Overview: The course publication
All you need to know about using/writing for Digital Society
🗺️ Week 1: quick navigation
Welcome → 📍The course publication → Course timeline → Assessment
The publication
Digital Society (which you are now reading) is a Medium publication, like an online magazine. It has over 200 writers, including (or soon to include) you. These writers are almost all current/former students of UCIL Digital Society.
This publication is the course materials and is the first place you should go to for all course information. You can bookmark it, or reach it via UCIL26002 in Blackboard. If you have any questions then check out the content on Medium. If you can’t find the answer then just email digisoc@manchester.ac.uk.
Most of the publication is written by you, your peers, and graduates of the course. Your assessed work will be part of the publication for others to learn from.
So what’s in Blackboard?
There are three things which you need to go to Blackboard for:
- Prepare & Reflect tool: This is essential if you are taking UCIL26002 (and not available otherwise). This tool will guide you through the course week by week. Every week, there’s a checklist to help you stay on track, and a place to rate your understanding and engagement with each topic, so you can see your progress. The tool is also where we ask you to share your Medium username and student number so we can give you your marks and feedback even if you don’t use your real name.
- Submitting a copy of each assessment to Turnitin. You will publish on Medium, and upload an anonymised Word doc to Turnitin (to comply with University policy).
- Reading your feedback/marks in Turnitin. We will only ever share your marks and assessment feedback privately, and never through Medium.
We will send out course announcements using Blackboard: you should receive emails for these, but you can find them all through Blackboard too.
Everything else is in Medium, and we will link to Blackboard at the relevant points. We hope you understand why some functions must be in Blackboard (we have nothing against Blackboard!) to connect with University systems, but hope that you will appreciate the different approach we have taken.
What should I read each week?
Use the Prepare and Reflect tool. It will give you a link to the Medium post for that week’s topic, and you can tick it off when you’re done. You should work through the Medium post, which includes online reading and activities. We suggest you come back to the post a few days later to see what other people have written in the activities.
There’s also a blog post version of the course timeline on Medium which we suggest you read after this post, to get an overview of how the course runs.
How can I track my progress?
Use the Prepare and Reflect tool! It includes what you should be working on each week, and when the assessment deadlines are. You can tick things off when you have done them, and (privately) rate your understanding and engagement with the topics. You can update this any time, and we hope you find it useful. Just click ‘Prepare and Reflect’ in Blackboard.
How will I contribute?
The weekly topics each have a post written by a staff contributor, but you will share your experiences and opinions through polls, 💬 Contribute activities like the one in the Welcome post, and other activities.
Your assessed work will be part of the publication for others to learn from.
Optionally you can also publish anything you like on or relevant to the topic of ‘digital society’, and submit it to the Digital Society publication.
What next?
Now that you know how to engage with the Digital Society publication, we suggest that you read our week-by-week guide to the course.
🗺️ Week 1: quick navigation
Welcome → 📍The course publication → Course timeline → Assessment
