Course content
The course is organised into four sections. After initial exploratory activities on the themes of electracy, visuality and creativity, the learner embarks on creating their mystory, an experimental double-narrative combining visual and academic discourses. The learning process is concluded by a reflective and evaluative stage.
Section 1 Preparation (Week 1)
In this climate-setting week the students get to know each other and familiarise themselves with the course technologies. They complete a sequence of visualisation tasks aiming to help them with the preliminary reflection on their actual/imagined/desired subjectivities within the two main course environments: the wiki and their individual blog.
Section 2 Incubation (Weeks 2-4)
In this exploratory phase the students work more closely with the course main themes (identity, creativity, visuality) and techniques (hypertext and image collages). They collaborate on transforming a quasi-biographical text into a hypertext, an exercise in annotation, linkage and content visualisation, and, hopefully, in a more in-depth text analysis. Following Ulmer’s guidelines (2003), the task also intends to serve as a ‘relay’, encouraging the student to extrapolate from the paradigm to their own case in the following activity.
Next the students examine the issues of visuality and their potential usefulness in connecting ideas and creating new understandings. As a personalised follow-up on both activities, the learner creates their own identity visualisation, a collection of artefacts, a task aiming to prime them for the subsequent mystory assignment.
Section 3 Elaboration and evaluation (Weeks 5-9)
The student plots their mystory to explore their selected subjectivity from two perspectives. One of them is a visual record of their inner voice elaborating on their subjective understanding of their professional/ethnic/familial/pop-cultural identity (Ulmer, 2003). This rather playful examination of the personal circumstances serves as a focal point for developing a more objective and stylistically formal narration which problematises the student’s everyday experience in light of background research. The final story-within-a-story is expected to be a hypertext, using hyperlinks, visuals and texts and so becoming a coupling of not only the student’s subjectivities but also modes, mediums, and styles.
Section 4 Reflection (Week 10)
Finally the student reflects on their engagement in the creative process.
Go to the next page to read about the teaching methods.