So I’ve been thinking of a few assignment ideas for my class that I think might produce something OER-like for future students to use, or for others in the world to benefit from. Here are the broad ideas
- Whole class “fake vs true” assignment where students work in pairs and then add all their material to ONE place. They create or curate (up to them) memes and infographics and such… some of which are true, and some fake or partly fake… so maybe each pair produces 3 of these. Then we include all of the class’s contributions in one space (so for 25 students I would get roughly 12 pairs, 3 contributions, remove any duplicates, end up with maybe 30 of these. We can discuss how best to poll people on them on campus or online. This is inspired by a suggestion from last semester which we as a class modified into this version.
- Individual assignment about “digitally literate Egyptians” where they pick a particular Egyptian social media phenomenon and write about them. A YouTuber, blogger, instagrammer… or a hashtag or facebook group. Someone who’s using their digital literacy to do something in Egypt. I could then curate these somewhere and others in class could use them. Perhaps a class assignment after this would be for students to develop their own understanding of what digital literacy is or what dimensions it should have for their own contexts. Maybe. I’ve had students hack Bloom’s taxonomy really well before. Digital literacies are at least multifaceted and more contested, so why not?
- Digital Literacy Awareness campaign. Students often wanna give back when they take this course. I thought they could take any aspect of the course they wanted, in pairs or trios, and either develop a brief awareness campaign on it (post on YouTube, create electronic posters, etc) and share to a community (their colleagues, school kids, etc) OR they could research the level of awareness on campus to see how well understood something is (e.g. how secure people’s passwords are, or how deeply aware of their biases).
What do you think?