Week One: Bootcamp

8/29/16-9/2/16

All work is due by midnight on Friday, 9/2/2016

Welcome to ds106! This first week is dedicated to getting set up: set up your domain and Web hosting; install your WordPress site; and create other social media accounts such as Twitter, Flickr, SoundCloud, YouTube, etc. Complete introductions via posts, twitter, Flickr, video, audio, etc. The sooner you get started, the better. If you run into trouble after looking through the supporting links, the Digital Knowledge Center in the ITCC building is a great place to go for help.

Here is a detailed list of what to do this week:

1.     Review the Syllabus

You should carefully read through the syllabus. This course is different from most. The syllabus will help you understand the work and activities of the course. If you have any questions on the content, send them to us via Twitter or email.

2.     Get a Domain and Webhosting

After review the syllabus, first thing you need to do is choose a domain name for yourself. A domain name is a just a fancy name for a URL or Web address. For this class, you will register a domain name (free through UMW’s Domain of One’s Own project) of your own. Check out some advice about choosing a domain name. It really should be about you and not this course. Once you choose your domain name, you need to register it and set up web hosting through Domain of One’s Own (login with your UMW netid/password). Detailed instructions can be found here. If you already have a domain through Domain of One’s Own, then you are one step ahead. For more details on how to navigate your web hosting account, i.e. cPanel (your control panel), creating subdomains, using Installatron, etc., we have extensive documentation here: http://docs.umwdtlt.org/umw-domains/signing-up-on-domain-of-ones-own/ Shortly after you sign up for your domain and Web hosting, you will receive an email requiring you to verify your domain. This is a legitimate email, and you must follow the instructions in it! If you do not, in two weeks, your domain will go into a state of “limbo” making your site basically unavailable.

3.     Install WordPress

This tutorial will take you through installing the publishing platform WordPress. Keep in mind if you already have WordPress installed on your UMW Domains, you can use your existing site (and just tag or categorize your ds106 work accordingly) or choose to create a new WordPress site in a separate subdomain, such as ds106.myawesomedomains.com. Find out what a subdomain is and how to set up a subdomain on our documentation site. You will be using WordPress A LOT in this class. If you’re not already familiar with it, please keep this set of WordPress resources handy.

NOTE: Do not use wordpress.com. You have to set up your own domain, or use a domain you already have (see Step 2, above), and you have to install WordPress on it (this step).

4.     Install Hypothes.is

This is another channel for interaction that we will be using throughout the semester. There are three parts to this:

1. Go to hypothes.is and create an account.
2. Download and install the browser plugin (Chrome or Firefox, or both if you like).
3. Install the Hypothesis plugin on your WordPress site

The Hypothesis browser plugin lets you highlight and annotate web pages. The plugin for WordPress makes it possible for visitors to your site to highlight and annotate your pages. This is a way of interacting with the web and with your classmates, which you will hear more about next week. There is a Quick Start Guide for using Hypothesis, which you may find helpful

5.     Register Your Blog at the Main ds106 Web Site

Once your blog is available on the web (it should be almost immediate) register yourself and your new blog on the DS106 site. You MUST do this in order for everyone to see the posts you’ll be writing for the class. NOTE: In order to register your site, you will need to give us a Twitter userid. You may want to skip ahead to the Twitter portion of #7 if you don’t already have a Twitter account.

6.     Get an Avatar

You will need to select an “avatar” for yourself. This is an icon or image that can represent you online (it need not be your face). This should preferably be a square image. Create a “gravatar” for yourself at http://gravatar.com using the email address you most likely will use for course work (and keep in mind you can associate your gravatar with several email accounts). Many sites (such as our class site) will automatically use this image as your avatar.

7.     Set up Your Social Media

Create accounts and fill out profiles for yourself (if any of these let you set an avatar, use the same icon as you set up on Gravatar) on:

○      Flickr (photo sharing) http://flickr.com

If you are new to Flickr or have no images in your account, you MUST post at least 5 images to your flickr account right away (they can be whatever you want); Flickr may not verify and make your account public until there are 5 images there. When you upload your photos, tag them with ds106. Get in the habit of doing this!

○      Soundcloud (audio publishing) http://soundcloud.com/

Set up an account if you don’t already have one.

○      Google / Youtube (video sharing) http://www.google.com/accounts/

If you have a Gmail account, you are already set with this. If not create a Google account. This is what will allow you to join any synchronous video discussions we have (in Google Hangout) and gives you access to YouTube.

○      Vimeo (video sharing) http://vimeo.com

Alternatively, if you don’t want to get a YouTube account, feel free to use Vimeo for your videos.

○      Twitter http://twitter.com

Twitter will be one of the main channels for communication in ds106. If you already have an account for personal purposes, you are welcome to use it or create a new account for communication related to this class. Make sure you customize your profile! Send your first message of greeting and be sure to use #ds106 hashtag in your tweets. Learn how to search on the #ds106 hashtag.

8.     Make some Multimodal Introductions

Now that you have all your accounts, it’s time to use them to introduce yourself to the class. Use Twitter, SoundCloud, YouTube, and Flickr to introduce yourself to the community, be creative. Once you’ve done that you need to embed them all into a WordPress blog post. Here are some tips for embedding media in WordPress.

Are you exhausted yet? There a lot more still. If you wait until the end of the week to do your all work you will be crushed!

9. Read

Read Austin Kleon’s post “10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered: Lessons from my book ‘Show Your Work!’” If I didn’t know better, I would think that he wrote the book for this course. What do you think of his message? Which of his ten points seem most significant to you? Use Hypothesis to make annotations on the post. I set up a group for this purpose. You could pick two of his points, highlight meaningful sections and include your thoughts as annotations. Tag your annotations ds106. Blog your thoughts about this experience, as well as your thoughts on the post as a whole. Tag this post ShowYourWork. UMW students have online access to Kleon’s book through the Simpson Library, but only one person at a time can view it. It’s worth a look, both for what he has to say and the creative presentation of his message.

10.  The Internet

We’re using The Internet as a theme for our semester. In addition to this course being on the web and of the web, it will also be, to an extent, about the web. This does not mean that the web is the only thing we will be talking about. The purpose of the theme is to give us some common ground for interaction. You will have ample opportunities to personalize the work you do. You, as a group, have as much influence over where the theme goes as you care to take. To that end, you have a few of tasks.
1. Read and respond to any one of these:
○ A Domain of One’s Own in a Post-Ownership Society
○ The true promise of Interactive Computing: Leveraging our Collective IQ
○ How To Break Open The Web
2. What do the Internet and the web mean to you? Not in a technical or definitional sense, but rather in a philosophical one. The emphasis is on “to you.” There is no right or wrong answer. This is not a test or essay question. It is meant to get you thinking.
3. I’m looking for some broad, open-ended questions about the web/Internet. Come up with at least two, but more is okay. The plan is to use these as potential springboards for ideas in the coming weeks. Put your thoughts in a blog post and tag it TheInternet.

11. Write your Weekly Summary

You’ll be completing these summary posts on your blog every week. This week, write a post that shares your reflections on the first week. Tag this post WeeklySummary. These posts are REALLY important. We use them to grade you every week, so you need to link to other posts you’ve written, embed media you’ve created, and narrate the process of learning that you went through this week. What did you learn? What was harder than you thought it would be? What was easier? What drove you crazy? Why? What did you really enjoy? Why? NO EXCEPTIONS. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED.