl=en Usually the price is a bit lower for each of these, many available for less than $10, although you cannot resell such books. Please ensure access to as many of our course books as you can, bring those you have obtained or notes about them to the first class. === how the class will be organized This will be a media and technology intensive course. So-called constructionist learning and collaboration open up our analysis of interconnections among games and feminist media worlds and the cognitive structures and ecologies they alter and interact with. Bring your own laptop, netbook or iPad if you can, to connect across media, to become increasingly savvy about web resources, and to use data visualizations and virtual environments for cognition and collaboration. Throughout the course we will share resources for all these. The course will involve both taking things in, absorbing them and learning to put them in context; and also actively using what we come to know, sharing it others, thinking on one's feet, brainstorming and speculating, figuring out how it all fits together. Active learning requires patience and imagination, a bit of courage to try things out without knowing something for sure yet, and a willingness to play around with being right and wrong, guessing and a lot of redoing. The website for our entire class is located at: http://experfemlearn.blogspot.com/ This is where graphics, mini-lecture materials and notes, communications and assignment help, and other vital class information and presentations are displayed. You can complete your assignments properly only if you stay very familiar with this website: it includes links to the Davidson MOOC too. Bookmark it immediately! Plan on visiting our website and reading email every couple of days. If you have any difficulties getting access to these resources come and talk to me as soon as possible. Any announcements about cancellations due to weather or other considerations, and general class requirements will be sent out on coursemail and you need to see them quickly. To get help go to IT's Help Desk at the Computer and Space Sciences Building, Rm. 1400, or checkout the help desk webpage at: http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/

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Get to know everyone in the class, share contact information, and support each other if in emergencies anyone must be absent with class notes and discussion. Everyone should also have several class buddies too. We will introduce ourselves early in the semester, and buddies can help each other brainstorm projects, edit each others’ work, provide feedback before assignments are due, and help each other work in drafts, starting projects early and completing them in good time. === graded assignments: paper, poster, learning analysis, logbook, prototyping Five kinds of assignments are required in this class: • a research paper with visual handout for con display (enough handout print-outs for all in class), • a research poster for con display, documented with digital pictures (hardcopy in class, electronic to be emailed), • a final learning analysis, • a logbook, • some techno-crafty prototyping activities, some done during class The first three: paper, poster, learning analysis, allow you to position the work for the class in various frameworks, or knowledge worlds. In each of these you will work on research, analysis, and critical thinking. Some of this will be in traditional academic forms, some in emerging scholarly practices, but it is possible to combine these also with the techno-crafty delights cons have always shown off as well. And papers and poster projects may be be done with partners or individually, as you choose. The logbook will help you organize your projects: when you started them, how many drafts you completed, who you worked with, where you are in what you have done, and what still needs to be done. It will be turned in four times during the semester (the first in time for early warning grades), and you won’t get credit for any assignments until the final version is turned in on the last day of class with the final version of the learning analysis. You can download a template for the logbook at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzmKs1Fz7m9ucDQyM09sWUgtYmM/edit?usp=sharing Prototyping activities will introduce you to multimodal learning, what some call “flipping the class” or how to include “making” as a kind of learning. We will be making both posters and websites. If you are new to making the kind of posters that enhance critical thinking and cognitive skills, or want some ideas about how to craft them well, see the wonderful slideshow by Leeann Hunter here: http://multimodal.wsu.edu/blog/?p=97 If you have never made a website, you might start off with a Blogger version: https://www.blogger.com/tour_start.g. Blogger is what I use for the class website. I use Weebly for my professional website: http://education.weebly.com/ Both of these are very simple. Or you might like to build a site on Word Press: http://en.support.wordpress.com/using-wordpress-to-create-a-website/ If you have already begun crafting websites, pick your favorite platform for something new, or enhance what you already have going with projects from our course. Two times during the semester we will be creating class conferences together. For each one you will do either a paper or a poster. Which one you will do when will be determined by lot. You cannot get full credit for either assignment until after you also present them in these sessions, and participate in follow-ups. Summary of assignments:

• Logbooks: 4, last one must be turned in to get any credit for the course • Prototypes: 3 class posters, 2 website versions • Event 1: research poster & pics or paper & handout; 2 days attendance: 1/3 grade • Event 2: research poster & pics or paper & handout; 2 days attendance: 1/3 grade • Final Learning Analysis & attendance: with logbooks & prototypes all together: 1/3 grade

Wondering how grades are determined? What they mean on your paper? ! A work is excellent, unusually creative and/or analytically striking ! B is fine work of high quality, though not as skilled, ambitious, or carefully edited as A ! C is average work fulfilling the assignment; may be hasty, drafted once, showing difficulties with

grammar, spelling, word choice

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! D work is below average or incomplete; shows many difficulties or cannot follow instructions ! F work is not sufficient to pass; unwillingness to do the work, or so many difficulties unable to

complete For more discussion of each grade, with an eye to written work especially, see this Google Doc, which is linked on our class website: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzmKs1Fz7m9uZmFjYmVhMmItOTMxMy00ZjhiLWJmYTktMjU0MWUxNmFkZWRi/edit Remember, you can always talk to Katie about grades and your evaluation concerns during office hours anytime. But also note that you are expected to be learning how to evaluate your own work, and to put it into perspective with the work of others, learning from what others do. This means learning how to motivate and understand your own work, not depending solely on what others tell you to do, or how they judge it. Remember: don’t eat the menu (grades) instead of the meal (learning)! === what to do when you must unavoidably miss class, for emergency or perhaps for illness: • TALK TO AT LEAST TWO CLASS BUDDIES IMMEDIATELY. Before you even come back to class, call

them up or email them and find out if any special assignments are due the day you return, and make sure that you know about any changes in the syllabus. Try to have done the reading and be as prepared as possible to participate in class when you return.

• MAKE A DATE TO MEET WITH CLASS BUDDY TO GET NOTES AND DISCUSS WHAT WENT ON IN CLASS WHILE YOU WERE GONE. You are responsible for what happened in class while you were gone. As soon as possible, get caught up with notes, with discussions with buddies and finally with all the readings and assignments. Always talk with class buddies first. This is the most important way to know what went on when you were gone and what you should do.

• AFTER YOU HAVE GOTTEN CLASS NOTES AND TALKED ABOUT WHAT WENT ON IN CLASS WITH BUDDIES, THEN MAKE APPOINTMENT TO SEE KATIE. If you just miss one class, getting the notes and such should be enough. But if you've been absent for more than a week, be sure you make an appointment with Katie, and come in and discuss what is going on. She wants to know how you are doing and how she can help. Or, while you are out, if it's as long as a week, send Katie email at katking@umd.edu and let her know what is happening with you, so she can figure out what sort of help is needed.

• IF YOU ARE OUT FOR ANY EXTENDED TIME be sure you contact Katie. Keep her up to date on what is happening, so that any arrangements necessary can be made. If you miss too much class you will have to retake the course at another time. But if you keep in contact, depending on the situation, perhaps accommodations can be made. Since attendance is crucial for all assignments and thus for your final grade, don't leave this until the end. LET KATIE KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING so that she can help as much and as soon as possible.

• THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN EXCUSED ABSENCE AND ANYTHING ELSE: generally speaking you are only allowed to make up work you missed if you have an excused absence. That the absence is excused does not mean you are excused from doing the work you missed, but that you allowed to make it up. I usually permit people to make up any work they miss, and do not generally require documentation for absences. Be sure to give explanations in your logbook and do make up all work you have missed.