Wire 106 Listen Along on ds106radio (#4life)

— John Meadows (@Physx28) September 17, 2014

Week four of Wire 106 was dedicated to listening to audio. Given that, Paul Bond suggested we load three episodes of season 2 of The Wire that we assigned this week (i.e., 3, 4, and 5) on ds106radio and have the class listen and tweet to them broadcast live. So we did, here’s how:

You need to listen to, and live tweet along with, at least one of this week’s The Wire episode’s happening this Tues/Weds/Thur at 9 PM on http://ds106rad.io/listen


And they did, Grant Potter tweeted out the stats on Thursday’s listening party when twelve people were listening to the live stream! I love the stats.

Whose on the live stream? Freddy’s in the house.

Paul Bond has already blogged his reflections about the sessions, and so did #wire106 internaut Meredith Fierro, who had the following to say:

I really enjoyed live tweeting the episode, it gave me a chance to connect with other members of my class. Since this is an online class I thought I was going to go through the class not really meeting anyone from the class. But I definitely was wrong.

This comment gets to the heart of ds106. You can have community in an online, distributed course using the open web; it just takes some time and tenacity. By week four a community on Twitter and in the blog comments is beginning to cement. What’s more, the class is starting to get into a groove of how to navigate the various class spaces on the web. It takes time and energy to do ds106 right, but I still contend the rewards are well worth the work.

And to that end, Stephen Downes was wondering what my take on literacy was in regards to Sandy Brown Jensen’s recent article on digital storytelling. I have no real stable answer, and digital storytelling always seemed like an awesome trojan horse to teach whatever I want. That said, I’ve come to a few principles about literacy more generally as a result of teaching ds106. Literacy is directly linked to the realization that knowledge and power are relational. Literacy comes as a result of reflecting and sharing openly within a network of your peers. It depends upon regular practice and participation. To gain it demands time, attention, and most importantly interest—namely your own. Finally, an excellent sign you’re becoming literate in something, anything really, is the further realization that the relationship between knowledge and power is still as potentially damning as it was when Eve bit the apple :)

Anyway, that was an aside, but I appreciate Stephen asking. But to the original point,  I think the simple act of listening closely to an episode of The Wire alongside 11 other people while tweeting your thoughts suggests this new media provides brave new possibilities for being and thinking together. I love that we are able to explore different ways of being together, because everything else seems to come from that. There’s a literacy of being digitally that’s happening really subtly in our contemporary moment more broadly, and I love that ds106 can sometimes provide a stage for how that’s unfolding in online education for a handful of students at UMW.