A. Technobiography

Assigned Week 3 (September 11). Due Week 4 (September 18).

Kennedy (2003) defines technobiography as a "method for studying digital experiences in general, and the relationship between online and offline lives in particular" (p. 120). Technobiography, she argues, is particularly effective for studying online lives in offline contexts and in the lived context in which online lives are produced.

Your assigment is to write your own techno-autobiography, examining how some aspect of your own identity developed in the context of computers, digital media, and/or online worlds.

You may position yourself as a computer scientist, as a computer science learner, or in another way. Reflect on how you understand your identities with respect to CS and how these understandings have developed through past experiences.

Format

While you are welcome to structure your technobiography as a conventional academic paper, you are also invited to make its form part of its argument. Your technobiography should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 words, though more media probably means fewer words.

Assessment criteria

Theorizing experience. Your autobiography should engage with both specific details of your lived experience and abstract interpretation of this experience, drawing on ideas from the course.
Voice. The speaking voice has a considered relationship to what is related, creating an occasion for reflection, positionality, and the authorship of a chosen identity.

References

Kennedy, H. (2003). Technobiography: Researching Lives, Online and Off. Biography, 26(1), pp. 120–139. https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2003.0024