A New Kind of Newsletter

The Digital Self-Determination Research Sprint ran a weekly newsletter that pulled together insights from speakers, featured key quotes from students, and highlighted some artifacts that participants were creating each week. 

For instance, the third session of the Sprint focused on highlighting assumptions and challenges underlying an overly Western-defined concept of digital self-determination. The Session 3 newsletter provided a clear opportunity for readers to learn about this, not just from the speakers invited to the Sprint, but also from participants. 

Research assistants Bernardo Caycedo and Sidharth Chauhan, along with BKC Staff Reuben Langevin and Lance Eaton, worked to gather quotes, edit videos, select artifacts, and design the visual layout each week for over 150 newsletter readers.   

The end result was a learning experience for not just the participants, but also for readers, who could learn in tandem as the ideas emerged rather than waiting until the end of the Research Sprint. As an approach, our newsletter mixed concepts from MOOCs (massive open online courses) with the latest interest in newsletters (Substack, etc.) with an added hint of urgency, since the newsletters ended with the end of the Research Sprint. 

For those interested in seeing individual issues of the Research Sprint Newsletter, you can find all issues here.