Dates and reading selections may change to reflect the pace and interests of the class. Unless otherwise noted, the material and tasks are due on the date they appear. Assignments and deadlines appear in red.
Part I: Play
In this section we explore one of our key concepts this semester: play.
Friday, January 20 (Week 1)
- Introductions
- Setting up Slack
- Davidson Domains
- Hacking the syllabus
- The Black Box
- Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task (1967)
Friday, January 27 (Week 2)
- Johan Huizinga, selections from Homo Ludens (1938)
- Roger Caillois, selections from Man, Play, and Games (1958)
- Mark Sample, draft of Digital Pedagogy entry on Play (2015)
- Hack 1 assigned
Friday, February 3 (Week 3)
- Lewis Hyde, selections from Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1997)
- Mary Flanagan, chapters 1 and 2 from Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009) [Also access the entire e-book through Davidson]
- Miguel Sicart, “The Design of Ethical Gameplay” from Beyond Choices (2013) [e-book through Davidson]
- Hack 1 due
- Hack 2 assigned
Part II: Design
Friday, February 10 (Week 4)
- Circuit Playground Workshop #1
- Follow directions to install Arduino software on your computer
- Don Norman, “The Three Teapots” and “Three Levels of Design” from Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
- Anne Balsamo, “Design.” International Journal of Learning and Media 1.4 (2009): 1–10.
- Carl DiSalvo, “Design and Agonism” from Adversarial Design (2012) [Davidson e-book]
Friday, February 17 (Week 5)
- Circuit Playground Workshop #2
- Bruce Sterling, “Patently untrue: fleshy defibrillators and synchronised baseball are changing the future” (2013)
- Explore the Design Fiction projects at the MIT Media Lab
- Hack 2 due
Part III: Hacking
Friday, February 24 (Week 6)
- Circuit Playground Workshop #3
- Steven Levy, chapters 1 and 2 of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984)
- McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]
- Hack 3 assigned
Friday, March 3 Rescheduled for Sunday, February 26 (Week 7)
- Gabriella Coleman, “Our Weirdness is Free: The Logic of Anonymous—Online Army, Agent of Chaos, and Seeker of Justice” (2012)
- Dale Beran, “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump” (2017)
Friday, March 10 (Spring Break)
- No class, obviously
Friday, March 17 (Week 9)
- Gabriella Coleman, chapters 1 and 3 of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2013)
- Rosa Menkman, “The Phenomenology of Glitch Art” from The Glitch Moment(um) (2011)
- Hack 3 due
- Hack 4 assigned
Friday, March 24 (Week 10)
- Meet in ITS for a session on hacking and infrastructure at Davidson
Part IV: Making
Friday, March 31 (Week 11)
- Will Holman, “Makerspace: Towards a New Civic Infrastructure.” Places Journal (2015)
- Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker” from The Atlantic (2015)
- Evgeny Morozov, “Making It” from The New Yorker 13 Jan. 2014.
- Alexander Galloway, “Critique and Making” (2012)
- Hack 4 due
Part V: Remixing
Friday, April 7 (Week 12)
- Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence” from Harper’s Magazine Feb. 2007 59–71. (The preceding link goes to the web version; here’s the PDF version)
- Kenneth Goldsmith, selections from Uncreative Writing (2011)
- Virginia Kuhn, “The Rhetoric of Remix” from The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012)
- Carla Hesse, “The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 BC-AD 2000: An Idea in the Balance” from Daedalus 131.2 (2002) : 26–45.
- Hack 5 assigned
Monday, April 10 Friday, April 14 (Week 13)
- Steven Jackson, “Rethinking Repair” (2014)
- Ernesto Oroza, “Technological Disobedience” from Makeshift
- In-class: Michael Sacasas, “Do Artifacts Have Ethics?” (2014)
- In-class: Librarian Shipwreck, Neil Postman’s 6 Questions (+1 from me) (2013)
Richard Sennett, Prologue, Chapter 1, and Chapter 7 from The Craftsman (2008)- Impossible Project assigned
Friday, April 21 (Week 14)
- Hack 5 due (and viewing/pizza party)
Friday, April 28 (Week 15)
- Impossible Project workshop
Friday, May 5 (Week 16)
- Impossible Projects Due