{"id":4620,"date":"2011-09-27T09:13:40","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T13:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=4620"},"modified":"2011-10-26T18:54:09","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T22:54:09","slug":"augmenting-the-syllabus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/09\/27\/augmenting-the-syllabus\/","title":{"rendered":"Augmenting the Syllabus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"AMST<\/a>
Landing page for my Introduction to American Studies course site<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The research and writing featured on this blog generally build from the idea that digital information and material experience do not exist in two separate realities \u00e0 la The Matrix<\/em>, but coexist in one augmented reality<\/a><\/span><\/span> where the informational and material play a role in constituting one another. This semester at the University of Maryland, I’m exploring those moves between informational spaces and physical ones in a mixed online and in-person version of an American Studies course and wanted to share and get feedback on the process of planning, designing, and enacting this augmented introduction to the study of American culture. This design is specific to this course and its themes, but the general principles should work elsewhere and the cultural context of online higher education is important to anyone involved with that system.<\/p>\n

Online education is playing a larger and larger role in the economics and pedagogies of the increasingly privatized and ‘right-sized’ U.S. research university and my course is certainly a product of these changes<\/a><\/span><\/span>. At the same time, researchers and teachers in a variety of disciplines<\/a><\/span><\/span> are using this moment of transition to question and revise outdated pedagogical routines and are designing classes to better facilitate multiple levels of student engagement with reference to the real world outside the ivory tower. I would have loved to have explored interventions such as contract grading<\/a><\/span><\/span> or an increased focus on navigating and designing<\/a><\/span><\/span> information systems within my course but, like many graduate students, I had to work within the boundaries of an already existing syllabus. The general shape of the course was set; so my pre-semester work become more about adjusting the course’s weaknesses and flexing its strengths within the mixed online\/in-person environment, knowing that the different parts of that environment would lend themselves to different kinds of learning. I organized this effort around a few core principles that apply in any learning environment:<\/p>\n