English 482: Communicating in the digital age Syllabus
Week 1 Wed Jan 21 How do technology and literacy interface?
Week 2 Mon Jan 26 Writing it down
Wed Jan 28 Discussion:
Week 3 Mon Feb 2 Theories of literacy
Wed Feb 4 Writing on clay: a messy workshop experience.
Week 4 Mon Feb 9 Discussion of Essay 1
Wed Feb 11 Writing on Clay Essay due today. Why do we fear new technologies?
Week 5 Mon Feb 16 The promise and threat of a new technology.
Wed Feb 18 The age of the computer
Week 6 Mon Feb 23 The rise of word processing.
Wed Feb 25 Trusting the text.
Week 7 Mon Mar 2 The new digital genres
Wed Mar 4 Technology’s impact on reading and authorship
Week 8 Mon Mar 9 The mobile phone and the digital revolution
Wed Mar 11 Social aspects of communication technologies. Technology and gender.
Week 9 Mon Mar 16 How are the new modes of communication reconfiguring our notions of text and authorship?
Wed Mar 18 The impact of the Internet on authorship.
Mar. 21-29 Spring Break Week 10 Mon Mar 30 Command and control: Censoring the digital revolution.
Wed Apr 1 Group report 1: Intellectual property in the age of digital reproduction. Raul Melgar, Justin Taylor
Week 11 Mon Apr 6
Wed Apr 8 Group report 3: The blog. Meghan Riley, Christine Woods
Week 12 Mon Apr 13 Group report 2: The social impact of the digital revolution. Tiffanie Bui, Alex Gentile
Wed Apr 15 Group report 5: Wikipedia, ePinions, IMDB, fan fic, digital literature, and other forms of web-enabled and collaborative writing. Jenn Laidlaw, David Ross Week 13 Mon Apr 20 Group report 6: YouTube and the new videographers. Colleen Mostyn, Mia Conner
Wed Apr 22 Group report 7: The digital revolution and the schools. Sarah Hively, Rachel Hahn Reading for today: Cuban, "Oversold and underused." Week 14 Mon Apr 27 Group report 8: Privacy on the web. Rachel Warren, Laura Huston, Ceara Hickerson Wed Apr 29 Group report 9: The dark side of the web. Brittany Ste4adman, Chantel Rubio, Jessica Lee
Week 15 Mon May 4 Group report 10: Censorship on the web. Ryan Zielinski, Glenn Beckwith, Darren Hibbard Wed May 6 Wrap up session: how close are we to the communication practices of Star Trek? In addition, you will each be allotted a few minutes to tell us about your final project. May 8: Your final paper is due by 5 pm today, preferably via email. Group projects: I ask each of you to sign up for a 2-3 person group oral presentation. Plan for a talk that is about 45 minutes long, one that will generate activities and discussion for the rest of the class period. It is up to each group to allocate responsibility for identifying subtopics and coordinate the presentation. I will suggest some supplementary class readings for some of the topics. Presenters should provide us with factual information but not tell us what we already know. You should always analyze your subject and assess its significance. And you should prepare a series of questions to focus class discussion following your presentation. Your presentation may take any number of forms, from illustrated lecture/discussion to powerpoint to video -- by all means use whatever technologies we have available to enhance the material -- but all presentations should go beyond the simple reporting of information and include both analysis and interpretation of the subject under discussion. Your final paper may grow out of some aspect of your group report topic, so I urge you to pick your presentation area carefully. But to ensure coverage, not everyone may get their first choice of presentation topics, so don’t feel that you are locked into doing a final paper on that topic. We’ll talk in class about kinds of topics you might pick for the final paper, and there will be a handout on choosing topics as well. In addition to resources that you will find on your own (strongly recommended), you may also find useful data and analysis in the many reports of the Pew Internet in American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp topics: 1. Intellectual property in the age of digital reproduction. The printing press mechanized the reproduction of words and images to allow for the mass production and dissemination of ideas. With the coming of the press, print "factories" turned out words the same way that Henry Ford's factories would later turn out automobiles. One result of the print revolution was a rethinking of the nature of authorship and the ownership of words. The digital revolution adds a new spin to textual reproduction, producing more and more readers and more and more creators of text, sound and image. And it too is changing our notions of who owns the digital property -- the words, sounds, and images -- that's on the Web. Is the notion of the author dead or dying? Is copyright going the way of clay tablets? Will plagiarism be decriminalized as we upload and download everything from mp3 files and torrents of the latest Harry Potter to term papers and episodes of Law and Order? 2. The social impact of the digital revolution. Are computers creating a world of haves and have nots separated by a digital divide? Is the anonymity that digital communication affords an opportunity to level the playing field or to commit fraud, theft, and deception? Is the digital world a safe or a dangerous space? Is it gender-neutral? Is it bringing us together or isolating us further from one another? Is the English language threatening to take over cyberspace in the same ways that it has taken over the global economy? How are Americans using the internet? 3. The blog. Is the blog really the love child of the web page and the diary? Is it a textual version of a webcam? The digital world’s answer to reality TV? The blog is the fastest-growing digital genre, yet it is also the one most quickly abandoned by writers. What kinds of blogs are out there in the blogosphere, and what communication roles do they fill? If bloggers are really only in it for the short haul, then what sort of future do you foresee for blogging? 4. Facebook, MySpace, and the space pages. An offshoot of the blog that combines features of diary, resume, billboard, photo album, and record collection, the space pages sharply underline the generation gap that we have come to associate with the digital revolution. Wildly popular on campuses, among teens, and young adults, these opportunities to combine self-expression with unsolicited advertising have captivated users, who check their pages many times a day and have begun to use them instead of email or IM for communication. Schools and employers now fear these space pages as they once feared blogs, IM, and email before them. What characterize a Facebook or MySpace page? How have these genres developed and where are they heading? 5. Collaborative webbing: Wikipedia, fan fic, digital literature, and other forms of web-enabled and collaborative writing. The wiki allows an open or closed group of writers to collaborate on a project, one as small as a report or as large as Wikipedia itself, the online encyclopedia that seeks to become our chief source of information, and that draws praise for its democratic approach to writing while at the same time is slammed for its tolerance of inaccuracy. Urban Dictionary is another kind of collaborative, and there are many more. Explore the writing space -- the sandbox, as Wikipedia refers to it -- that is enabled by the computer and the Net. 6. YouTube and the new videographers. The cell phone changes the nature of the telephone conversation, but its photo and video capacity leads users to become not just talkers but videographers as well. The computer means everyone's an author, but sites like YouTube allow us to become producers, directors, scriptwriters, and actors in our own visual texts. How do the video camera, the digital still camera, and later the cell phone facilitate the creation of new genres of communication? 7. The digital revolution and the schools. Education has always looked to technology to supplement, and sometimes to replace, face to face instruction. While schools continue to invest in computers and hop on the Internet bandwagon, critics argue that faith in computers as educational tools is misplaced, that students and teachers, while they use the machines, are using them not so much to "do lessons" as to do other things. Critics point as well to the failed educational technologies of the past: radio, film, the filmstrip, the VCR, and televised instruction. Is the computer going to meet the fate of its predecessors? Or will it bring literacy to a knowledge-hungry world? 8. Privacy on the Internet. Technologies of communication always involved a tradeoff: we sacrifice privacy for the advantages of going further out into the wide, wide world. The Internet and the cell phone are reconfiguring our notions of public and private. The World Wide Web offers us a window on the world, bring unprecedented amounts of information to our desktop. Yet at the same time, our presence on the Net allows observers to gather all sorts of information about us: our searches, our very keystrokes become public information, exposing us as never before to the prying eyes of marketers and government agents. Have we entered the “1984” big-brotherism that Orwell feared so much, where a camera is always on us, a microphone monitors our speech, a trackpad sucks data from our fingertips? Or are we simply giving up an unimportant aspect of our privacy for the advantages that surfing provides? 9. The dark side of the web. The Internet offers vast amounts of information and unlimited opportunities for writing and reading, but like all literacy technologies, it carries with it danger as well as opportunity. In what ways do digital technologies differ from their predecessors in offering a voice to spammers, scammers, criminals, kooks, weirdoes, perverts, molesters, terrorists and fanatics? 10. Censorship and the internet. All technologies of communication bring with them the question of regulation. Writing (literacy in general) offers us access to knowledge, but like the bite of the first apple, sometimes too much knowledge, or knowledge about forbidden subjects, is considered dangerous. Historically, writing may be liberating, but it also brings with it censorship (the First Amendment protects free speech, but not all speech is covered by its protection). Is the Internet any different in that regard? Many countries already limit what their citizens can see and do on line. It’s not always repressive regimes like those associated with Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China and Cuba, where the internet is perceived as a tool for dissidents and revolutionaries. France and Germany, too, place restrictions on what is available online in their web spaces. US legislators are greatly concerned with protecting what children can have access to online, and child pornography on the net is illegal pretty much world-wide. Should the Net be an “anything goes” environment or one that is regulated? What forms of control exist for conventional technologies; what regulations need to be in place in the digital world? Do we need to put controls in place or can we rely on users of the Net to police themselves? How much censorship is enough? How much is too much?
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