Teaching Artifact - Assignment: Digital Ethnography
Creators: name: Ostergaard, Lori
name: Risam, Roopika
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Evaluation
subject: Identity (Psychology)

description: Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This digital ethnography assignment designed by Lori Ostergaard positions intersectionality at the heart of the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of the Internet. Among the goals for Ostergaard's course are "study and apply theories of digital culture and its effects on online communities, especially in relation to ethnicity, gender, class, physical ability, and sexual orientation" (422). After initial assignments examining students' own online identities and researching emerging media forms, the digital ethnography assignment requires them to interact with and analyze online communities as participant-observers. In their guided analysis, students apply their understanding of intersectional theories of identity to their study of the online community. They also produce a multimodal final project on the community, composing either a hyperlinked Web site or article, a wiki article, a narrated slideshow, or a documentary video. This assignment encourages students to understand the relationship between online and offline identities by examining behavior and language used in online communities. In their applied analysis, students explain their newfound understanding of how the Internet is grounded in intersecting axes of oppression. While this assignment is useful for ethnography, I have used it in my own classes for autoethnography—asking students to examine their own interactions with others online through platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Snapchat. Instructors can use this exercise to encourage students to think critically about their own roles as users and creators of online content. This assignment can also be used to help students reflect on how the intersecting dimensions of their own identities shape their experiences online and their attitudes about life offline.
description: Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This digital ethnography assignment designed by Lori Ostergaard positions intersectionality at the heart of the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of the Internet. Among the goals for Ostergaard's course are "study and apply theories of digital culture and its effects on online communities, especially in relation to ethnicity, gender, class, physical ability, and sexual orientation" (422). After initial assignments examining students' own online identities and researching emerging media forms, the digital ethnography assignment requires them to interact with and analyze online communities as participant-observers. In their guided analysis, students apply their understanding of intersectional theories of identity to their study of the online community. They also produce a multimodal final project on the community, composing either a hyperlinked Web site or article, a wiki article, a narrated slideshow, or a documentary video. This assignment encourages students to understand the relationship between online and offline identities by examining behavior and language used in online communities. In their applied analysis, students explain their newfound understanding of how the Internet is grounded in intersecting axes of oppression. While this assignment is useful for ethnography, I have used it in my own classes for autoethnography—asking students to examine their own interactions with others online through platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Snapchat. Instructors can use this exercise to encourage students to think critically about their own roles as users and creators of online content. This assignment can also be used to help students reflect on how the intersecting dimensions of their own identities shape their experiences online and their attitudes about life offline.