About the Course

This is a process-oriented college course that helps students understand, shape, and communicate their digital identity over time. It combines reflection, personal branding, and career exploration with hands-on web building using a personal WordPress site through Skidmore Domains. Students examine their digital footprint, values, strengths, and habits through voice logs, blogs, and low-stakes multimedia reflections rather than polished performances. The course emphasizes ownership of one’s digital presence instead of reliance on platforms like LinkedIn alone. AI tools such as Boodlebox and ChatGPT are used deliberately as reflective partners, not shortcuts, with a strong focus on ethical and critical use. Frameworks like DiSC, Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, the 4Ds Framework, and Ikigai guide self-understanding and decision-making. Students progressively narrow from broad self-knowledge to realistic career roles using AI, alumni research, and job postings. Major graded artifacts are reflective vlogs that show thinking, focus, and growth rather than final answers. The course values process, iteration, and adaptation, with the syllabus designed to evolve based on class needs. Overall, it’s about building a coherent digital and professional narrative grounded in self-awareness, intentional design, and responsible use of technology.

Instructional Goals

The five goals below outline how this course is structured to support student learning, creative practice, and responsible engagement with AI across the semester.

1. Develop an intentional professional digital identity

Students develop an intentional digital identity by reflecting on their values, experiences, and sense of purpose, and translating those into a clear and authentic personal brand as they approach graduation. They practice agency by making deliberate choices about how they represent themselves online, considering audience, platform, and context. Students learn to articulate this identity clearly through writing, media, and in-person communication.

2. Design and maintain personal cyberinfrastructure with a digital sustainability plan

Students design and maintain personal cyberinfrastructure by building and managing a WordPress site and, when appropriate, a custom domain. This work emphasizes ownership, portability, and sustainability, helping students understand digital spaces as systems they can shape, adapt, and carry forward beyond Skidmore.

Students develop a digital sustainability plan that considers how their portfolio and online presence will be maintained, updated, or repurposed after graduation. They learn to treat their portfolio as a durable hub that connects writing, media, and professional networks over time.

3. Practice creative and ethical co-intelligence with AI

Students practice creative and ethical co-intelligence by working with generative AI tools as thinking and creative partners rather than automated solutions. Using frameworks such as the 4Ds, students learn prompt design as a form of rhetorical and strategic communication, align AI outputs with their goals and voice, and remain accountable for judgment, authorship, and meaning.

Students also practice explaining and defending their AI use through reflection, dialogue, and presentation.

4. Evaluate information, AI outputs, and platforms critically

Students develop critical evaluation skills by assessing credibility, bias, and context across AI-generated content, digital platforms, and social media using methods such as SIFT. This goal reinforces ethical responsibility in public digital environments and supports transferable habits of discernment across academic, professional, and civic contexts.

5. Engage in reflective, experiential learning through intentional creation and dialogue

Students engage in reflective, experiential learning through making, revising, and reflecting across digital writing, voice, audio, video, and portfolio work. Structured reflection and dialogue support collaboration, adaptability, and self-awareness. Students practice making intentional decisions about when, how, and why work is shared, connecting digital creation with in-person communication.

Use of AI in This Course

This course treats artificial intelligence as a thinking partner, not as a shortcut or replacement for your judgment, voice, or responsibility. Our approach is guided by the AI Fluency Framework (Dakan & Feller), popularized through Anthropic’s open AI Fluency courses.

The framework centers on four core practices, known as the 4Ds: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence. Together, these practices support thoughtful, ethical use while keeping humans clearly in control of meaning and decisions.

Primary AI Platform: BoodleBox

We will use BoodleBox as the primary platform for this course. BoodleBox provides access to multiple AI models in a single environment, which helps you see AI as a category of tools with different behaviors rather than a single oracle. This allows us to focus on how these systems work, rather than training on one proprietary tool. It is available to you at no cost.

Within BoodleBox, you will:

  • work with different models to compare strengths, limitations, and tone
  • practice prompt design and revision
  • use and build custom chatbots for specific purposes

Building and testing chatbots helps you understand how these systems are shaped by prompts, constraints, and design choices. This reinforces that AI behavior is not neutral or fixed, but influenced by human intention.

The 4Ds: How We Use AI Thoughtfully

Delegation means deciding what to hand off and what must remain human work. AI may support brainstorming, outlining, idea generation, or exploring alternatives. Judgment, interpretation, reflection, and final decisions are not delegated.

Description focuses on how clearly you guide these systems. You will practice specifying purpose, audience, tone, format, and constraints so the tool acts as a useful, bounded collaborator rather than a vague generator.

Discernment is the ability to critically evaluate output. These systems can produce inaccuracies, reproduce bias, or flatten individual voice. You are expected to question, revise, and refine AI-generated material rather than accept it at face value.

Diligence involves ethical responsibility and accountability. You are responsible for all final work you submit or share, regardless of how AI was involved. The tool may assist, but you remain the author, editor, and decision-maker.

Evaluating Information and AI Output (SIFT)

To support responsible use, we will also draw on the SIFT method for evaluating information, whether it comes from AI systems or other sources:

  • Stop and consider what you are seeing
  • Investigate the source
  • Find better coverage or corroboration
  • Trace claims back to their original context

SIFT helps slow down decision-making and avoid overreliance on confident but unreliable output.

Experimenting with Other Tools

In addition to BoodleBox, we may also experiment with other tools for specific purposes, such as:

When you use tools beyond BoodleBox, you are expected to:

  • explain why you chose the tool
  • evaluate its strengths and limitations
  • reflect on how it shaped your thinking or output

Accountability and Articulation

Any use of AI in this course must be defensible in conversation, and you are expected to be able to orally explain, present, and perform competently on any work submitted under your name, including work developed with AI assistance.

You should be able to:

  • explain how and why you used AI
  • describe what you accepted, revised, or rejected
  • articulate what you learned from the process
  • discuss your work clearly in class, in small groups, or in the final podcast

Your learning is evaluated based on effort, engagement, reflection, and judgment, not on how polished AI-assisted output appears.

How AI Fits into Course Work

AI may be used across blogs, voice reflections, audio or video experiments, portfolio development, and podcast preparation. In all cases, it should support exploration, reflection, and revision, not replace them.

These tools and models change quickly. Part of this course is learning how to work effectively in a shifting environment rather than relying on any single tool or version.

Bottom Line

AI in this course is a tool for thinking, not a tool to do your thinking.

Using AI well means:

  • delegating intentionally
  • describing clearly
  • discerning critically
  • acting with diligence

These practices will matter long after this course, regardless of which tools emerge next.

Core Course Components

This course is built around a small number of interconnected components. Each one supports a different kind of learning, and together they form a system that emphasizes process, reflection, articulation, and growth over time. No single component stands alone.

1. The Blog: Learning in Progress

The course blog is our primary workspace for the course. It is where ideas are explored, tested, revised, and documented over time.

You will use the blog to:

  • draft and revise written work

  • reflect on experiments with tools and media

  • document decisions, changes, and learning moments

  • connect course ideas to your own interests and experiences

Early in the semester, blog posts are primarily developmental. The blog is not about producing finished or polished work. It is about learning in motion.

Selected blog posts will later inform content development for your portfolio.

2. Vlogs: Thinking Out Loud

Voice logs, or vlogs, are informal audio reflections where you think out loud. You can record them on your smartphone or schedule a quick recording session in LEDS (Library 222). 

Vlogs capture your in-the-moment reasoning, including tone, pauses, uncertainty, emotion, and spontaneous connections. This kind of embodied thinking is difficult to fake and difficult for AI to fully simulate, which makes vlogs powerful evidence of authentic learning.

You will use vlogs to:

  • talk through ideas as they are forming

  • explain decisions you are making in real time

  • reflect on experiments with tools, including AI

  • process challenges, questions, or moments of insight

Vlogs are not about performance or production quality. They are about showing up as yourself and practicing clear spoken articulation.

How Blogs and Vlogs Work Together

Blogs and vlogs are intentionally paired in this course.

A common and encouraged pattern is to record a short vlog while you are working through an idea or decision, and then later return to that recording when writing a blog post. The vlog captures first-draft thinking; the blog slows that thinking down, reorganizes it, and deepens it.

Over time, vlogs trace the development of your voice and confidence, while blogs trace the development of your ideas and arguments. Together, they make the learning process visible in ways that written work alone cannot, especially in an era when polished text is easy to generate with AI.

3. The Portfolio: Your Digital Hub & Professional Presence

The portfolio is the central hub of your digital identity and one of the most important outcomes of this course.

As you approach graduation from Skidmore, the portfolio becomes a way to bring together your learning, interests, and experiences into a coherent professional presence. It is not just a collection of assignments. It is a space where you begin to articulate who you are, what you care about, and how you want to be understood by others beyond the classroom.

Built on WordPress.org using professional-quality themes provided to you, the portfolio is a space you own and control. You may also choose to connect a custom domain, allowing you to establish a durable personal web presence that can grow with you after college. The SkidCreate Gallery includes examples of different portfolio sites.

Over time, you will use the portfolio to:

  • refine and showcase curate selected work from your blog and student experience

  • connect ideas across assignments, courses, and experiences

  • articulate your interests, values, and emerging direction

  • reflect on your growth and learning over the semester

Other platforms, such as LinkedIn, can point back to this hub, but the portfolio remains the anchor. It serves as your personal cyberinfrastructure, a stable and intentional space where your work, voice, and perspective come together.

All of the strategies in this course, including writing, voice reflection, multimedia experimentation, and thoughtful use of technology, are designed to support the development of this portfolio. By the end of the semester, it should help you communicate clearly with professors, peers, and professional audiences, and support the connections you begin to build as you move beyond Skidmore.

4. Audio and Video as Thinking Tools

In this course, audio and video are used as tools for thinking, not just for producing content. Working in sound and images helps you see and hear your ideas more clearly, often revealing what is unclear, assumed, or underdeveloped in ways that writing alone does not. You will learn how to prompt for the screen by translating ideas into visuals and sound, often with the support of AI, and how to evaluate the results critically. Over time, selected audio and video experiments may become part of your portfolio, supporting a professional presence that reflects both clarity of thought and intentional use of technology.

5. In-Class Dialogue & Collaboration

Learning in this course happens through conversation, explanation, and shared sense-making, not just through individual work.

In-class time is used to:

  • talk through ideas and decisions as they are forming

  • explain your work out loud and hear how it lands with others

  • collaboratively explore tools, prompts, and approaches

  • reflect together on what is working, what is unclear, and what needs revision

  • receive feedback from peers and the instructor in real time

These moments matter because they connect your digital work to how you show up with others. Being able to articulate what you are doing, why you made certain choices, and how your thinking is evolving is a core outcome of the course.

In an environment where AI can easily generate polished text, in-person dialogue reinforces accountability, clarity, and presence. It is where ideas are tested, assumptions are surfaced, and learning becomes visible through conversation rather than performance.

Your participation in these dialogues supports not only your own learning, but the learning community as a whole.

6. The Podcast: Articulating Your Portfolio and Professional Voice

The podcast is a culminating learning experience that connects your digital portfolio to your ability to explain your work, thinking, and direction out loud.

As a soon-to-be graduate, it is not enough to have a well-designed digital presence. You also need to be able to talk about that work clearly, thoughtfully, and with confidence. The podcast is where you practice doing exactly that.

In this course, the podcast takes the form of a structured conversation in which you:

  • walk through your portfolio as a whole

  • explain how your ideas, interests, and work connect

  • reflect on how your thinking evolved over the semester

  • discuss how you used tools, including AI, and what judgment you applied

  • articulate what you are taking forward beyond the course

This is not a performance and not a scripted presentation. It is a reflective dialogue focused on clarity, sense-making, and communication. You may participate in the podcast individually or in a small group, depending on the format of the assignment.

The podcast reinforces the idea that digital identity and professional presence are shaped not only by what appears online, but also by how you show up in conversation. Being able to explain your work in your own voice, respond to questions, and make connections in real time is a critical complement to the portfolio itself.

Together, the portfolio and podcast represent the synthesis of this course. The portfolio gathers and curates your work. The podcast brings that work to life through spoken articulation. Both are designed to support your transition from student to graduate with a clear sense of voice, purpose, and presence.

How the Course Components Work Together

Each component of this course supports a different part of the same learning process.

The blog captures your thinking as it develops over time, allowing you to explore ideas, revise them, and reflect in writing. Voice logs capture your in-the-moment reasoning and help you practice explaining your thinking out loud. Audio and video experiments help you see and hear your ideas, test meaning across media, and learn how to communicate visually and sonically, often with the support of AI. The portfolio brings this work together into a coherent digital presence that you own and control. In-class dialogue grounds all of this work in conversation, collaboration, and accountability with others. The podcast then provides a final opportunity to articulate the whole story clearly and confidently.

Taken together, these components emphasize learning as a process rather than a performance. They help you build not just technical skills, but judgment, voice, and presence. By the end of the semester, you will have practiced thinking, making, reflecting, and explaining in ways that prepare you to carry your work and identity forward beyond Skidmore.