“Net Mirror: The Post-Pandemic University” is the current version of “Networked Narratives” – a connected learning course at Kean University. “Net Mirror: PPU” is the fifth iteration of this unique course, designed in Spring 2021. Previous iterations of the “Networked Narratives” course live in another place.
Also known as #NetNarr, this open, networked, experimental course is the brainchild of two friends and colleagues – Mia Zamora and Alan Levine. Collaborating and co-teaching from a distance (as it has always been done), they were originally inspired by a laboratory-collaboratory concept for learning and a modern version of alchemy. Embracing the idea of both Kean students and open participants tinkering, mixing, remixing elements in their digital laboratory, they designed a unique course about storytelling in a networked world.
Emphasizing creativity and production-centered forms of learning, “Networked Narratives” (a.k.a. #NetNarr) is a playful connected learning environment for building digital skills and literacies. But the COVID-19 global pandemic has changed for everything for everybody. As we struggle to continue learning in this context, an urgency about understanding our online lives (now truly our real lives?) has taken the foreground. While the playful spirit of #NetNarr always lives on, we will use this year’s collaboratory to focus profoundly on the ways we are shaped both individually and societally by technologies of surveillance, data mining, and algorithmic influence.
We turn from last year’s examination of the Net Mirror to imagine a post-pandemic future for learning that dares to envision a new path forward. Many students starting their path of higher education do not have a “normal” to re-cast as “new” and they are at the leading edge of change, documenting, questioning, and shaping a future of education shrouded in uncertainty.
Net Mirror: The Post-Pandemic University will engage in micro-fiction and storytelling, while also emphasizing the production of public scholarship and advocacy. Our course will generate weekly reflective writing and expression in multiple forms of networked media, and it will culminate in a collection of speculative fiction published in our online publication The Arganee Journal.
Open participants can follow along via the #netnarr twitter hashtag and can also add their network tools (twitter, hypothes.is, and a blog) to the main alchemy lab.
As always, there are additional experiences that one cannot fully anticipate. Entropy permeates this experience.
Learn more about the history of “Networked Narratives” a.k.a. #NetNarr from our January 2021 podcast with Terry Greene and Anne-Marie Scott as an episode of Check the O.L.: Liner Notes from Groundbreaking Online Learning.
Listen to “NetNarr with Mia Zamora and Alan Levine” on Spreaker.