ds106 presentation for the College of Wooster

Earlier today I fired up ds106.tv to share my thoughts about ds106 with the 2013 Faculty Fellows program at the College of Wooster. The timing was right because I just started a Summer session of ds106 this Monday, and my head is spinning from the experience—it’s been more than a year since my last ds106 class. Coming back to the class gave me what I like to think is a more nuanced idea of the elements of community buttressed by a participatory, syndicated architecture that makes ds106 so awesome. The argument undergirding this presentation is that what’s unique and relevant about ds106 for teaching online, in particular, is that both the class and the larger community models the distributed, open principles that make the web so radical. So rather than aping a monolithic silo that happens to have a URL, like most LMSs and by extension xMOOCs, ds106 inhabits the ecosystem of the web that scales at the level of the individual learner. It was a fun presentation to give! And I hope the faculty at Wooster got something out of the discussion.

@jimgroom awesome session this morning. It led to a very lively discussion and kept the Fellows jazzed all day #fellows2013

— Jon Breitenbucher (@j_breitenbucher) May 22, 2013

A special thanks to Jon Breitenbucher for inviting me, and I can rest assured that Alan Levine‘s workshop and presentation on-site made up for any of my glaring omissions. It almost feels silly for me to talk ds106 remotely when the man who has ruled that class for the last year was there in-person. Nonetheless, I appreciate the opportunity, it helped me fine tune a number of thoughts that have been churning in my head around community and architecture as it relates to ds106, as well as how it might be applied more generally.

A few notes about the recording, I have to apologize I couldn’t include the more than 20 minute Q&A in the above video, but the recording I did was not able to capture the audio from the Google Hangout that was running parallel to ds106.tv. We’re working on that, but I do have to say I love working with the little makeshift studio at DTLT, this is the third recording I’ve done this week, and I am pretty sure there will be at least two more before the week ends 🙂

One final note about the video, at about 13:30 minutes the sounds bumps up a bit because the lapel microphone was moved, so please adjust accordingly.