Dear ds106 community,

By now, I imagine, you will have noticed an avalanche of blog posts coming across the transom of your rss feed for ds106 with the cryptic title DFPQ1. As much as I wish it were, this is not some effort to create a viral social media phenomenon. DFPQ1 stands for Digital Face Lift Pop Quiz 1 and what you’re seeing are student responses to the pop quiz question that was given at the end of today’s lecture (see previous post for details).

Ordinarily I wouldn’t go to the trouble of sending out such a personalized blog post explaining what’s going on. But I fear that some folks out there might have been put out or dismayed by the sudden onslaught of identically titled blog posts. Come to think of it, it’s also possible that the sequence of characters I instructed students to use for the post title might trigger some alarm bells among the folks who’ve been tasked with using some of the tools that monitor the net for alarming anomalies and such.

Final slide of today’s presentation on Paragraphs 1-5 of Personal Cyberinfrastructure by Gardner Campbell

So let me offer a brief explanation of what this is all about and offer an invitation. Above is the final slide shown during today’s old-skool lecture on the first five paragraphs of Gardner’s Personal Cyberinfrastructure essay. As I’d warned the students of the possibility of a pop quiz when assigning the reading, I felt compelled to find some way to keep my promise. Students completing the quiz/task before 17:00 (JST) will be rewarded with a modest amount of points based on the skill and style used in supporting the appeal the particular sentence holds for them.

This is where you, dear ds106 community members, come in. Wouldn’t it be a hoot for these students here in Tokyo to get some feedback on their effort? Your encouraging suggestion might prompt them to revise their newly born sentence in such a way that it garners them with with even more points. Or you might even be led to think about some of the ideas in Personal Cyberinfrastructure in a new way based on what you read. You never can tell until you click the link.

So I hope this explanation has helped to calm any rattled nerves and the invitation prompts some level of action. I thank you for your attention and wish you well.

Digitally,
Scott Lockman