About the Course Calendar

Texts are to be read/watched/listened to for day they are listed. For example, Robinson is to be watched for Wednesday, 8/26. Homework in addition to texts will be presented in yellow. The schedule is subject to change; it is your responsibility to check it regularly.

Week One: What This Semester is About

M 8/24: Introductions

Assignment for Wednesday, 8/26
Click through the course web site, getting familiar with the layout and read the Syllabus carefully. Come to class with any questions you might have.

Watch the videos linked-to below by Robinson and Wallace and read the comic by Neverdahl and be prepared to discuss them as well as who Robinson, Wallace, and Neverdahl are. That is, try to find out as much about them as you can, keep track of where you found that information, and think about how knowing more about them impacts your understanding/appreciation of their text.

W 8/26: Ken Robinson, “How Schools Kill Creativity” (TedTalk); David Foster Wallace, “This is Water“; Bloom Like an Artist by Ida Eva Margrethe Neverdahl; ctp-rwn-qs.pdf

Assignment for Friday, 8/28
If you do not yet have a Twitter account, please sign up for one at http://twitter.com. Twitter works best (especially for our purposes) when the username is professional and you are authentic. For example, my username is: billwolff (http://twitter.com/billwolff), and I use my full name to show who I am. My account is unlocked. Please sign up with a professional username, use your real name, and keep your account unlocked. We’ll be using Twitter in a professional way so there is no need to keep anything private. Make sure you have your username with you. The shorter the username the better and please avoid underscores (_); they are hard to type on smartphones.

Please read Silver, (2009), The difference between thin and think tweets.

Update: In you have time, please add the Twitter app to your phone and/or tablet. Make sure you have it in class on Friday.

F 8/28: Twitter Play; Silver, (2009), The difference between thin and think tweets
Hand out Twitter Assignment

Week Two: What is Communication?

Assignment for Monday, 8/31
Please download and print the readings by Axelrod & Cooper,  and Hall from the Readings page. Read Axelrod & Cooper first, then use their annotation techniques to annotate Hall. Bring your annotated version to class. If you prefer annotate using digital annotation techniques, please try to adapt Axelrod & Cooper to the digital space you prefer to use. I will check your annotations in class.

Go to the Twitter assignment page and follow all students in both sections, if you haven’t already done so. Start live-tweeting. The more you start getting tweeting into your course-work habit, the more you will get out of the assignment.

M 8/31: Axelrod & Cooper; Hall, chapter 1; semiotics-discussion-questions.pdf

Assignment for Wednesday, 9/2
Read and annotate Rheingold, “Participation is Power” using Axelrod and Cooper’s techniques. Watch Wesch’s video. At the end, Wesch lists many issues and ideas we’re going to have to rethink as a result of digital media. Please make a list of 10 or so that you might add.

W 9/2: Rheingold, “Participation is Power”; Wesch, The Machine is Us/Using Us (Final Version)
Hand out: Semester-long Digital Literacy Project

Assignment for Friday, 9/4
Please read Blogging for Creatives pages 6-19 (introduction, chapter 1) and pages 32-33 (What’s in a name). Yahoo Style Guide Chapter 2 (Know Your Audience). Complete the Exercise on Page 24 in Yahoo Style Guide. You should print out, and bring with you to class, your responses to Question #2, #3, #4. You should pick a website that is more an online-magazine, blog, etc. (one which is updated frequently) vs. one that is static content like a University website or a Shopping one like Amazon.

Go to Reclaim Hosting and register a URL, which is $25 a year. Make your URL is professional and easily identified with you, like williamwolff.org is identified with me. Choose a .com or .net domain; try to avoid .org unless the others are taken. You must have your URL with you in class on Friday. Then, begin the process of installing WordPress. You can follow the steps in this tutorial:

F 9/4: Blogging for Creatives pages 6-19 (introduction, chapter 1) and pages 32-33 (What’s in a name). Yahoo Style Guide Chapter 2 (Know Your Audience)

Week Three: WordPress (updated)

M 9/7: Labor Day, no classes
W 9/9: WordPress play; Blogging for Creatives Chapters 2 & 3; Yahoo Style Guide Chapter 1 (“write for the web”)
Research Proposals Due in class (bring or email a digital copy with you)
F 9/11: WordPress play; Blogging for Creatives Chapters 4 & 8; RSS Readers
Hand out WordPress Assignment

Week Four: Digital Literacy

Assignment for Monday, 9/14
Read the articles by Cindy Selfe and Kevin Kelly listed below.

Work on finding a clear, nice theme for your web site that is appropriate for the content. Update the Settings to include a proper title and subtitle. Add a category to your proposal and several tags. Add the Twitter, tag cloud, and any other widgets you’d like (but don’t go overboard). Create a blog roll by adding the 5 or so sites you reference in your proposal. Start thinking about the kinds of posts you’ll want to post. If you have trouble, see the WordPress Tutorials section on the Student Sites & Resources page. If that doesn’t tweet BW with your question and use the #ctpf15 hashtag so the whole class sees it.

Enjoy your weekend!

M 9/14: Selfe (pages 10 – 15 only); Kelly, Becoming screen literate; selfe-kelly-qs.pdf

Assignment for Wednesday, 9/16
Go back to Rheingold, “Participation is Power” and re-read pages 122 – 134, which covers the topics of “blogger as filter, connector, critic, and advocate” (p. 122). Be prepared to discuss each role in detail.

In class on Wednesday, we are also going to be introduced to the read it later service, Pocket, and the interest news service, Zite. Go to Pocket and create an account and install the Pocket toolbar button on your browser. If you own a smartphone, please install the Zite and Pocket apps (iPhone or iPad, Android, Windows). Come to class with them already installed and ready to play with. You will need to have the Twitter app on your phone as well, so if that isn’t installed, please do so—and install it before the others.

W 9/16: Zite and Pocket Play; Zite and Pocket assignment
F 9/18: President Reed’s Inauguration; Class canceled

Week Five: Level Up Your Web Site

Assignment for Monday, 9/21
Read the chapters and articles listed below.

Under the Important Points heading in the WordPress assignment, Point Two encourages you to learn the conventions of your blog interest community: “As you read and write, pay careful attention to the conventions of your interest community. Do participants include many personal stories? Should a unique photo be added to each post? Read and respond to posts with an eye toward the vocabulary and practices of your interest-driven community.”

Come to class with a list of 10 conventions of your interest community, ranging from blog content and structure to community vocabularies and hashtags to community social media spaces. The more you learn about your community, the more effective you will be at finding readers and camaraderie.

M 9/21: Read: Blogging for Creatives Chapter 5 (Creating Great Content); Read: Yahoo Style Guide Chapter 18 (Copyright); Read: “How to Fix Common Image Issues in WordPress” (You can stop when you get to the section “How To Import External Images to WordPress”); Read: “Tips for Using Images on Your Blog”

Assignment for 9/23
Read Amy Andrews, How to Write an About Page and the chapters is the Yahoo Style Guide listed below. Compose your about page using Andrews’ ideas. You may borrow from your blog proposal, if you would like. Go through your current blog posts and update them based on the suggestions in the Yahoo Style Guide and add links if you have none.

W 9/23: Amy Andrews, How to Write an About Page; Yahoo Style Guide Chapter 4 (Construct Clear Copy) ansd 5 (Be Inclusive); WordPress Workshop
F 9/25: The Pope’s in Town; Class Canceled

Week six: Web 2.0 and Identity

M 9/28: Baym, “New Forms of Person Communication”; Lee, 40 Maps that Explain the Internet; O’Reilly, What is Web 2.0?
W 9/30: Turkle (1996), Who Am We?; Kelly, We Are the Web; Highland, As Real as Your Life

Assignment for Friday, 10/2
In class on Friday we are going to experiment with the RSS feed reader, Feedly. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and was developed in part by Aaron Swartz. In “What is Web 2.0?” (which we read for Monday), Tim O’Reilly describes RSS as “RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes.”

I’d like you to create an account on Feedly and install the Feedly app on your phone (if you have room for more). You can watch this very good introduction to Feedly so we can get right in to using it during class:

F 10/2: Feedly Play
Hand out Diary of Phone Interactivity Assignment

Week Seven: Participatory Culture

Assignment for 10/5
Please read Jenkins, only pages xi-xiv and 1 – 34 and watch the TED talk by Deb Roy. 750 words of blogging are due by Sunday. Work on your blog layout and use of links and multimedia. Remember to add tags and categories to your posts.

M 10/5: Jenkins pages xi-xiv and 1 – 34; Roy, The birth of a word. TED

Assignment for Wednesday, 10/7
Please watch Wesch, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. The video runs 55 minutes, but it is an engaging 55 minutes.

Your next weekly blog post will be in the form of a vlog, so please start thinking about that.

Don’t forget about the Diary of Phone Interactivity Assignment. If you were absent last Friday, you’ll still have time to complete it after getting your materials on Wednesday.

W 10/7: Wesch, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

Assignment for Friday, 10/9
Bring your completed phone Diaries to class, as we will be discussing them. Read and begin implementing Part 2 of the Twitter assignment.

In class on Friday we will be experimenting with the social curating platform, Storify. Storify provides users with the ability to take social media and other online content from disparate places and times on the internet into a curated interactive text.

For Friday, please go to Storify and watch the screencast that automatically plays when you first go to the page. Then, create an account and browse through some of the stories.

You can also watch this TED talk by Storify founder, Xavier Damman. in which he discusses his vision of the world in the age of social media:

F 10/9: Storify Play
Bring completed phone diaries to class

Week Eight: Midterm

M 10/12: Fall Break; No Classes
W 10/14: Midterm Exam, part 1

Assignment for Friday, October 16
Please complete the Midterm Part 2, which you can find at: http://j.mp/ctpf15-midterm-pt2. Submit your midterm by 11:00am. Once you submit it, it cannot be edited, so write your response in a Word (or other) document and be 100% happy with it before you paste it into the form field.

Remember, there is no blog post due this week, though it you did not complete one for Sunday, Oct 11, you may make it up this week.

F 10/16: Class not meeting; Midterm Exam, part 2 due via Google Form by 11:00am

Week Nine: Information Overload (updated 10/14/15)

M 10/19: Postman; Shirky, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure; Tedesco, “How to Solve Impossible Problems”
W 10/21: Class canceled; BW in Phoenix at a conference
F 10/23: Diigo Play
Diary of Phone Interactivity Blog Post Due

Week Ten: Filter Bubbles and Creativity (updated 10/25/15)

M 10/26: Pariser, “Beware online ‘filter bubbles’”; Zuckerman, “Why our Webs are Rarely World Wide, and What We Can Do About It”
W 10/28: Ferguson, Everything’s a Remix, Parts 1 – 4
F 10/30: Class meeting in a GoogleDoc
Lessig, Laws that choke creativity; Faden, A Fair(y) Use Tale; Creative Commons: About the Licenses Creative Commons (be sure to watch the video “Wanna Work Together”)

Week Eleven: Mashup, Remix, and Copyright

M 11/2: Remixing Play, re Ferguson, Everything’s a Remix, Parts 1 – 4
W 11/4: More on Copyright, Remix, and Mashup
F 11/6: Archives Play; develop blog grading criteria

Week Twelve: Shaming and Memes

Assignment for 11/9
Please read and be prepared to discuss “How Richard Dawkins Coined the Word Meme: The Legendary Atheist’s Surprising Religious Inspiration“; “ROFLCon II: What Makes an Internet Meme Go Viral?” and “The Hitler Meme and Fair Use” from On the Media; and Know Your Meme: LonelyGirl15. Search through Know Your Meme and select your fav meme from the archive and be prepared to have fun with it in class. Also, please watch this TED video by Susan Blackmore, “Memes and ‘Temes'”:

M 11/9: “How Richard Dawkins Coined the Word Meme: The Legendary Atheist’s Surprising Religious Inspiration“; “ROFLCon II: What Makes an Internet Meme Go Viral?” and “The Hitler Meme and Fair Use” from On the Media; Know Your Meme; Know Your Meme: LonelyGirl15

Assignment for 11/11
Please read and be prepared to discuss “God that was awesome” and “Your speed” by Jon Ronson (they are in 1 pdf doc on the Readings page) and “The Price of Shame” TED talk by Monica Lewinski:

W 11/11: Ronson; Lewinsky, The Price of Shame on TED
F 11/13: Read: Social Media Preferences Vary By Race and Ethnicity (If you want to see the full report you can access it here.); Read: Addressing Race Iniquity Issues Thru Social Media Power; Read: Online Harassment Report
Hand out Final Project Assignment

Week Thirteen: Conferences (updated 11/13/15)

M 11/16: Class canceled; writing day

Tuesday, 11/17: Rough Draft 1 due in Dropbox folder by 12:00 noon

W 11/18: Draft Workshop Group 1 meeting only
F 11/20: Draft Workshop Group 2 meeting only

Week Fourteen: Final Project Planning

M 11/23: Final Project Planning and Practice
Bring screen shots and/or original images to class
W 11/25: Thanksgiving Break, No Classes
F 11/27: Thanksgiving Break, No Classes

Week Fifteen: Work on Final Projects

M 11/30: TBD
Have screen shots/images in a PowerPoint or Keynote
W 12/2: TBD
Full rough draft due on YouTube channel by class time
F 12/4: Reflecting on the semester; course evals; com-studies-learning-objectives.pdf

Week Sixteen

M 12/7: last day of class; pecha-kucha-grading-rubric.pdf
Second Rough Draft Due on YouTube Channel by class time

Tuesday, 12/8: Final Project and Reflection due by 11:00pm