About Homework Assignments
The assignments that are listed on this page are to be completed before class starts the day they are due. The latest assignment will be placed at the top to reduce scrolling. There won’t be many for #wecf13 beyond the readings listed on the Course Schedule, but be sure to check just to make sure.
for Thursday, September 12
We are going to be using the Learning Record portfolio system for tracking out learning and assessing our performance. Please read the Learning Record documents on the Readings page (scroll down past the essays). (You’ll see that there is quite a bit more to the Learning Record site than I’m asking you to read, so feel free to read more if you’d like.) Tweet questions you have about the system using the #wecf13 and #lro hashtags. I’ll address them on Twitter and/or in class when we discuss it.
In class on Thursday will be discussing blogging in great depth. Read through the blogs listed on the course schedule and the readings page (they are the same). When reading them, I’ll like you to note what you as a reader like and don’t like about the structure, layout, and features of the blog. Note both the kind of posts and the structure of those posts (are they long reads, quotations, image- and video-heavy, text heavy?). Consider what would draw people to the blog (they are all very popular). What is the writing like? We’ll be discussing all this and more in class as we start to create our course blog. If you are not familiar with blogging, please read:
- Rettberg, J.W. (2009). What is a blog? Blogging. Malden, MA: Polity Press. [pdf]
Don’t forget that the Twitter assignment starts immediately, so follow everyone in class and start tweeting your work and for #wecmondays!
If you have any general questions, tweet or email me.
for Thursday, September 5 (first class meeting)
Please read the following in this order:
- Rheingold, H. (1993). Introduction. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (online version).
- Dibbell, J. (Dec. 1993). A rape in cyberspace; Or, how an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizzards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society. Village Voice. [PDF]
- Wellman, B., and Gulia, M. (1997). Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtial Communities as Communities. Communities and Cyberspace, edited by Peter Kollock and Marc Smith. New York: Routledge [pdf]
You can see that we’re starting with some historical pieces as a way to contextualize the beginning of the semester and start us thinking about the idea of online community. Please I’d like you to compose a 500-750 word response to these pieces in which you consider what Rheingold’s and Dibbell’s descriptions of virtual communities in terms of what Wellman and Gulia write 4 years later. Please have an electronic version of your response with you– that is, email it to yourself, have it on a flash drive, on the computer you have with you, and so on. We’ll be using it as the first blog post. Print version not needed. We will discuss the essays in class and most likely in the second meeting, as well.
In class we will be discussing Twitter and blogging, as well. We’ll set up the course collaborative blog. If you are not familiar with Twitter, you might read over:
- Atwood, M. (2010, March 19). Atwood in the Twittersphere. New York Review of Books.
- Silver, D. (2009, February 25). The difference between thin and think tweets. Silver in SF.
If you are not familiar with blogging, please read:
- Rettberg, J.W. (2009). What is a blog? Blogging. Malden, MA: Polity Press. [pdf]
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)
If you do not have a WordPress.com account, I’d like you to sign up for one at: https://signup.wordpress.com/