Weekly workflow | 21ss_LoLA

I. This Website

This website is going to be the main hub for information. It will essentially replace most PDF materials you are familiar with from regular semesters, such as presentation slides. You will find all course information, the syllabus, bibliography, and tips and tricks, which you can easily navigate with the sidebar.

All homework will be published here. I’d recommend you bookmark the syllabus, because everything that is relevant weekly is linked from there.

The main sections will replace presentation slides. They will be written in the form of short articles that pick up some major points that came up during the live session. They also might go a bit deeper into certain subjects.

My aim is to make the experience as integrated as possible and tell the story of our class in a coherent way throughout the semesters. Inform me about broken or misdirected links. :)

Blackboard

I am not currently planning to use Blackboard at all this semester. I find it slow, confusing, overly complex, Content cannot be linked directly, and it’s bloated with features nobody needs. It only might make an appearance if we need file storage for sensitive or copyrighted material This may include:

Readings that are not available through Primo or found online
Material provided by or including students, e.g. student presentations / posters, recordings

I will point it out explicitly if that happens.

II. Live streams

Every week at the scheduled seminar time—Mondays 16:00-18:00—, I will live-stream my main presentation. For the most part, this will be like our regular seminar, except that we are not all in the same room. Other than that, everyone can ask questions with or without microphone, and it will be as interactive as usual (or even more so).

For now, I am not planning to upload full recordings. I might upload edited pieces from time to time to Blackboard. However, I will integrate anything interesting that comes up during the live session into this website. So no one is going to miss out on interesting questions or spontaneous discussions that develop during a live session.

III. Self-study

There is a preparatory reading every week. I will build on it, and assume that you are familiar with it. Reading academic literature is one of the major corner stones of this (and most other) seminars. Most of the times, there is also a special homework task posted here.

In fact, the bulk of the work, you have to do by yourself. This is nothing special about an online semester. If you look up what an ECTS credit represents you will find that it is work load measured in time. If you then subtract the little time we use during live sessions, you’ll realize how much time is left for you to prepare for every week, study the readings, discover your own further readings, do research for your own project, or practice. Ideally, you should have read even more than just the recommended literature by the end of the seminar. Reality check if you find yourself skipping entire readings or procrastinating homework assignments.

Social

Matrix

I have opened a Matrix room for this course. I really like the principle of the protocol so let’s give it a shot.

On the surface, this is similar to Slack or Discord (or IRC if you are oldschool). That gives us a nice, persistent room to chat, share files, articles, memes and what-have-you.

Matrix is decentralized and secure, i.e. no adds and no big tech company that is spying on you It is also open source (as opposed to Blackboard), which in my experience generally is equivalent to higher quality compared to expensive licensed one-size-fits-all software (and your Uni is not waisting money on it…). You can create an account, or use an existing Google/Facebook/Apple account. The best bet for a client is probably element.io which is available cross-platform and inside the browser, but there are other options (options: sounds crazy, right?).