Exercise: Responsible Design for Digital Communities
Learning Objectives
At the end of this exercise, participants will be able to:
- Consider community in their classrooms.
- Explore the ideas of safety, trauma, and environment in their course offerings.
Suggested Materials
Presenters
- Presenter display, such as connected television or projector.
- Various examples of accessible code snippets and workflows, such as alternative text and closed captioning.
- Sticky notes, easel and post-it sizes.
- Writing utensils to hand out to participants.
- Jamboard, Padlet, or other software for teams to collaborate.
Participants
- Computer, tablet, or smartphone.
- Post-it notes and writing utensil (provided by presenter)
Estimated Activity Time
Ninety minutes.
Exercise Outline
Consider the following quote:
“What does safety look like in those spaces when you are basically letting these people into your home in a way, …who you didn’t bargain [with].”
A refrain often heard in the kindergarten through twelfth grade space is, through remote instruction, we (as teachers) are inviting our students into our homes. So too, are we going into theirs. What may have once happened solely within the walls of the classroom is now being broadcast for parents to see. And possibly recorded (warning: this video contains explicit language.)
Part of our responsibility is to provide safe spaces (also known as Affinity Spaces within the lens of Connected Learning) and to encourage student voice from the outset.
To frame the exercise guidelines, this list may provide a starting point for your reading and activities:
- User – Student, faculty, guest speaker.
- Device – Computer, tablet, smartphone. Operating System.
- Environment – Wireless Networks.
Exercise GuidelineS
- Review the section on Educational Spaces, starting on page 18, of Responsible Design for Digital Communities.
- Using The Checklist as a guide, start a document to collect your thoughts on the questions posed.
- If you have completed From a Certain Point of View, this can be an additional activity.
- At the end of a specified amount of time, come together as a group and share out your ideas using collaborative software such as Padlet or Jamboard.
- Review the following points:
- What themes emerged around the idea of latency, syncing, polls and – using your Learning Management System – consistent ways to share content and media?
- Did opportunities to connect in smaller break out groups or future sessions around these ideas come up?
- How might these questions reflect back on Universal Design for Learning or web content accessibility?
