The wrap up of the first semester of the Doctoral Program in Digital Media demanded the output of a written work for each of the enrolled classes. Communication Theory (CT) requested a position paper on the purpose of digital media theory and the key questions it should attend today, Advanced Topics in Digital Media (ATDM) and History and Trends in Digital Media (HTDM) asked for literature reviews that considered at least one of the authors whose work was discussed in class, and Research Methods (RM) required a revisited version of the students’ research plans.
Communication Theory (CT)
The position paper reflected the opinion that digital media theory should be looking for common building blocks of human/software matter in the vast, heterogenous realm of domains that it impacts, in order to make sense of it – as distinguishing what is human from what is software about technology is becoming increasingly difficult. Four aspects of human life to discretize this search – sociality, spatiality, civility and individuality – were suggested.
History and Trends in Digital Media (HTDM)
The literature review developed for HTDM focused on the concept of low code, motivated by the work of Wendy Chun that depicts code as sorcery, as a fetishism that perpetuates those who develop code as sorcerers – or wizards, ninjas or super heroes, as commonly seen today in the titles of related job roles. This review intended to look for evidence in literature of the merits of low code – the programming languages most abstracted from the machine one – to the development of increased computer applications’ development power of non-technical users – splitted between children (future adults) and adults.
Advanced Topics in Digital Media (ATDM)
The work developed in the scope of ATDM was motivated by Dennis Charsky’s characterization of serious games – relying on the dimensions of Competition and Goals, Rules, Choice, Challenge and Fantasy – and considered an inspection of literature for implementations and frameworks of serious games for informal education. The resulting short paper was submitted to the call for publication of the 2022 edition of the Interaction Design & Children conference (IDC22) of the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which is happening in Braga, Portugal, this summer.
Research Methods (RM)
Attending the evaluation of past reviewers, the focus on the improvement of the research plan proposed has been in the detail of the tasks to be performed, in particular regarding the participant selection and the co-design operationalization. Developments were accomplished. Regarding participant selection, which considers two levels – a school selection and a household selection -, criteria for the school selection was determined and the development of an index of households’ educational resources availability is set as a goal for the next semester and a first contribution to the community out of this work. Regarding the co-design process, the exploration of the work of Allison Druin on the participation of children in the development of technology for children motivated the ambition to study and propose a method that facilitates the co-design with spatially distributed participants, each in the context of its household, as the diversity among these contexts is a fundamental variable to take into consideration, and such a method constantly reminds the participants of, or educates on – children including -, the constraints that this diversity considers.
This current month, void of classes of the doctoral program, will be used to continue improving this detail of the research plan, having in mind the applications for scholarship which will soon have to be submitted.
Courses’ Grades
- HTDM: 18/20
- CT: 19/20
- ATDM: 17/20
- RM: 17/20
