CRAFTING DIGITAL PLACES
Netbook Edition
This is Crafting Digital Places, a teaching resource by Oscar Keyes and Luke Meeken focusing on critically experiencing, making, and sharing digital places. Particular attention is paid to the ways colonizing norms are encouraged by many digital places, and how digital places may habituate non-colonial and anti-colonial* sentiments and actions toward digital and physical places and lands.
We've taught this content with middle and high school students, in-person, but it could also be used for self-teaching, or for remote teaching. Elements of it could definitely be adapted for use with younger learners.
To the left are the modules of the curriculum, and below are the tools we use in teaching it. They're presented in an order that reflects how we often teach this work, but we also change how we move through this resource every time we teach with it, and encourage you to rearrange, omit, and append to suit your setting!
One tool we've used to remix the content of this site is to create a shared Google doc to organize links to resources from this site, and to organize students into groups for collaboration.
This version of the site is designed for use with Chromebooks and Netbooks, as all of the below tools are browser-based and require no installed software. Hopefully, it's of use to students remote-learning with those devices, or with groups of students using a variety of devices.
* Note: Recognizing that "decolonization is not a metaphor," we acknowledge that this project is not a decolonizing project, as it does not materially remedy the theft of Indigenous lands. We define this project as having critical and anticolonial aims, and hope to foster through this project critical sensitivities in students that work tangibly toward decolonized realities, but we recognize that this project alone cannot accomplish decolonization.
TOOLS WE'LL USE
The site we use to model our characters (and possibly other objects for your world!). Like sculpting digital clay.
Another 3D modeling site you can use. Like building with digital blocks. You can create an account with a fake email, if you don't have an email address (but write down your password if you do!).
Mixamo is a free, online tool for rigging and animating 3D models. We'll use this to create animated characters for our worlds, and to make animated GIFs.
PlayCanvas is a browser-based 3D design environment used by artists and game designers. It's free to use, though you have to create an account.
Note: Free accounts are publicly viewable, and have limited storage. (In our experience PlayCanvas has been generous in setting up private accounts for educators.)
Photopea is a free, browser-based image editor. We'll be using it to modify and add detail to the textures on our 3D models and terrain.
Screencast-O-Matic is a free browser-based screencasting tool used by video artists, YouTubers, and game streamers. We use it to record walkthroughs of our virtual worlds, and ones made by other people.
Note: Most of these tools work best in the Chrome or Firefox browsers, and are least effective in Internet Explorer / Edge browser.