a thaumaturgical compendium

The following is the framework for a course without a syllabus. This document is up on Google Docs, and seminar participants will edit it together on the first night of class.

Communication, Media, & Society
ICM/JRN 522, Fall 2008
Tuesdays, 18:30-21:10 (GMT-5), Buckman Center 137

Instructor
Alexander Halavais, 522@halavais.net
Skype, Google, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed: halavais
Telephone: +1.646.961.3526

Office Hours
Mon, 12:00 – 13:00 (GMT-5)
@ Video/Text: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/halavais

Tues & Weds, 16:30 – 18:00 (GMT-5)
@ QU Mt. Carmel Campus, Faculty Office Building 23

(Or by appointment.)

Introduction

The catalog description for this course is as follows:

This course focuses on the historical and contemporary state of personal
and public interaction with popular media in the context of technological
developments and the impact of these developments on society and culture.
Students completing this course will study journal articles, survey the
research literature, and write papers on the historical trajectory of
information consumption from the emergence of mass-produced paper-
based texts to the development of the World Wide Web.

This has always struck me as an impossibly broad description. The advantage to this is that it allows some flexibility in what we focus on, and in previous versions of this course, I have successfully turned the planning of the course—to a greater or lesser degree—over to the participants in the seminar. (See the end of this document for a statement on the philosophy surrounding this approach to organizing the course.) Therefore, this initial syllabus is really only a temporary skeleton, to be fleshed out collaboratively on our first meeting. It is hosted on Google Docs, and we will be editing it on our first meeting. What is listed here initially is the “immutables”—things that due to the structure of the university, my own standards, or the description of the course must remain fairly strictly defined.

In terms of course content, we should cover:

• Some of the ways in which media affects (and is affected by) society and its coevolution with social structure.
• The evolution of media: how it changes over time.
• The history of mass, networked, and interactive media.
• The future of mass, networked, and interactive media.

I will be distributing (both online and in person) some resources that will help us to plan out a course. I’ll ask you to brainstorm before our first meeting as well. We will find a topic, or topics, that allow us to dig deep into a particular historical or contemporary issue and make connections to social effects and the media environment.

Read the rest of this entry »

This sort of post has now become a staple, but here are some things I’m doing instead of blogging. I’ll try to post a little bit about these projects as they progress.

• Finishing up my new book, Search Engine Society. I’m putting the finishing touches on the index. All of it was desperately out of date the moment I wrote it, but that was inevitable. Luckily, Polity has been very good about turn-around timing on this. It’s due out in October, if the gods of printing allow. Indexing is more annoying than I thought. Can’t we just Google it?

• Research for a paper about Digg, and ratings. I had originally planned on writing this up in the form of a Dr. Suess book, but I think I’m headed for something a bit more traditional at this point. This actually follows a line of research from my dissertation, lo, so many years ago.

• Research for a paper about the use of hyperlinking in the rhetoric of extremism (and particularly racism) on the web. Again, this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for about a decade, but I’m only now getting things together for it.

• Early stages of planning to take the initial ideas I presented in a paper at NCA last year, about collaborative filtering, netroots, and the public agenda, and apply them to the presidential election. I want to finish this up sometime in, say, November.

• Organizing materials for my next book. Will be working on it over the next year or so. There are a three separate ideas I’ve been working on, but I think I’m going to look at the nexus of networked communication, learning, creativity, and government.

• I’m revising my “Intro Interactive” course. No, really. This will be the first time I have revised a course rather than starting pretty much from a clean slate. Very exciting. Hoping to outsource some of it, and interview some friends and former students to get a look at the interactive industry.

• I’m rewriting “Communication, Media, and Society” from scratch, trying to provide the means for doing my “students design the class” thing and still having it work for an online version.

• Early stages of planning for my spring courses: “Web Programming” and “Something Else.” There are several possibilities for my special topics, including: Search Engine Society (duh!), Surveillance, Virtual Worlds,

• I’ve been doing some prep on a major project, which will be my top priority when it launches later this year. Laying the foundation and doing some planning over the next few months. I’ll announce it formally on my birthday later this month.

But I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try to do better. Oh, and if I owe you something (refereeing, emails, invoices, money, the head of your sworn enemy), I’ll get to it. Just a bit bogged down right now.

I’ve been reading an excellent essay in the American Scholar, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, by William Deresiewicz. Go there and read it. Despite the implied Obama critique, I think he has hit several nails on their heads.

Many of the people whom I have met who have benefited from an education at an elite school are bright but uninteresting. And they seem to believe that they are brighter and more accomplished than they actually manage to be. As long as I am painting with a stereotypical brush, I’ll note that in my experience, this is particularly true of graduates of Harvard and Yale, and least true of graduates of Princeton and Cornell. The funny thing is that these expectations are often born out.

I didn’t really think much about the Ivy League until I came to Quinnipiac. I attended state schools, and my impression is that there is a lot in common in terms of coursework between a large public school like the University of Indiana, and a large private, like Harvard. But the attitudes that Quinnipiac students hold toward Yalies, and the reverse, has brought into sharp focus the cultural capital held by Yale.

Every couple years, Yale’s student paper publishes a sort of “safari” piece on Quinnipiac students that always manages to set a colonial tone. (The most recent is awed by the fact that in their native habitat, Quinnipiac students seem to spend—gasp!—a great deal of time studying.) I have the feeling that for most Yale students, the experience of Quinnipiac students is utterly beyond their grasp. The gap here is not between the working class and the elite. Quinnipiac students generally come from “new money,” it seems to me: their parents are almost prototypical members of the bourgeoisie, sons and daughters of successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, and stockbrokers. That Yalies consider Quinnipiac students to be heavy partiers suggests they have never visited ASU or SDSU, but there is definitely a difference in what is considered an expected workload. Some of our best students rival the abilities of some of their best students, but our average student seems unsure of why he is in college, and unsure of what he wants to do afterward. (This is new for me: ambition seems more common both among children of the working poor in Buffalo and in a different way, among children of the aristocracy.) I chafe a bit at our emphasis of professional skills, but it seems likely that Yale graduates will be working with Quinnipiac graduates, and our students will probably teaching their students the nuts and bolts of professional practice. That Yale and Quinnipiac students can find so little common ground is an indictment of both institutions.

I think the article overplays this as endemic to the Ivy League. Students at almost every university seem to feel entitled to a high-paying job upon graduation, regardless of what they actually accomplish in school, and grade inflation in our own program rivals Yale’s. But he may be right that the graduate of an Ivy League school has been told so often that he is a member of the elite that he believes this as part of his being. Unfortunately, at least until mellowed a bit after graduation, this makes many students at Ivy League schools fairly insufferable to talk to.

Of course, there are exceptions. Many of my friends are survivors of Ivy League programs, and I don’t hold it against them in the least. Some of them even deign to read my blog ;). But unfortunately, since the Ivies tend to set the cadence for “aspirant” institutions, the problems outlined in this article seem to trickle down. When this is compounded with the fact that our political leaders are disproportionately products of these schools, it seems clear that an adjustment is needed.

No, not this Alex, 9th circuit judge Alex Kozinski, who has recently found himself in the limelight when asked to recuse himself from an obscenity case because he had published “similar” pornographic images to the web. He apparently believed that placing these items in an obscure directory on his private website was enough to hide them from public view. He was wrong. (And here, I disagree with Lessig’s view that it was private-ish.)

Someone sent me a note asking for my opinion on this. I’m not sure that I have a considered opinion. The descriptions of the images seem to be far worse than the images themselves. Two of the images described in the LA Times article appear here (NSFW), in a compilation of putatively humorous images that is not safe for work. Which gives rise to the question of that term: Not Safe for Work. Should a judge be judged by a standard different from the standards by which we judge any other citizen. Bear in mind that he has been accused of circulating distasteful images, not illegal images. I don’t think anyone would suggest that a subscription to Hustler should disqualify someone from the bench.

I can see getting fired for viewing these kind of images at work, particularly if it resulted in co-workers seeing them. I can even see getting fired for intentionally publishing this sort of material on a personal site, if your work found out about it and you were in an industry sensitive to public opinion (as most are). But there was no such intent here. It’s not like he’s been secretive about it; as he admits here, he maintains a “gag list,” from which he sends out “dirty jokes.” (There is more in this interview that seems a bit risque in retrospect.) The question is whether this should impact his role as a judge. I don’t see why it should. Given how few people we have at the appellate level that have even a basic understanding of the online world, it would seem a particularly unfortunate

At worst, I think he can be blamed for a lack of political acumen, and arguably (since it always is) questionable taste. Perhaps he should add “keeping a careful lid on your personal interests” to his advice for aspiring federal judges. And though he’s not a fan of bloggers, this serves as a great example to those who are bloggers of how personal web publishing (by you or your kids) can come back to bite you.

Here is the presentation I’ll be giving in the morning. Yes, I’m still playing with the “screencast-as-slides” approach: ooh, distracting motion!

Update: And here is a short outline of tips I handed around:
phases.

In the afternoon sessions, we had four presentations (with discussions).

You want me to teach what?

In the first of these, Joan van Hise and Dawn Massey addressed the question of what to do when you are faced with teaching a course with content or delivery that is unfamiliar. They brought Smarties and Dum-dums to throw at participants.

When pressed into a course you are unfamiliar with, you look for others as models. If there are no models, try professional organizations, other disciplines, and working profession as a source of information.

Past these sources, two approaches:

Plan A: Amass adequate technical training. Read the literature. Go to conferences and pre-conferences and training. Make contacts. Adopt a research agenda related to the area.

Plan B: Bring in an expert. Have them do guest lectures, provide case studies, have them help with course materials, team teaching, or have the expert observe your teaching.

While this is stressful, it provides a great opportunity for learning and developing as a professional.

Getting students to learn from their mistakes

Vera Cherepinsky presented some ideas on getting students in their introductory math courses to use graded exams to study. She provides students a chance to correct problems that had some error in the solution. They are required to find the errors, decide whether it is major or minor (and explain why), and then explain how to fix it. Seems like a substantial time investment, though it’s clear it helps students to learn.

Capturing Shakespeare classes with Apple Podcast Producer

Richard Regan presented his experience with capturing audio for a course on Shakespeare. The Apple Podcast Producer provides a way of streamlining the production of podcasts, providing for a pretty much immediate upload of lectures recorded using an iPod. He records directly into Producer (using a Blue Snowflake, and the system immediately uploads to iTunes University. It’s pretty much one-click, making it easy for non-techies.

They are looking to move to having audio servers in four classrooms, with microphones in the room, that would record the conversation in the room on built-in Mac Minis and upload it automatically to iTunes U. They are also looking at doing video in much the same way.

When college writing gets personal

Peter Witkowsky, from Mount Saint Mary College, talked about ways of using new media to encourage writing, and negotiating “academic” and “personal” writing styles. Says that freshmen tend to fall into two models: Elinor or Marianne: “Neither of us have anything to tell. I because I conceal nothing and you because you communicate nothing.” He says that he finds the polarization between these extremes is increasing.

Suggests that we encourage, rather than discourage, the use of web-based resources. He provides the example of using blogrunner to track on the decision about the making US currency accessible to the blind. By looking through this stuff, you provide an example of assessing information online.

I’m up at Fairfield University for their annual conference on teaching. Time permitting, I’ll try to blog the sessions.

The day began with a keynote from Alison Morrison-Shetlar, the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Central Florida. I’ll admit to being a bit cynical about overarching advice on teaching, but I think she did a good job of cutting through a sea of ideas and presenting some nice ideas for improving teaching at the course level and at the university-wide level.

She split this into three perspectives: those of the student, the teacher, and the classroom. She talked about a project to reinvent the general education requirements at UCF. They went out to try to figure out what students were excited about and found that across the board, undergrads shared an interest in the environment and global climate change. They encouraged faculty to include these issues, in whatever way was appropriate, in their general education courses, and provided resources for faculty to make use of (learning artifacts provided by faculty). As a result, students were not only more excited about the general education classes, they became more involved in other campus initiatives.

From the teachers perspective, she pushed hard on formative assessment. Although these were not particularly new ideas, it was great to hear them again, and just because you’ve run into them before, doesn’t mean you remember to try them. She touched on low-stakes writing (one-minute papers), encouraging students to draw pictures of the ideas they are exploring, use pictures as puzzles to encourage discussion, make use of choral response (even at the grad level), and pass the chalk to get people to present materials.

She had less time to discuss things from the perspective of the classroom, but encouraged the clustering of courses, team-teaching, and inviting colleagues into the classroom.

Next, there was a session on using Moodle with Web 2.0. The presenters ran into technical difficulties, so they ended up a bit rushed. They broadly introduced the ideas of surrounding Web 2.0 tools. They had some particular favorites (gliffy, mindmeister, buzzword, google docs, elluminate, WizIQ). WizIQ is particularly interesting: a free plugin for Moodle, it allows for live collaboration over video. It was a nice show-and-tell, though I think it’s time to throw out the whole “web 2.0” thing, especially when it comes to education. I still think the best definition of “web 2.0” is “stuff we weren’t doing on the web five years ago.” I’m dubious of efforts to define it conceptually beyond this.

In the second part of their talk, they looked at strategies for employing Learning Management Systems. They decided they wanted to have the live components (through elluminate), but they are doing their static work through NineHub, a free Moodle host. They set up a course over there to collect resources relating to teaching with social media.