In the fall 2010 semester I will be teaching a graduate seminar, and I wanted to use this space to share some of my thoughts and plans.
Some context: I get to teach graduate seminars only once every two years, which doesn't seem like all that often. I like the idea of matching the topic to my current research interests, which explains why I'm not going to repeat the seminar I taught last time on indie culture (which I thought went pretty well). I'm still interested in indie culture, but I have been looking at new areas of study. I see the opportunity to teach graduate students as an occasion to read work that I want to know better. Some of it might be material I have read before but not studied carefully, and some of it will be new to me as it will be to everyone else in the seminar.
Elana and I have been working on a project on convergence-era television and cultural status, and this research has piqued an interest in the history of media technologies. So much of what is interesting about TV in recent decades is a product, in part, of the integration of digital TV technologies. Thinking about the intersection of television's contemporary social and technological identities has made me want to know more about the history of communication technologies, and to think about new media (in the current sense of digital media) in light of this history.
I am posting this here for a few reasons. Most importantly I want prospective seminar participants to have a sense of what they are signing up for. This will be a reading-intensive course with a fair bit of time spent on the past rather than the present of new media. I also wanted to pull the curtain back a bit to reveal the process of developing a course. When I was a student I would have been happy to learn more about instructors' thinking behind teaching certain topics and shaping a syllabus. And I am also eager to invite your feedback, whether in the comments or elsewhere, to help me find the right shape for a course on a topic, New Media, that always threatens to get out of hand. I'm happy to hear from students past and future, as well as others who have taught or studied these topics. Feel free to suggest more readings, to let me know about your experiences teaching this material, or to warn me off of spending a week on Marshall McLuhan.
Some of the work I have in mind to consider in this course will fit into the typical conception of new media studies. Benkler and Lessig are clear instances of scholars engaged with questions about changes brought on by digital communications. But some of the work I want to look at is much older, and considers media which are no longer new in terms of what changes they wrought on society and culture. I'm not sure how much of the material that interests me will fit into the course. I don't know if work on oral vs written cultures will make the cut and I don't know if spending too much time on telegraphy and telephony will unduly tax the patience of media studies MA candidates who are probably more interested in today's internet than the Victorian internet. But these are all topics I want to know more about.
Below are some likely and possible readings. The ones I'm especially eager to include in the course are marked with a *. In the past one assignment I have given in a course like this is a book review, where students in groups of between three and five all read the same book. We then have one seminar meeting that's a kind of book club, where we have panel discussions of each book. The items I'm considering for this assignment are marked with a #. Of course there is much more here than one can teach in a single semester, so much of the work below won't make the cut. And because I'm interested in TV first of all, that is the medium that will likely get the most time during the semester.
Charles Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minnesota, 2007).
*Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale, 2007) / Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2009).
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
*William Boddy, New Media and the Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford, 2004).
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 2000).
#Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity, 2009).
James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992), or possibly just Chapter 8, "Technology as Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph."
Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins, 1989).
Claude Fischer, America Calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940 (California, 1994).
Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (MIT, 2007).
Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, New Media 1740-1915 (MIT, 2003).
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (MIT, 2008).
Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn, eds., Rethinking Media Change (MIT, 2004).
#Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (California, 2004).
*Derek Kompare, "Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television," Television & New Media 7.4 (2006), 335-360.
Lawrence Lessig, Remix Culture: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008) / Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin, 2005).
#Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU, 2007).
*The Essential McLuhan (Basic, 1996).
*Michèle Martin, "The Culture of the Telephone," in Patrick D. Hopkins (ed.), Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender and Technology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 50-74.
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990).
Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009).
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002).
*Benjamin Peters, "And lead us not into thinking the new is new: a bibliographic case for new media history" New Media & Society 11 (2009), 13-30.
#Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (Crown, 2009).
*Lynn Spigel, Make Way for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago, 1992).
Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds.,Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke, 2005).
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (New York: Berkeley, 1998).
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003).
#Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers, 2009).
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, The New Media Reader (MIT, 2004).
*Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge, 2003).
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
3/23/2010
9/04/2008
Fall 08
Long time no blog!
A semester has begun. Today was cool and rainy in Milwaukee, summer no more. I am teaching two courses:
Intro to Mass Media, our 101 course with hundreds of students (previously).
And Indie Culture, a graduate seminar.
I like reading a syllabus. Every time a Republican compares Sarah Palin's experience to Obama's, my first thought is, well she's never written a syllabus.
One more thing: via my delicious network, "Is Wikipedia Becoming a Respectable Academic Source?"
A semester has begun. Today was cool and rainy in Milwaukee, summer no more. I am teaching two courses:
Intro to Mass Media, our 101 course with hundreds of students (previously).
And Indie Culture, a graduate seminar.
I like reading a syllabus. Every time a Republican compares Sarah Palin's experience to Obama's, my first thought is, well she's never written a syllabus.
One more thing: via my delicious network, "Is Wikipedia Becoming a Respectable Academic Source?"
5/21/2008
Lessons From the Class Blog
Now that my semester is ending I am leaving teaching behind for a few months of writing, but I wanted to blog here about something I have been doing in the classroom. When I began having my students contribute to a group blog in a Principles of Media Studies class in September, 2006, I thought of it as an experiment. I didn’t know what the students would be like or whether they would be invested in the assignment, and I didn’t know how blogging would fit within the course. After four semesters now, I have collected some ideas about how a class blog works and doesn’t work that I thought would be worth sharing.
When I began the class blog it was my first semester teaching the course and the topic, but I was by then an experienced blogger. Although Zigzigger began only in December of 2006, I had previously blogged without using my full name on topics largely unrelated to my scholarly interests (I’m not going to link to that blog from here, but it’s not hard to find if you have Google). I knew the appeals and affordances of blogging (quick, personal response to ongoing events; membership in a community of bloggers) and thought they would add a lot to a class that would often be concerned with recent media and current events.
The purpose of my class blog is for the students to keep a public media consumption diary. This is supposed to make them more aware of the media in their lives and to prompt them to reflect on their significance. I tell the class at the beginning of the semester that it doesn’t matter if they write well in the blog or if they have a point to make. The students get credit for each entry regardless of content, as long as it’s 150 words long and media related. The assignment is to blog ten times during the semester for a total of 10% of their final grade, and they can post no more than once a week. (Each week begins and ends on Friday at noon, which means that most weeks the largest number of entries are posted on Thursday afternoon and evening and Friday morning.) Comments are encouraged but not required; the same goes for hyperlinks, photos, and videos. The class usually has about 25 students, which is a manageable size for a group blog. A much bigger or smaller class would not work as well.
I have read about other people’s class blogs, and it seems everyone prefers to do it slightly differently. Some people have each student create his or her own blog. Some require comments in addition to posts. Some give students topics to blog about or encourage them to respond to one another’s entries or insist on links or bullet-point lists or embedded video. I think a group blog works best because it makes the students more likely to read each other’s posts, and it makes the blog into a communal space like the classroom. I don’t like the idea of requiring comments because it makes it harder for me to track their participation and because I think voluntary comments have more value than mandated ones. (I got this sense from flickr groups where you post a photo to the pool and have to leave a comment on someone else’s; the comments on these photos tend to be pretty superficial.)
There have been some semesters when students did not blog as much as I hoped. I thought that giving them ten free points for writing anything at all was being really generous and making it easier for them to succeed in the class, but some students would just forget about blogging or not care enough to do it. This really frustrated me when students who could have gotten better grades by blogging regularly ended up with worse grades because they didn’t blog enough. I have wondered whether access to computers is an issue here. Students who do not have a computer at home (there are some in every class) are at a disadvantage. So are students who are less familiar with the participatory internet. (The idea that anyone born since the mid-1980s is a “digital native” is way overstated.) I learned early on that I would need to spend time at the beginning of the semester walking the class through every step of blogging, including where to type the content of a post, how to insert a link or photo or embed a video, how to publish a post, and how to comment on someone else’s. Any student who had not successfully blogged the first week would have to come to my office for a one-on-one session at my computer. Many things that are obvious to me about blogging, things that seem simple and intuitive, are not so to people unfamiliar with the format of the blog. I have found that some newcomers to the participatory web need special care and attention at the beginning of the semester if they are to become comfortable with these new experiences. Even taking these steps, however, is no guarantee that everyone will blog like you want them to. I still don't know how to solve the problem of the student with limited computer access blogging less than the student who has broadband and a laptop. My sense is that this is often a class (and race) issue, which is to say it's the product of a larger structure of inequality that makes it harder for some students to succeed in school.
A class blog really works only if there is an incentive greater than a grade to contribute to it. If you are going to have the class blog, the most important thing is to integrate the blog into the class. This motivates contributions, and good ones. The blog must not be merely supplemental. This is a challenge because the content of the blog comes from the students, and you as the teacher have little control over what they do on it. Indeed, the point is that this part of the class is pretty much their domain. It works better this way. How do you integrate the blog into class? I do it by setting aside time, usually at the beginning of class, to talk about one or two recent entries. I make a special point of doing one of these “something from the blog” discussions on the second day of class. By then usually a handful of eager students have posted their first entry, and I choose one to read to the class (I paste entries into a word document so that I’m not reading off a screen). When I do this, I am careful to appear impressed by the student’s writing, and I praise the entry for both its form and content. I say things like: “I like the way you raise a provocative question” or “It really works that you are responding in a personal way to something you find interesting in the media.” I overdo it a little with the positive reinforcement, but at the beginning of the semester this sets the kind of tone I like in the classroom. The point of this exercise is to give the students the idea of what a good blog entry looks like. (I am especially effusive with praise for properly inserted links and embedded videos.) More importantly, it makes students aware that someone is reading their writing. It gives them an incentive to write good blog posts: I might choose theirs to bring into class and single it out for praise.
As the semester goes along, I try to do something from the blog at least once every third class (Principles of Media Studies meets twice a week for 75 minutes). I try to spread the love around, so that by the end of the semester just about everyone’s writing will have been considered by the group. I sometimes don’t read the entries word for word, but instead just refer to them and ask the student to talk about what they have written. I always give the student who wrote the post we are discussing the first opportunity to talk about it. Sometimes I disagree with students’ points or question them in a gently challenging way. Then I open up the discussion to others. Sometimes these sessions take five minutes, and sometimes it’s more like fifteen or twenty. If a student posts a video, we might watch it.
A couple of times a semester, I also like to give the students the opportunity to talk about blogging, about the blog as a medium and a component of the course. I like to get their feedback about the blog as an assignment to know if they consider it a nuisance, to see if they read each other's entries, to get a sense of their idea of what blogging is and what it can be. Usually there are some skeptics and some enthusiasts. I have yet to hear anyone say that I should stop having students blog at all, but maybe that's something you wouldn't say even if you felt that way. When we talk about participatory media like fan videos and Wikipedia, having the class blog gives us an opportunity to use blogging as another example of "user-generated content" that everyone is very familiar with. The comments I most appreciate in these discussions are those that point out how having to blog regularly affects your experience of the world. Many students over these four semesters have said that blogging has made them pay attention to things they might not have otherwise (to get ideas of things to write about). It has made them more aware of the pervasiveness of media in their lives and of the significance of this. I would like to think that it has encouraged them to think analytically about their experiences. And that being in the habit of writing for an audience has made them better at expressing themselves in a style of writing which, while pretty casual, is still more formal than texting, IM, and Facebook wall posts.
Depending on the course’s topic in a given week, the blog entries might actually relate to the material we are covering. I don’t always try to get the blog discussion to relate to our class’s topics, but often there is a connection I can make. I can talk about an idea anticipating something we are going to discuss in a few weeks, or recalling a topic considered previously. Sometimes students get ideas for a blog post from class. For instance, after a class in which we talked about children’s television and read about and watched Blue’s Clues, a student posted some clips of Yo Gabba Gabba, which gave us the opportunity to compare the two shows and revisit and reinforce a couple of key points from the previous day. I like to think that this kind of repetition with variation often helps people learn better.
Integrating the blog discussion into the class does a number of things. It gives the students an incentive to blog and blog well. It encourages the class to see itself as a group of people with common interests having a conversation rather than as individuals listening to me and writing down what I say. It acquaints students with one another in a way that isn’t possible in the classroom setting, and gives me a window into their experiences which helps me understand them better. Many students share things in the blog that they would not in the classroom. They feel that their contributions to the blog are lower-pressure than their contributions to class discussions. Some students who are reluctant to speak in class say that the blog offers them an opportunity to participate. (I hope they don’t see it as a kind of alibi for keeping quiet in class, though.)
There’s one more thing I like about having a group blog in a media studies class, and it might seem obvious but I think it’s worth stating: I learn from the blog. I get links to viral videos and news about celebrities and condemnations of sensationalist local news. My students write recaps or little reviews of television shows I’m not watching or videogames I'm not playing or movies I’m not seeing or websites I'm not reading. Even when they write about media I do know, my students articulate perspectives that are different from those I might encounter otherwise. Having access to these experiences and perspectives helps me teach my students better by giving me more of a sense of who they are and what they’re like. This is partly, then, a selfish benefit. I like to know about cool new stuff. But it’s also a benefit to students when the teacher speaks their language, and a class works best (in my experience) when its participants feel that they know one another and are engaging in the pursuit of a common purpose. When integrated well into a course, a blog can afford this kind of feeling.
When I began the class blog it was my first semester teaching the course and the topic, but I was by then an experienced blogger. Although Zigzigger began only in December of 2006, I had previously blogged without using my full name on topics largely unrelated to my scholarly interests (I’m not going to link to that blog from here, but it’s not hard to find if you have Google). I knew the appeals and affordances of blogging (quick, personal response to ongoing events; membership in a community of bloggers) and thought they would add a lot to a class that would often be concerned with recent media and current events.
The purpose of my class blog is for the students to keep a public media consumption diary. This is supposed to make them more aware of the media in their lives and to prompt them to reflect on their significance. I tell the class at the beginning of the semester that it doesn’t matter if they write well in the blog or if they have a point to make. The students get credit for each entry regardless of content, as long as it’s 150 words long and media related. The assignment is to blog ten times during the semester for a total of 10% of their final grade, and they can post no more than once a week. (Each week begins and ends on Friday at noon, which means that most weeks the largest number of entries are posted on Thursday afternoon and evening and Friday morning.) Comments are encouraged but not required; the same goes for hyperlinks, photos, and videos. The class usually has about 25 students, which is a manageable size for a group blog. A much bigger or smaller class would not work as well.
I have read about other people’s class blogs, and it seems everyone prefers to do it slightly differently. Some people have each student create his or her own blog. Some require comments in addition to posts. Some give students topics to blog about or encourage them to respond to one another’s entries or insist on links or bullet-point lists or embedded video. I think a group blog works best because it makes the students more likely to read each other’s posts, and it makes the blog into a communal space like the classroom. I don’t like the idea of requiring comments because it makes it harder for me to track their participation and because I think voluntary comments have more value than mandated ones. (I got this sense from flickr groups where you post a photo to the pool and have to leave a comment on someone else’s; the comments on these photos tend to be pretty superficial.)
There have been some semesters when students did not blog as much as I hoped. I thought that giving them ten free points for writing anything at all was being really generous and making it easier for them to succeed in the class, but some students would just forget about blogging or not care enough to do it. This really frustrated me when students who could have gotten better grades by blogging regularly ended up with worse grades because they didn’t blog enough. I have wondered whether access to computers is an issue here. Students who do not have a computer at home (there are some in every class) are at a disadvantage. So are students who are less familiar with the participatory internet. (The idea that anyone born since the mid-1980s is a “digital native” is way overstated.) I learned early on that I would need to spend time at the beginning of the semester walking the class through every step of blogging, including where to type the content of a post, how to insert a link or photo or embed a video, how to publish a post, and how to comment on someone else’s. Any student who had not successfully blogged the first week would have to come to my office for a one-on-one session at my computer. Many things that are obvious to me about blogging, things that seem simple and intuitive, are not so to people unfamiliar with the format of the blog. I have found that some newcomers to the participatory web need special care and attention at the beginning of the semester if they are to become comfortable with these new experiences. Even taking these steps, however, is no guarantee that everyone will blog like you want them to. I still don't know how to solve the problem of the student with limited computer access blogging less than the student who has broadband and a laptop. My sense is that this is often a class (and race) issue, which is to say it's the product of a larger structure of inequality that makes it harder for some students to succeed in school.
A class blog really works only if there is an incentive greater than a grade to contribute to it. If you are going to have the class blog, the most important thing is to integrate the blog into the class. This motivates contributions, and good ones. The blog must not be merely supplemental. This is a challenge because the content of the blog comes from the students, and you as the teacher have little control over what they do on it. Indeed, the point is that this part of the class is pretty much their domain. It works better this way. How do you integrate the blog into class? I do it by setting aside time, usually at the beginning of class, to talk about one or two recent entries. I make a special point of doing one of these “something from the blog” discussions on the second day of class. By then usually a handful of eager students have posted their first entry, and I choose one to read to the class (I paste entries into a word document so that I’m not reading off a screen). When I do this, I am careful to appear impressed by the student’s writing, and I praise the entry for both its form and content. I say things like: “I like the way you raise a provocative question” or “It really works that you are responding in a personal way to something you find interesting in the media.” I overdo it a little with the positive reinforcement, but at the beginning of the semester this sets the kind of tone I like in the classroom. The point of this exercise is to give the students the idea of what a good blog entry looks like. (I am especially effusive with praise for properly inserted links and embedded videos.) More importantly, it makes students aware that someone is reading their writing. It gives them an incentive to write good blog posts: I might choose theirs to bring into class and single it out for praise.
As the semester goes along, I try to do something from the blog at least once every third class (Principles of Media Studies meets twice a week for 75 minutes). I try to spread the love around, so that by the end of the semester just about everyone’s writing will have been considered by the group. I sometimes don’t read the entries word for word, but instead just refer to them and ask the student to talk about what they have written. I always give the student who wrote the post we are discussing the first opportunity to talk about it. Sometimes I disagree with students’ points or question them in a gently challenging way. Then I open up the discussion to others. Sometimes these sessions take five minutes, and sometimes it’s more like fifteen or twenty. If a student posts a video, we might watch it.
A couple of times a semester, I also like to give the students the opportunity to talk about blogging, about the blog as a medium and a component of the course. I like to get their feedback about the blog as an assignment to know if they consider it a nuisance, to see if they read each other's entries, to get a sense of their idea of what blogging is and what it can be. Usually there are some skeptics and some enthusiasts. I have yet to hear anyone say that I should stop having students blog at all, but maybe that's something you wouldn't say even if you felt that way. When we talk about participatory media like fan videos and Wikipedia, having the class blog gives us an opportunity to use blogging as another example of "user-generated content" that everyone is very familiar with. The comments I most appreciate in these discussions are those that point out how having to blog regularly affects your experience of the world. Many students over these four semesters have said that blogging has made them pay attention to things they might not have otherwise (to get ideas of things to write about). It has made them more aware of the pervasiveness of media in their lives and of the significance of this. I would like to think that it has encouraged them to think analytically about their experiences. And that being in the habit of writing for an audience has made them better at expressing themselves in a style of writing which, while pretty casual, is still more formal than texting, IM, and Facebook wall posts.
Depending on the course’s topic in a given week, the blog entries might actually relate to the material we are covering. I don’t always try to get the blog discussion to relate to our class’s topics, but often there is a connection I can make. I can talk about an idea anticipating something we are going to discuss in a few weeks, or recalling a topic considered previously. Sometimes students get ideas for a blog post from class. For instance, after a class in which we talked about children’s television and read about and watched Blue’s Clues, a student posted some clips of Yo Gabba Gabba, which gave us the opportunity to compare the two shows and revisit and reinforce a couple of key points from the previous day. I like to think that this kind of repetition with variation often helps people learn better.
Integrating the blog discussion into the class does a number of things. It gives the students an incentive to blog and blog well. It encourages the class to see itself as a group of people with common interests having a conversation rather than as individuals listening to me and writing down what I say. It acquaints students with one another in a way that isn’t possible in the classroom setting, and gives me a window into their experiences which helps me understand them better. Many students share things in the blog that they would not in the classroom. They feel that their contributions to the blog are lower-pressure than their contributions to class discussions. Some students who are reluctant to speak in class say that the blog offers them an opportunity to participate. (I hope they don’t see it as a kind of alibi for keeping quiet in class, though.)
There’s one more thing I like about having a group blog in a media studies class, and it might seem obvious but I think it’s worth stating: I learn from the blog. I get links to viral videos and news about celebrities and condemnations of sensationalist local news. My students write recaps or little reviews of television shows I’m not watching or videogames I'm not playing or movies I’m not seeing or websites I'm not reading. Even when they write about media I do know, my students articulate perspectives that are different from those I might encounter otherwise. Having access to these experiences and perspectives helps me teach my students better by giving me more of a sense of who they are and what they’re like. This is partly, then, a selfish benefit. I like to know about cool new stuff. But it’s also a benefit to students when the teacher speaks their language, and a class works best (in my experience) when its participants feel that they know one another and are engaging in the pursuit of a common purpose. When integrated well into a course, a blog can afford this kind of feeling.
1/24/2008
Does anyone blog just the right amount? I seem to blog either too much or too little. When it's too much I feel guilty for sucking away the time. When it's too little I miss the rush of communicating with y'all. Now with Twitter and all the other blogesque internetty micro-thingies like "Share on Facebook," I find a new threshold of blogworthiness has taken over me. A few musings seems like too little to hang a blog post on. Three or four links don't seem worth the energy of composing a post and making sure the spelling is good enough. I can just e-mail them to the people I really think will dig them or communicate them some other way online. What I think is missing now, though, is precisely the inconsequential post, the random observation that doesn't work its way into a larger point. I think you won't mind reading that sort of thing.
And so:
My general theory of Reality TV is that it's all about tears and hugs. This week's Project Runway brought the tears and oh boy, we really knew the feelings behind them. Ricky, who seemed so sure to be a loser every time, won the challenge with his sophisticated denim corset dress and just couldn't hold it in. Triumph over adversity is such a basic trope of reality shows and this ep did it right, which that bitchy Christian talking trash about Ricky in an on-the-fly segment earlier on to make us wonder if Ricky really has what it takes to "make it work" (which as catchphrases go is sorta lame, Tim Gunn). It's always great to see at the end of an episode of reality TV how the producers included details to set up the ending that you can only appreciate in retrospect.
Simon has taken "not as good as you think you are" as a kind of catchphrase this season (so far) on Idol. I liked it once, it was ok the second time, and I really don't care to hear him say it again. This week's eps were only an hour each and produced few memorable moments.
I started teaching my big class and I feel like the mayor of a small town. I set policies, meet with underlings (i.e., my wonderful TAs) behind closed doors to talk strategy, satisfy requests from citizens when they're reasonable, and occasionally lay down the law. Nothing in my academic training has prepared me for this.
We are almost at the end of season 3 of The Wire and I'm still avoiding spoilers whenever possible [spoiler ahead]. I predicted the murder of Stringer Bell in the penultimate episode of the third season but did not anticipate my profound grief over his loss. It's been three days and I still can't shake it. This is one reason why those who say The Wire is more than just televisual high-fiber cereal are so right: the stories it tells are so masterful just as stories, before you consider any of the show's sociological and political lessons. But you knew that.
That's all for now. More later.
And so:
My general theory of Reality TV is that it's all about tears and hugs. This week's Project Runway brought the tears and oh boy, we really knew the feelings behind them. Ricky, who seemed so sure to be a loser every time, won the challenge with his sophisticated denim corset dress and just couldn't hold it in. Triumph over adversity is such a basic trope of reality shows and this ep did it right, which that bitchy Christian talking trash about Ricky in an on-the-fly segment earlier on to make us wonder if Ricky really has what it takes to "make it work" (which as catchphrases go is sorta lame, Tim Gunn). It's always great to see at the end of an episode of reality TV how the producers included details to set up the ending that you can only appreciate in retrospect.
Simon has taken "not as good as you think you are" as a kind of catchphrase this season (so far) on Idol. I liked it once, it was ok the second time, and I really don't care to hear him say it again. This week's eps were only an hour each and produced few memorable moments.
I started teaching my big class and I feel like the mayor of a small town. I set policies, meet with underlings (i.e., my wonderful TAs) behind closed doors to talk strategy, satisfy requests from citizens when they're reasonable, and occasionally lay down the law. Nothing in my academic training has prepared me for this.
We are almost at the end of season 3 of The Wire and I'm still avoiding spoilers whenever possible [spoiler ahead]. I predicted the murder of Stringer Bell in the penultimate episode of the third season but did not anticipate my profound grief over his loss. It's been three days and I still can't shake it. This is one reason why those who say The Wire is more than just televisual high-fiber cereal are so right: the stories it tells are so masterful just as stories, before you consider any of the show's sociological and political lessons. But you knew that.
That's all for now. More later.
1/02/2008
Intro
Beginning this Spring semester I am taking on my department's 101 course, "Introduction to Mass Media," with 324 students and six TA's. (Yes, the course should be renamed to reflect the fact that we don't think of the media as "mass" like we used to.) Although I was trained as a film scholar, I teach in a journalism and mass comm department (there's that "mass" again) where I consider myself a scholar of media, and in particular American entertainment media. (My scholarly interests are fairly well reflected in the topics I have covered in this blog.) Most of the department's majors specialize in journalism or advertising and PR, though some choose to focus on media studies. But because this is the intro course, it attracts lots of 1st and 2nd year students from across the university looking to fulfill a general education requirement. My approach to teaching 101 is to expect that no one knows anything. (Of course this isn't true; some students will know lots, and everyone has their life-long experience of media. But I never expect anyone to know anything in particular.)
I decided several months ago to teach 101 without a standard textbook and instead to assign readings (and viewings and listenings) on electronic reserve and the interwebs. The book previously used in my department and many others, Media and Culture, by Campbell et al., is one I don't care to read myself from start to finish, so I can't justify making hundreds of strangers do so.* When I was an undergrad I would choose courses so as to avoid having to read textbooks (and take multiple choice exams, which I also still dislike, though I will use them to save my TAs' labor). This is one big reason why I majored in English lit as an undergrad, which offered courses where the only readings would be novels, poems, stories, and plays. Getting a B.A. in exchange for reading this pleasurable stuff seemed like a much better bargain than having to deal with textbooks, which often seem to have been written not for actual readers, people who care for language and ideas and stories and who often prefer reading to many other activities, but for the author's notion of what an undergraduate student is like. I know there is probably no better way of introducing undergrads to many topics and fields than assigning textbooks, but it usually pains me to read them, to encounter their didactic tone, their politically correct smattering of special topics in colorful boxes, their elevation of information over understanding and argument. (Yes, there are many good textbooks and this is a very broad negative generalization. Indeed, here are some I like.)
Like many academic texts, Campbell has a breathtaking retail price: about $90. Textbooks have been getting much more expensive, doubling the rate of inflation. That $90 price tag doesn't make textbook prose any better; it goes toward magazine-style color layout, supplementary materials like powerpoint shows and test banks and online video clips and quizzes (protected as a walled garden, of course), and the salaries of the cheerful reps who drop by professors' offices to persuade them to assign their employer's product. I hate conservative nostalgia, but I find it hard to believe that in shifting from college textbooks that were basically just words on a page to textbooks that are multimedia extravaganzas we have improved our education of undergraduates.
Alternatives that I considered didn't seem all that different from Campbell in price or quality, to the extent that I could judge without actually reading them, which I don't care to do. Textbook publishing is not unlike big pharma in marketing products not to consumers but to professionals responsible for prescribing or assigning them to consumers who lack the agency to make their own choices. The doctor/professor doesn't need to care too much about the product's price or weigh this as a factor in comparing the product to competitors. Thus the "enhancements" the publishers offer, the online content and the PP slides, are things that make the prof's life easier (and maybe help teach better) and that make the text seem appealing to him or her. Who knows if the students want or need these things. And anyway, maybe it's the prof's job to create slides and online content. I'm not sure, I just don't think the students should be paying extra, and I suspect that the publishing house's profits are more important in making the decisions that create these enhancements than their commitment to higher education. I'm no economist, but it seems likely that if the consumer were more empowered in this scenario, the prices would be more reasonable. My decision not to use a textbook was in part a product of my hostility toward academic textbook publishing as a business, as was my decision to write about it here. (Some universities have started textbook rental programs to lessen the burden on students, but this may not be a practical option for many campuses--search "textbook rental" and you'll see what I mean.)
Just as significant as these issues in my case, though, the intro to mass media books don't approach their topic in a way I would want them to. Campbell and others organize their material by medium and format. There are chapters on film, television, the internet, newspapers, magazines, advertising, etc. I don't think the contemporary media should be taught as discrete topics in this way and would prefer not to have one week on cinema, one on television, etc. Media are converging in so many ways and this organization scheme doesn't reflect this reality
I've been collecting readings suitable for this kind of course and it's been a bit of a challenge. I prefer to assign readings I myself would like to read, but of course they also need to be appropriate for beginning undergrads at UW-Milwaukee. I wanted readings that would be accessible to readers with no background knowledge yet serious and rigorous enough to introduce ideas worth teaching. I have found a mix of scholarly and popular writings that I think do this pretty well. Some are challenging, and to really get them the students will need to read slowly, carefully, and more than once. But many are what I would consider easy, which I think is a good thing. I don't know if reading articles from Time and The New Yorker and New York Times will seem easy to the students; probably very few of them read these publications. My biggest challenge in teaching is to imagine myself in the role of the student, to understand what they understand and don't understand, and how understanding varies among them.
My new semester doesn't begin for three weeks, so I am pasting my syllabus-in-progress below. You will see if you keep reading that I have organized the course into five units corresponding to five affordances of media: to sell, to entertain, to document reality, to be civic culture, and to be art. I came up with these on my own; I'm sure others would come up with more or fewer or different ones. I am aware that these are in some ways redundant and overlapping, that many examples of media are artistic, commercial entertainments that document reality and promote civic culture. (I have been watching The Wire beginning with Season 1 in the past few weeks and I think it does all of these things pretty well, though I might add a sixth especially for it: to confuse. I'm collecting links about the show in my del.icio.us.) Ordering the course this way will allow us to revisit certain kinds of media from different perspectives. It will also allow me to spend more time on areas I know well and have an interest in (movies, TV, the internet, music) than I would be able to do if I were teaching from a standard textbook.
But teaching this way, compared with teaching from a textbook like Media and Culture, probably means that the students will encounter less information. Many of the readings will be more specifically about a single topic like The Walt Disney Company or 19th century American newspapers than the chapters in an intro textbook. The typical intro textbook has no shortage of facts and details. I hope that I will be able to impart greater understanding and knowledge, however, than I would using a textbook.
Any suggestions are welcome in the comments. In particular, I am still looking for readings that will introduce students to Hollywood as an institution and to movies as an art form (I left my own area of greatest expertise for last as I have been working on the syllabus), and readings that consider reality TV as something other than just trash.
Intro to Mass Media
Day 1: Course Introduction (W 1/23)
unit i: media to sell
Day 2: Today's Media Companies and their Strategies (M 1/28) Read David Croteau & William Hoynes, "Introduction" and "Chapter 4: Strategies of the New Media Giants"
Day 3: Media Company: Disney (W 1/30) Read Janet Wasko, "The Disney Empire"
Day 4: Media Franchise: Batman (M 2/4) Read Eileen Meehan, "'Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!': The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext"
Day 5: Advertising (W 2/6) Read Inger L. Stole, "Advertising"
Day 6: MTV (M 2/11) View "MTV 1983 (Part 1 of 2)" (85 min.) and please don't ignore the commercials, promos, and VJs; Read Ed Levine, "TV Rocks With Music" and Janet Maslin, "TV View; A Song is No Longer Strictly a Song, Now It's a 'Video'"
unit ii: media to entertain
Day 7: Entertainment (W 2/13) Read Neal Gabler, "The Republic of Entertainment"
Day 8: Hollywood I (M 2/18) View Singin' in the Rain; Read Douglas Gomery, "The Triumph of Hollywood"
Day 9: Hollywood II (W 2/20)
Day 10: Television Drama (M 2/25) View TBA (a 1-hr television show); Read Michael Z. Newman, "From Beats to Arcs"
Day 11: Videogames (W 2/27) Read Steven R. Poole, "The Origin of Species" and "The Player of Games"
unit iii: media to document reality
Day 13: Representing Experience (M 3/10) Read Anthony Lane, "Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica"
Day 14: Photography (W 3/12) Read John Szarkowski, "The Photographer's Eye"; Mia Fineman, "Say Cheese!: A History of the American Snapshot"; Alex Williams, "Here I Am Taking My Own Picture"
Day 15: Sound Recording and Music (M 3/24) Read Michael Chanan, "Record Culture"
Day 16: The Moving Image (W 3/26) View Early Lumière Films; Early Edison Films; The Black Imp; The Gay Shoe Clerk; The Great Train Robbery; Read Eric Barnouw, Documentary, pp. 1-51
Day 17: Reality TV (M 3/31) View TBA (a 1-hr television show)
unit iv: media as civic culture
Day 18: Media for Citizens (W 4/2) Read Peter Dahlgren, "Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture"
Day 19: Newspapers and their Public (M 4/7) Read Michael Schudson, "The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press"
Day 20: News Culture and New Technologies (W 4/9) Read Michael Schudson, "National News Culture and the Informational Citizen"
Day 21: Digital Publics (M 4/14) Read Howard Rheingold, "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community"
Day 22: Media by Citizens (W 4/16) Read Wikipedia, "Citizen Journalism"; Steve Outing, "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism"; Jay Rosen, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" and "Citizen Journalism Wants You!"; Jeff Jarvis, "Networked Journalism"
unit v: media as art
Day 23: Art and New Technologies (M 4/21) Read Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Day 24: Movies as the "Seventh Art" (M 4/28) Read Hugo Münsterberg, "The Function of the Photoplay"; maybe view Chaplin clips online and Léger & Murphy's Ballet mecanique?
Day 25: Advertising and Pop Art (W 4/30) Read Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media"; Time, "Pop Art - Cult of the Commonplace"
Day 26: Music Sampling (W 4/23) Read Mark Katz, "Music in 1s and 0s"; Listen to Paul Lansky, "notjustmoreidlechatter"; Camille Yarbrough, "Take Yo' Praise"; Fatboy Slim, "Praise You"; Public Enemy, "Fight the Power" (for some of these to play in their entirety, you need to sign up for an account at imeem, which is easy and fast)
Day 27: Remix Culture (M 5/5) Read articles from Wired 13.07 in the section "remix planet" (yeah, all of them--they're short!)
Day 28: Course Summary (W 5/7)
full citations
Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural Design & Construction (February 1958).
Erik Barnow, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford UP, 1974).
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations (trans. Hannah Arendt)
Michael Chanan, "Record Culture," Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995).
"Citizen Journalism," Wikipedia.
David Croteau and William Hoynes, The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest (Pine Forge, 2005).
Peter Dahlgren, "Media, Citizenship, and Civic Culture," in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds., Mass Media and Society 3rd ed. (London: Arnold, 2000), 310-328.
Mia Fineman, "Say Cheese!: A History of the American Snapshot," Slate (17 October 2007).
Neal Gabler, "The Republic of Entertainment," Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage, 2000).
Douglas Gomery, "The Triumph of Hollywood," Movie History: A Survey (Wadsworth, 1991).
Jeff Jarvis, "Networked Journalism," BuzzMachine (5 July 2006).
Mark Katz, "Music in 1s and 0s," Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004).
Anthony Lane, "Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica," The New Yorker (24 September 2007).
Ed Levine, "TV Rocks With Music," New York Times (8 May 1983).
Janet Maslin, "TV View; A Song is No Longer Strictly a Song, Now It's a 'Video,'" New York Times (23 January 1983).
Eileen Meehan, "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!" in Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, eds., The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Hugo Münsterberg, "The Function of the Photoplay," in Philip Lopate, ed., American Movie Critics (New York: Library of America, 2006), 10-17.
Michael Z. Newman, "From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative," The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006), 16-28.
Steve Outing, "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism," Poynter Online (15 June 2005).
Stephen R. Poole, Trigger Happy (Fourth Estate, 2001).
"Pop Art - Cult of the Commonplace," Time (3 May 1963).
Howard Rheingold, "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community," The Virtual Community: Homesteading On The Electronic Fronier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993).
Jay Rosen, "Citizen Journalism Wants You," Wired online (14 March 2007).
Jay Rosen, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience," PressThink (27 June 2006).
Michael Schudson, "The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press," Discovering The News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1980).
Michael Schudson, "National News Culture and the Informational Citizen," The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996).
Inger L. Stole, "Advertising," in Richard Maxwell, Ed., Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001).
John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966/2007).
Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Polity, 2001).
Alex Williams, "Here I Am Taking My Own Picture," New York Times (19 February 2006).
*Every time I open Media and Culture to a random page, something irks me. For instance, the first thing that caught my notice the first time I flipped through was the skyscraper of culture on p. 16 (the Chrysler building of culture, to be precise) describing which cultural texts are high (Hamlet, Aïda), which are middle (Harry Potter, John Coltrane), and which are low (Rolling Stones, Gawker.com). The accompanying text reads, "Throughout the twentieth century we tended to think of culture not as a social process but as a set of products sorted into high, low, or middle positions on a cultural skyscraper." [Really? Who is "we"? Who is it that "thinks of culture" at all? And who would think of it as a skyscraper?] "Look at this highly arbitrary arrangement and see if you agree or disagree. Write in some of your own examples. Why do people view culture this way? Who controls this process? Is control of making cultural categories important--why or why not?"
Why would I want to reinforce this idea, even if only to criticize it? Many students find it hard to grasp the attribution of an idea to others which you will question, so whatever you say gets copied down like it's what you want them to know. I don't avoid attributing ideas, but I'm careful about when I do so and choose important ideas that I really want them to consider. Here they are being asked not just to consider a perhaps unfamiliar idea, but to revise the authors' highly arbitrary attempt to illustrate it. For real. I find this whole idea shallow and reductionist; I hardly dismiss the notions of cultural hierarchy and distinction, but why would you want to represent it as such an orderly and straightforward array of items? And this particular hierarchy is so problematic, given that Hamlet and Aïda are not so simply high, that Coltrane and Harry Potter are such bad examples of middle, that the Stones are as good as it gets to many people who think of themselves having good taste, that the typical reader of this book will never have heard of Gawker and that it's a bad example of a "low" blog anyway (here are some alternatives: Drunken Stepfather, Perez, Double Viking). This list seems to have been written by someone who doesn't really know and care about literature, drama, jazz, rock, and blogs. (The authors call their hierarchy "highly arbitrary" but it's clearly not really all that arbitrary except to the extent that any such thing is arbitrary, and they must have chosen these particular items in this particular order for a reason.)
Most important: sociologists and culture critics have been saying for years that such hierarchies are collapsing toward a "nobrow" culture, and that elites are now much more likely to be culturally omnivorous than they were in the old days. On this point, see James B. Twitchell's chapter "Adcult and the Collapse of Cultural Hierarchy" in Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture; John Seabrook's book Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture; and Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore" American Sociological Review 61.5 (Oct., 1996), 900-907.
(This entry was edited on 1/10 to clarify that my hostility is toward academic textbook publishing as a business rather than academic publishing in general.)
9/04/2007
Anticipating MIFF
The Milwaukee International Film Festival runs from September 20-30, and tickets will go on sale tomorrow. This is the fest's fifth year, and although I have lived in Milwaukee for all that time, I have never seen any films at the fest. This is partly a product of my dislike of film festivals, which I find tend to inflate people's estimations and evaluations of films in their atmosphere of appreciative discovery. I don't like large crowds, and I've seen too much crap that festival guides touted as essential viewing. I would rather catch the films that will have theatrical releases on my own schedule, and I resent paying inflated admission prices to see things I might not rent if Hollywood Video carried them and I had all night to watch movies. I admit that this is a little eccentric and silly, and that there are many great films that one can only see at festivals. Partly this avoidance is also a product of my formative years in Toronto, a town with a truly great festival next to which Milwaukee's looks pretty rinky-dink. Anyhow, I have decided to throw myself into this year's festival, to give it a real chance, and catch up with some of the international cinema that has been touring the circuit. Now the hard part: choosing what to see.
There are good and bad things about going to a fest like this one. There will be no discoveries here, certainly not of major American independents or foreign auteurs. Most of the films here have screened already at more important events. Lots of the MIFF entrants were on the slate in Toronto a year ago, and many of the American ones that didn't were at last winter's Sundance. European films that didn't play at the TIFF might have been at Berlin, Rotterdam, or Karlovy Vary. This means that a large number of the films screening here have been reviewed fairly widely. I have been collecting these in my del.icio.us, under the tag miff. Of the major festival circuit names, the best known here are probably Hang Sang-soo and Lars von Trier. Local boy Chris Smith will be here with his new film, his feature debut, The Pool. The fest guide describes it a "neorealist tale" shot in India. Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep will be showing, as will The Whole Shootin' Match, a 1979 American indie that is credited with inspiring Robert Redford to make Sundance into a showcase for American regional cinema. There are docs, shorts, local films, and a small series in tribute to Willem Dafoe, a Wisconsin native who went to UW-Milwaukee before dropping out to join an avant-garde theater group, and then going on to his career in movies. Unfortunately, none of these mumblecore films we have been reading about in blogs and newspapers seem to be turning up here this year. I have seen some of them on video, and think I want to save my judgment until I have seen some in the theater. The small screen might not be their ideal format. (I assume Hannah Takes the Stairs will be here before long, given the amount of publicity it has had.)
More MIFF blogging is to come, I hope. Stay tuned.
***
Some other items:
-A new semester has begun. I am teaching one course, Principles of Media Studies. This is my third semester at it, and for this installment I have added a day on Facebook. I was thinking of replacing the group class blog with a discussion board in a Facebook group but sort of chickened out. It's still not clear to me how students and teachers will interact in the online social-networking environment, and I don't want any students feeling like I have invaded their space. I also didn't want to compel any of them who might be reluctant to get on Facebook to participate there. Some of them are trying to protect their time by avoiding that stuff, and I applaud them for trying, I guess.
-The summer television offerings have been so good that our usual habit of catching up on shows we have missed on DVD has been put aside. (Last summer's discovery was BSG.) I'm working out some ideas about Mad Men, my favorite of the season by far. It's worth watching its credit sequence if nothing else, clearly in the Bass tradition but very contemporary at the same time. I also like the psychological machinations of Damages, and its superb acting by Glenn Close. And The Hills and Newport Harbor amaze in every installment with their gorgeous mise en scene, classic soapy plotting, and vapid characters. One cannot turn away.
There are good and bad things about going to a fest like this one. There will be no discoveries here, certainly not of major American independents or foreign auteurs. Most of the films here have screened already at more important events. Lots of the MIFF entrants were on the slate in Toronto a year ago, and many of the American ones that didn't were at last winter's Sundance. European films that didn't play at the TIFF might have been at Berlin, Rotterdam, or Karlovy Vary. This means that a large number of the films screening here have been reviewed fairly widely. I have been collecting these in my del.icio.us, under the tag miff. Of the major festival circuit names, the best known here are probably Hang Sang-soo and Lars von Trier. Local boy Chris Smith will be here with his new film, his feature debut, The Pool. The fest guide describes it a "neorealist tale" shot in India. Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep will be showing, as will The Whole Shootin' Match, a 1979 American indie that is credited with inspiring Robert Redford to make Sundance into a showcase for American regional cinema. There are docs, shorts, local films, and a small series in tribute to Willem Dafoe, a Wisconsin native who went to UW-Milwaukee before dropping out to join an avant-garde theater group, and then going on to his career in movies. Unfortunately, none of these mumblecore films we have been reading about in blogs and newspapers seem to be turning up here this year. I have seen some of them on video, and think I want to save my judgment until I have seen some in the theater. The small screen might not be their ideal format. (I assume Hannah Takes the Stairs will be here before long, given the amount of publicity it has had.)
More MIFF blogging is to come, I hope. Stay tuned.
***
Some other items:
-A new semester has begun. I am teaching one course, Principles of Media Studies. This is my third semester at it, and for this installment I have added a day on Facebook. I was thinking of replacing the group class blog with a discussion board in a Facebook group but sort of chickened out. It's still not clear to me how students and teachers will interact in the online social-networking environment, and I don't want any students feeling like I have invaded their space. I also didn't want to compel any of them who might be reluctant to get on Facebook to participate there. Some of them are trying to protect their time by avoiding that stuff, and I applaud them for trying, I guess.
-The summer television offerings have been so good that our usual habit of catching up on shows we have missed on DVD has been put aside. (Last summer's discovery was BSG.) I'm working out some ideas about Mad Men, my favorite of the season by far. It's worth watching its credit sequence if nothing else, clearly in the Bass tradition but very contemporary at the same time. I also like the psychological machinations of Damages, and its superb acting by Glenn Close. And The Hills and Newport Harbor amaze in every installment with their gorgeous mise en scene, classic soapy plotting, and vapid characters. One cannot turn away.
2/11/2007
For my Principles of Media Studies class, I have created a glossary of terms on copyright. Feel free to use it, remix it, adapt it to suit your needs. Leave a comment here if you have thoughts about how it might be improved.
1/11/2007
Today I finalized the syllabus for my Principles of Media Studies course, which is an introduction to basic issues in the field. I'm offering it to you here because I have benefited from reading other people's, e.g., Chuck Tryon's Technology and the Language Arts Curriculum (tentative at the time) and Cory Doctorow's Pwned, on copyright in the digital age.
(I decided to make a course website using Google's page creator instead of using the university's "Desire 2 Learn" software partly because I don't like D2L's interface and partly because I wanted the site to be accessible to anyone. Someday perhaps I will learn how to design for the web for real, but for now Google will do--it's free and easy.)
(I decided to make a course website using Google's page creator instead of using the university's "Desire 2 Learn" software partly because I don't like D2L's interface and partly because I wanted the site to be accessible to anyone. Someday perhaps I will learn how to design for the web for real, but for now Google will do--it's free and easy.)
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