Social Media Literacies Senior Social Studies

Teacher: Timothy Scholze Other information such as synchronous meeting times, office hours, and contact information to be added later

Course Description:
Todays personal, social, political, economic worlds are all affected by digital media and networked publics. Viral videos, uprisings from Tahrir to #OWS, free search engines, abundant inaccuracy and sophisticated disinformation online, indelible and searchable digital footprints, laptops in lecture halls and smartphones at the dinner table, twentysomething social media billionaires, massive online university courses -- its hard to find an aspect of daily life around the world that is not being transformed by the tweets, blogs, wikis, apps, movements, likes and plusses, tags, text messages, and comments two billion Internet users and six billion mobile phone users emit. New individual and collaborative skills are emerging. This course introduces students to both the literature about and direct experience of these new literacies: research foundations and practical methods to control attention, attitudes and tools necessary for critical consumption of information, best practices of individual digital participation and collective participatory culture, the use of collaborative media and methodologies, and the application of network know-how to life online (Rheingold, 2012).

Learning Outcomes:
Diligent students will: Cultivate an ability to discern, analyze, and manage the way they deploy their attention. Learn to use social media tools for collaborative work. Understand the need for critical consumption of information.

 Understand and practice appropriate online behavior. Hone their ability to find the answer to any question with the right kind of search. Train their thinking to assess the accuracy of the answers they find online. Learn the modes, consequences, some of the responsibilities and dangers of different kinds of digital participation, from curation to blogging. Describe and carry out the steps necessary to cultivate personal learning networks. Become familiar with competing perspectives on social media practices and their effects; differentiate competing perspectives in key debates around the use of social media. MODULE 1 Attention! Introduction: Creating a Digital Footprint This module will set the tone for the course. We will explore digital footprints and the type of information we want to have online. Identifying how we gather information about the world and defining what social literacy means will be core components. We will use web 2.0 tools to introduce ourselves to our sister class in the U.K. MODULE 2 Infotention Creating a blog, participating in online discussions, and devoting our attention to the most important things first will be the focus for this module. We will also take a look at how various people have set up their computers for attention and explore the term infotention. MODULE 3 Evaluating Web Sources Is that for real? There are many deceptions and outright lies surrounding the networked online world. Our job is to make sure that the information we take in is fit for consumption. The art of crap detection is essential for life in the digital world and will help us not only now but in the future as well. This is an excellent skill to have and we should all be a bit skeptical about what we take for real. MODULE 4 Searching with Confidence

In this module we will work on making the most of our time online. We will look at how different people searching the exact same topic return very different results and how we can get the best results for our searching. With the right kind of search we are able to find the answer to almost anything. MODULE 5 Curation/Social Bookmarking/Tagging Curating used to belong to just the realm of museums. The rise in curation and social bookmarking are making advances into the realm of searching. Good curators are like editors of topics and a skill worth having in any walk of life. You have probably tagged a few photos on Facebook, but we will take tagging a couple steps further to help manage the dearth of information we come across. MODULE 6 Understanding Networks What exactly are networks? In this module we will learn from Stanford teacher Howard Rheingold about what networks are and how they apply to our lives. MODULE 7 Social Networks: Communities of Interest Everyone has something they are interested in. Some of us are interested in a lot of different things. From collecting to music to computer programming there is a community of others that we can meet to share information and ideas about our common interests with. MODULE 8 Putting it All Together: Building a Curation Workflow Nothing works better than putting the web to work for you. We will take a look at different ways that we can build automation into common information flow type tasks. This is sort of like taming the web, or how the web is tamed. Finding a great resource on one site we can build a system to take that information to the places we would like it placed. MODULE 9 Digital Citizenship Is there such a thing as digital citizenship? Do we have rights and responsibilities when we interact with others on the web? Here we explore some ideas for being a global digital citizen.

Grading:
You are responsible for what you do and what you learn. You will have to justify

to your teacher and your peers why you are assigning yourself a particular grade for this course. I will provide some examples of justifications used in the past and then you judge whether or not the grade was deserved. In the end you have to be able to learn how to learn on your own and I cant think of a better place to practice this than now.

Attendance:
The course is open 24/7 so you can work whenever is best for you. There will be two live sessions built into the course and it is HIGHLY suggested that you do your best to attend. Each module lasts 7 days and the work for the module needs to be accomplished by midnight on Sunday after the Monday that the module begins on. You can work ahead but any discussions we have during a module need to take place and be posted during that modules Monday Friday cycle. You should also respond to others posts in order to get the most out of participating in the course.