CUNY Week 1 – DS106 is Taking the 7 Train

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by adaptorplug

The spring semester is finally starting for York College and I’m really excited to get a new group of students into DS106. Here at York DS106 feeds out of the course CT101 whcih is the foundation course for our Communications Technology majors. For students that haven’t heard about it yet, and are registered for CT 101. This course is now taught as a “Digital Storytelling” class, and is a bit of an experimental course. The experimental nature is really two-fold, one in that all of the work you do for this class is conducted on the open-web using tools that you set-up for class, or ones you already are using and bring with you. The majority of the work you do will be posted to your own blog, and it will feed to the website http://ds106.us/.

This brings us to the second unusual part if this class – we are actually conducting the class in concert with three other universities around the world and everyone’s work feeds into the ds106 site. The course was created by the University of Mary Washington, and this particular open-web version was created by Jim Groom. Jim and Alan Levine are both teaching sections out of UMW this semester, while Scott Lockman is teaching a section out Cyberspace and Society course at Temple University Japan. There is also a section coming from Kansas State University (sorry I don’t know who’s running that class yet). And finally there are people that are taking the class, for their own personal fufillment, they are not receiving credit for the class, but are doing assignments which are fed to the ds106 site. These individuals are called open participants.

What’s exciting about this kind of class is that all the work feeds the same way into the same site and the intermingling of students, faculty, and open participants creates a wonderful community of engagement. You will see comments on your work that comes from people that you will never meet. You will also comment on others’ work and you will never meet them either. But that doesn’t mean you will not get to know them, and enjoy the interactions that happen online throughout this semester and hopefully beyond.

We’re starting a couple weeks behind the UMW course being taught by Jim Groom and Alan Levine, but we will be followoing along the main syllabus for the most part. I will be creating a specifically dates for our section of CT101 as DS106, but you will need to start out with the first assignment which involves registering your domain and setting up your web hosting account. Once you’ve done this, please enter your domain information in the form below.

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I’m looking forward to another semester of DS106 at York College, which will be our second semester so far. It’s been a tremendous ride and all that John Rocker says about the 7 Train in Queens he’d likely say about DS106. That’s because ds106 is a proud bunch of degenerates, bringing on the open internet to education, diverse and sometimes nerve-racking, but always awesomely real.