Syllabus

From COM 110 Wiki

Digital Information in the Contemporary World (COM 110)

CUNY Online Baccalaureate Program, Spring 2007

Instructor: Dr. Matthew Gold
Email: mattgold@gmail.com
Office Hours: Virtually any time. I will make every effort to respond to your email messages within 24 hours of receiving them.

Course Description: What does it mean to learn – to inquire, to investigate, to collaborate, to research – online? In this seminar, students will propose answers to these questions by exploring new communications technologies and probing their impact on contemporary understandings of identity and community. In addition to readings on these issues, online discussions, writing, group work, and seminar activities will be organized around learning and practicing problem-solving skills that require finding, examining, and evaluating online resources.

Course Requirements: There will be a series of short assignments along the way; also, a class wiki and individual blogs will be created (more to follow). There will also be a final project on a relevant issue (copyright law and file sharing, plagiarism and the web, the strengths and limits of online searches, etc.). This will be a group project, and will include an interim paper or discussion outlining a workplan detailing how the group will analyze the conceptual issues and literature.

One more thing: Throughout the term, we'll be reading and discussing a novel: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (Bantam, 1995). Subtitled A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, this tale of life 50 years from now treats what happens when a piece of educational technology designed for the grandchild of a lord in the ruling elite falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. The "talking book" (which also works through "ractors" – short for interactors, human actors who assume roles to interact with the user) gives Nell powers but also poses perils. If you think this is a kind of fable for our course's focus, you're right.

PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE OF TOPICS (under construction)
I. Introduction(s)
to the course, one another
The Diamond Age (first 60 pages)

II. Writing Spaces, Part 1: Wikis and Blogs
Blogs:
"Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man"

"Bloggers" (a Pew Internet & American Life survey) by Amanda Lenhart & Susannah Fox (July 19, 2006)

Wikis:
"Following the Wikipedia Controversy" by Michel-Adrien Sheppard (December 14, 2005)

III. Writing Spaces, Part 2:
“Hypertext and the Remediation of Print” from Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001)

IV. Recent History
"Lessons from the History of the Internet" (Chapter 1) from Manuel Castells' Internet Galaxy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001)

V. Communicating on the Internet
"Netspeak" (Chapter 2) from David Crystal's Language and the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001)

VI. Images and Visualization
TBA

VI. Social Networks
"Social Network" entry in Wikipedia
"The MySpace Generation" Business Week cover story from December 12, 2005 David Denby, "Big Pictures" (from The New Yorker)
Additional articles on YouTube and "Me Media"

VII. (Re)searching Online
USC tutorial on search engines, metasearchers, subject directories, boolean logic, proximity operators, and field searching

Resources for Documenting Electronic Sources (Purdue's Online Writing Lab)

VIII. WebQuests
The SDSU Webquests site

IX. Intellectual Property and Copyright
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (selections)

X. Online Research and Plagiarism
What Is Plagiarism? (History News Network)
Plagiarism and the Web (Western Illinois U)
Plagiarism: What It Is and How To Avoid It (MIT)
Evaluating What You Find in the Library and on the Internet (MIT)

XI. Tags, Feeds, and the Future of the Internet
Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, the Memorious"
"Semantic Web" on Wikipedia

Other Readings TBA

The last weeks of the course will be devoted to presentations on and responses to the term-long projects. Half of each student's grade will be based on individual contributions (to online discussions, to the individual blog and class wiki) and half will be based on the group project. Students should remember that all group work is visible in the course site – which is to say that group discussions and file-sharing are accessible to the instructor. If you don't pull your weight, that will be obvious – and in a way that would never be possible in a classroom-based course (one of many things about the classwork pertinent to the course's focus).