I’m leaving Diigo only reluctantly, after a year of using it in classes and on my own. I still love it, but more in concept than in practice. The concept, if you aren’t aware, is that with the Diigo toolbar, you can highlight and annotate any web page. Yes, there are other ways to do this, but I liked this functionality as a small extension to the existing bookmarking that can be done on Delicious and similar systems. When they acquired Furl, I was even more excited. I always though Furl was under-appreciated as a service.

It seemed particularly well suited to education. How great to be able to comment at the sentence-fragment-level of a student’s blog post. Think of the conversations that can be built up around annotating a reading together. And in fact I’ve used it for three courses, and really built one course around Diigo. When you submitted an assignment: you used Diigo to tag. When you had questions about a lecture: more Diigo.

What was outstanding in theory just hasn’t made it to practice. And the annoying part is that it really isn’t something major. It’s nothing that I could point at and say: fix this and it would be perfect. It’s the little things. Sometimes, when you do a whole lot of comments on a single page, the page loads can be really bogged down. Sometimes, when you highlight a section to make a comment, the highlighted section “jumps.” It seems like there are a lot of clicks needed to do just about anything. And, though I am generally tolerant of such things, the issue of plurals and odd English constructions on the site could be annoying. Sometimes the internal pagers didn’t quite work on groups.

But most of all, it fails the KISS test. Especially for a new student asked to use the service, the site itself can quickly become confusing. How do you find your own bookmarks? A group? How do you know when you are participating in a forum for a group or bookmarking something for it? Who can read your bookmark? When are you making a comment on a page? A general note for the page? A note on a specific piece of highlighting? It is a simple tool that has been split into a Swiss Army knife of applications and approaches. There is nothing wrong with some extendability and making tools do more, but the core functionality should be simple and clear, particularly to the first time user. And this is especially important in an educational setting, where you want students to be learning about the subject matter, not spending time fighting with a tool.

Delicious works fine for much of what I need to do. It’s a single-use tool, but it is quickly clear how it works. The folksonomies that emerge from Delicious can be complex, and there are interesting ways the tool can be employed, but the tool itself is simple, obvious, and doesn’t take up a lot of space on my computer, my bandwidth, or in my head.

I still have a Diigo account, and I’ll probably circle back to see how things have changed, but the toolbar is gone, and it won’t be showing up on syllabi anytime soon.

Now, I am naturally lazy–a trait I am trying to more actively cultivate, but I gather he had figured that because I haven’t been blogging or tweeting or doing any of those other sorts of continual status updates I must be slacking. As usual, my blogging (including micro-blogging) is inversely proportionate to how busy I am, not the other way around. There is a small caveat: sometimes it is an indicator that I am procrastinating, and therefore should be busy. On very rare occasions, when the stars align, it is actually linked to progress on a project, but generally speaking, silence on this front should never be taken as indication that I am actually relaxing a little.

On the other hand, the number of hours I have each week to work on projects is somewhat limited by being the daytime parent (with some help) of Jasper. This remains my priority, and though it sometimes means sacrificing things I would like to do, there is never going to be another time to hang out with my six-month-old, so he wins. As it is, I wish I could spend even more time with him.

In what seems to be a perennial sort of post, here are some of the projects I’m working on right now, besides raising the future benevolent dictator of our solar system:

• Writing Course at Quinnipiac University. I’ve been dragged–somewhat against my will :)–into teaching the “writing for interactive” course this summer. Actually, the content of the course isn’t what puts me off: it’s that (a) it is in the summer, and I would like to reserve summers for research and projects and (b) it’s 5 weeks long. It is hard enough to teach a course in 15 and have students not feel overwhelmed. When you compress that into 5 weeks–and it’s the same number of credits, so I think we should hit the material at the same depth–it is just impossible. So, dealing with that tension, particularly in a writing course, is going to be difficult. I also need to revise my fall seminars. I’m organizing one of my courses around reading and annotating Little Brother, as well as heavily revising my intro (ICM 501) course. (I have also felt a recent disruption in the force in the ICM program, which will probably require even more cycles being put toward re-keeling it.)
• Digital Media & Learning Hub. I haven’t been talking publicly in any organized way about this, but some of you know that I have been working with the DML Hub, a group constituted to improve collaboration among researchers funded by the MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. I’m working with a team to create a DML Collaboratory site for researchers, as well as an external site that will seek to gather the current state of the art in one place. I’m also in the early stages of working with a group to establish some norms of sharing data, particularly qualitative data. I’ll actually be blogging a bit about this latter project in the coming week, and probably tweeting a little about the Collaboratory and that process.
• Twittering and Protesting. Happy to have the opportunity to work with Maria Garrido again, this time on a project that tracks the ways in which Twitter is being used to both build identity and coordinate action. This is one of two papers that I’ve promised for the AoIR meeting next year. Will be blogging a bit as it develops. This is also one of two Twitter-related research pieces I’m working on, both at early stages.
• Association of Internet Researchers. In the short term, setting up a registration site, but I am desperately hoping that I can get the Exec behind using this in the long term as well. It would make my life so much easier, and everyone else’s as well! Still doesn’t solve the paper submission and refereeing system issues, but I really hope we are able to move to a different system for that next year. Looking forward to talking to next year’s organizers about how to make that work out a bit better.

A lot of other things are right on the cusp of needing to be done, but I’m trying to keep my head clear of them for the moment. It really doesn’t seem that bad when it’s spelled out as above. Of course, tthere are the other pending things: three book projects, whipping some old research together into publishable form, a grant proposal sometime later this year, various talks, digitizing my library, etc. But I’m trying to keep those things out fo mind, wherever possible.

Materials

All learning is, in some sense, autodidactic. This is particularly true of reading: one of the best ways we have to communicate with the most brilliant minds, even when they are long dead. I don’t pretend to be one of those brilliant minds, but I am happy to talk to whoever will listen. So, as I build courses, I try to include materials that can be viewed by as many people as possible. This means creating video and audio lectures that are free of charge to watch, and available out on the web in various ways.

These are intended for you to use to learn more about a topic, and to teach others. My restrictions, expressed through a Creative Commons license, are that you shouldn’t profit from the materials by selling them, and you should make clear that I am the author. While part of the reason I do this is because access to knowledge is an important contribution I can make to humanity, it is also a selfish act. I’m hoping that the widespread distribution and use of these materials will bring glory to me and to my university. But I also hope they will bring something equally important: good conversations.

Participation

I also invite you to come into our classroom, at least the part of our classroom that is online. (If you try to come into my physical classroom without a direct invite, you are likely to be tackled by overzealous security guards.) I believe not only “the more the merrier,” but “the more the smarter.” Now, you might say, shouldn’t classes–especially grad classes–be the purview of the intellectual elite?

I’m not sure I am in the best position to judge how smart anyone is, but I do know that the best students I’ve had are the ones who are interested in learning the material of the course more than any extraneous (grades, credit) rewards. So, I figure that if you want to be part of the class, you are welcome to, within the bounds of any limited resources. What does that mean?

Well, obviously QU students come first, and occasionally those courses are already way bigger than they should be. In that case, I may not have time to look at your work. These are, after all, donated cycles of my time, and therefore I can’t guarantee them. Likewise, if there is something (other than my time) that the university provides directly, I clearly cannot pass that benefit on to students in the class who are not matriculating at QU.

As a practical concern, I’m sure that there are other reasons someone might not be included, but I can’t think of them now. I guess, although IANAL, I can fake it: you’re part of the class only insofar as I decide you are, and I can boot you at any time.

Credit

While I know you are the sort of person for whom academic credit just doesn’t matter, for some people it does. Luckily, there are two options for doing work in once of my classes without becoming a student at QU. The first is to sign up through QU Online to take the course as a non-matriculating student. This makes you a bona fide member of the course from QU’s perspective, and gets you credit that you may be able to transfer to another graduate program. (Note, most graduate programs have a limit of transfer credit, including ours, even if you take the courses here. That is, there are only so many you can take as a non-matric student and still have it count if you decide to apply to the degree program.)

The second way you can do this is to reach an agreement with your supervisor to take directed study credits from her at your home university, while engaging in the coursework in my class. Show her the syllabus and other materials, and she will check your progress. I’m happy to coordinate with her directly on this, if you like.

Please do not hesitate to contact me or comment below if you have questions. I hope to see you in my courses!

Update 6/20: Had a couple of requests for “what courses are you talking about?” I actually wrote the above with the intent of linking to it from future courses, including a writing course next month, and my “Intro to Interactive” and a course based on extrapolating out some of the issues from Little Brother that I’m teaching in the fall. However, the two courses I taught in the spring were open as well:

Web Programming (ICM 505)
Search Engine Society (ICM 542)

I’ll be revising and teaching the former again this spring, and the latter is in a bit of limbo. I’ll link to future courses when they are ready.

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.

Schedule

We are scheduled to meet on the following dates. We may choose to group some of these meetings together into “modules” or split some of them into parts, depending on what we want to uncover and how.

Week 1: Tuesday, August 26 – Brainstorming and Writing the Syllabus – BRING A LAPTOP!

Objectives for our first meeting:
* Introductions: who are we?
* Mini-lecture: “Society and Communications Media: Some Highlights”
* Syllabus: brainstorming topics. Clear questions we want to get at.
* Syllabus: schedule. Who is doing what and when.
* Syllabus: assignments. What do you need to do for the course and how are you assessed?
* Syllabus: reading assignments. What do we need to be reading.

Week 2: Tuesday, September 2 –

Week 3: Tuesday, September 9 –

Week 4: Tuesday, September 16 –

Week 5: Tuesday, September 23 –

Week 6: Tuesday, September 30 –

Week 7: Tuesday, October 7 –

Week 8: Tuesday, October 14 –
(Please note that on this date the instructor will be out of the country. You can meet without me, I can try to attend via Skype, we can bring in a guest to work with, or we can figure out another alternative.)

Week 9: Tuesday, October 21 –

Week 10: Tuesday, October 28 –

Week 11: Tuesday, November 4 –

Week 12: Tuesday, November 11 –

Week 13: Tuesday, November 18 –

Week 14: Tuesday, December 2 –

All assignments in: December 9
(Because the instructor is expecting his first baby this week, he’ll need every moment he can to get the grading done. Therefore, all material for the course–including a final project or exam if we decide to have one–must be in by the 9th so that he can get grades in on time for the semester.)

Assignments

The assignments should be things that we think will make for the best learning experience in the course.

There are some special, baseline requirements that we must meet:

At least some of the material we engage in each week must be of expert-level quality. This means peer-reviewed journal articles and the like. We can certainly draw in more popular stuff as well, as this can often help to uncover interesting perspectives and point us in interesting directions. Indeed, in most of the previous 522s we have made use of an “organizing text” of popular fiction or nonfiction, and then found more scholarly work that related to it in order to dig a bit deeper.

As the catalog description indicates, writing makes up an important part of this course. As a minimum, each student is expected to write about 7,500 words during the semester. A significant proportion of that writing should be scholarly–that is, written in a style that would be acceptable for a scholarly journal, and supported with evidence from the scholarly literature. We will decide as a group how best to split up this writing. It could consist of a single, long paper, or as 750 haikus, or some mixture of these. This work might take on a more collective nature. We could do our own research and write a paper for publication. Last semester, the class wrote a book.

If it isn’t clear from the structure of the course, the instructor also thinks that conversation and discussion are an important part of learning. I hope we can assign some part of the final grade to participation in the class.

Evaluation

Evaluation has a couple of meanings, and though they are united, some see them as different: feedback and letter grades.

In terms of feedback, the instructor will do his best to give you expert-level evaluations of your work, and suggest ways of improving it. In areas where his expertise is weak, he will clearly indicate this, and in planning for the course, we should try to avoid those areas as much as possible.

In terms of letter feedback, I suppose there may be an impulse, since you are determining the structure of the grading, to just toss out the grades all together and say “everyone gets an A.” We can’t do that for a few reasons. First, I (Alex) am untenured, and that would run far enough against the standards of the university that they would probably give me the boot. Second, I (Alex) have tried this in the past, and it did not work out well. Even though it seemed like a good idea at the outset, people who did work in the class were resentful toward those who did not, and that sort of made the experience sour for everyone.

Short of that, I’m willing to discuss rubrics and other processes. I have some preferences, but will air these when we discuss the assignments evaluation process as a group.

Policies

We will arrive at an appropriate policy on late work and attendance as part of the above discussion. However, the following are not open to negotiation:

At the beginning of the course we will discuss the problem of plagiarism and proper citation. At its root, plagiarism constitutes misrepresenting the authorship of work for a course. If you make use of another’s ideas, this must be cited. If you make use of words and phrases that are substantially similar to another’s work, you must cite this. If you make use of phrases that are identical to another’s, regardless of the length of the phrase, you must place these in quotation marks. The following resources will be of help in understanding what constitutes plagiarism:

Plagiary and the Art of Skillful Citation: http://www.ece.mtu.edu/faculty/rmkieckh/cla/3970/Rodgers-plagiary.pdf

Writing With Sources: http://www.rochester.edu/College/honesty/docs/harvard_guide/index.htm

Please also refer to the Quinnipiac University Academic Integrity website (http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1046.xml) for information about Academic Integrity and proper student behavior. Students are expected to be familiar with these university policies. Forms of dishonesty include:
* cheating or helping another to cheat on an exam
* using a paper authored by someone other than yourself
* plagiarizing another’s written work (papers or outlines), in full or in part, including failure to properly cite all sources
* deliberately distorting information
* falsifying information (e.g., reason for absence)

Students found guilty of any of the above will be subject to sanctions, usually a failing grade for the course, and will also be reported to the Academic Integrity Board.

Students with disabilities who wish to request reasonable accommodations should contact: John Jarvis, Coordinator of Learning Services in the Learning Center, Tator Hall Room 119 at (203) 582-5390 or at john.jarvis@quinnipiac.edu. More information may be found at http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1168.xml . Quinnipiac University complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

I generally do not offer “Incomplete” as a grade, and when I do, it is only under extraordinary circumstances, and when the work up until the last several weeks of the course has been of a quality that would suggest the student would have otherwise received a passing grade in the course. Please carefully assess your grade by the last date for withdrawal (October 31), and consider withdrawing if you are not receiving a passing grade.

Course Philosophy

Why am I not just providing a finished syllabus in this course? In fact, I do this in most courses, but I have had success with this method in this course in the past. Frankly, providing a ready-made syllabus is a lot easier for me, as an instructor. For one thing, it means I only have to design a course once, and then can re-use it over and over. That sounds bad, but there are some advantages to it, including the potential making small tweaks and improving it over time. However, there are some real advantages to starting the semester without a syllabus as well.

You should be given the privilege of playing a significant role in helping to decide where your mind is going. I don’t think my attitude should be: “This is my course, follow me or get off the bus.” I think, given the time investment I am asking you to make, the dedication to the course, you also deserve a strong voice in its direction. Teachers like to talk about the “guide on the side” in opposition to the “sage on the stage” (see King, 1993). I’m not sure I want to be on the side, but I also don’t want to be the only one in the room that gets to talk or create. I want to engage in learning too, and I think it’s better for students when I do.

I think I can immodestly call myself an expert in this subject area. That’s not because I’m especially smart, but rather because I’ve chosen to devote more time and energy in reading about, thinking about, and doing research in the area than most people have. That doesn’t mean I have all the answers, but it does mean that I have some wisdom that can be helpful to you in your own quest for knowledge. What I am not an expert in is you, your experiences, and your passions. You may not be an expert in those things either, but they are worthy pursuits of your energies. In a one-on-one situation, we could explore your own interests directly; in a seminar, we can engage in some push-and-pull, and come up with a plan of study that reflects some of your interest, and maybe introduces you to some things you didn’t know were interests. In the end, we find a set of objects of curiosity for us all to share.

Note: it’s a trap. I’m transparent enough to tell you ahead of time that I plan on tricking you. I know the kung fu of connections. I know that knowledge is connected in far less than six degrees. I am a ninja of networks, deity of the digression. I have the knack for nodes, a talent for tangents. In other words, I suspect that no matter how we enter the issue of media and society, and no matter how we make our way through it, there will be enough to see that we will begin to be able to map the whole; and that, after all, is my hope…

For look! Within my hollow hand,
      While round the earth careens,
I hold a single grain of sand
      And wonder what it means.
Ah! If I had the eyes to see,
      And brain to understand,
I think Life's mystery might be
      Solved in this grain of sand.

– Robert Service, “A Grain of Sand.”

References

King, Alison. 1993. “From sage on the stage to guide on the side.”College Teaching 41(1):30.