Interactive Activities

The remaining sections of this chapter include interactive activities based on and adapted from the Networks Land project. They offer scalable, low-bandwidth activity frameworks that can be used in a variety of instructional contexts.

Each activity includes discussion & reflection prompts. These function as the collaborative problem solving activities for this chapter.

Networks Land¶

The Networks Land project was developed by Ingrid Burrington and Surya Mattu, during their time at the Data and Society Research Institute. Design support was provided by Disk Cactus.

Their project was funded by a Knight Prototype Fund grant and was workshopped with the Point Area Technology Center, Radical Networks conference, and LeAP at MS 51 afterschool program (Brooklyn, New York).

While the wireless signals that connect a user to the internet may be imperceptible to the human eye, the cables, antennas, data centers, and other physical objects that make up the internet aren’t. They are, however, easy to ignore and increasingly obscured in explaining how the internet works. Similarly, the mechanisms of governance and ownership of the network aren’t entirely hidden from public view, but they are often relegated as “impractical” knowledge much like the physical infrastructure. Understanding ICANN or where “the cloud” lives won’t help you navigate a website or learn to write code.

This attitude is a problem. When neither a computer scientist nor an eleven-year-old can coherently articulate how, on a tangible level, data travels through the internet or who owns the top-level domain my website uses, that’s a problem. When the internet is understood only through its screen components, it’s reduced to a dystopic interface for absorbing content and involuntarily feeding advertising engines.

Understanding systems and infrastructural elements is a useful part of being an informed human being and a useful thing to know when trying to figure out if and how those systems could change or are changing.

Visit the Networks Land project website to learn more about their work, including additional activities.

Networks Land¶

Section Contents¶