Over the last few months I’ve been collaborating with a bunch of wonderful scholars in the Selfie Research Network and one of the first outcomes of our work is an online course on selfies. We’re already in week three, which is my and Liz Losh‘s topic, biometrics and how machines read our faces and our selfies. Go on, read our introductory blog post for the week, do some assignments, post images to the Flickr group or steal our assignments and readings and use them in your own teaching! The full course has a six week syllabus, where each week includes image assignments, where students actually learn to think visually, as well as readings, discussion questions and a prompt for a reflective essay.

• Class Introduction, Learning Objectives and Policies
• Weekly Breakdown 
  • Week One: Identity and Interpellation
  • Week Two: Celebrity and Branding
  • Week Three: Dataveillance, Biometrics and Facial Recognition
  • Week Four: Gender, Sexuality and Dating
  • Week Five: The Subaltern, Criminal and “Others”
    
  • Week Six: Place, Space and “Appropriate” Selfies

Several of my collaborators are following the whole or parts of the course in their traditional classrooms with students in courses they’re already running. I’m not teaching a course where that would work right now, but I did use Alice Marwick’s celebrity selfie assignment from week two with my students, as well as a version of Theresa Senft’s identity selfie assignment as an icebreaker on the first day of class. The course is very much intended for other teachers to take and use as they want in their own classes. And of course we’d love to hear how other teachers used it!

We also hope that anyone who is interested will feel welcome to participate in the class – whether you’re a student, a scholar, a teacher or just interested in selfies. We don’t actually have any funding for this and we’re all really busy teaching our own classes, so the online part of the class isn’t as well curated and tended and marketed and so on as would be ideal, but it’s fun testing it out and maybe we can do something more formal in future. If you do join in and follow parts of the course we’d be quite excited!!

This online course is also part of a pre-conference workshop we’re organizing at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, IR15, in Daegu in Korea on October.