Syllabus
Objective
This seminar is designed to provide a foundation for the MS in Interactive Communication program, introducing the theory and practice of interactive communication, and establishing the organizational and research skills demanded by the field. As a field of study and as a profession, interactive communication is only just emerging, and there is no clear fixed tradition or discipline. There is, however, a collection of ideas about what interactive communication means, and how it works. Our focus during the semester will be on engaging these ideas, providing each student with a broad idea of how to take apart social and interactive systems, how to reassemble them in more effective ways, and how to track the current state of the art in interactive technologies.
Throughout the semester, we will be addressing the meaning of interactive communication and the deeper questions of why things work the way they do. We will also be looking at how to uncover the current trends, and predict opportunities for yourself and your organization. We will not be spending as much time on the practical elements of production technique, or on structured approaches to managing such production in an organization, as these are treated in more detail in later coursework. As a survey, we are interested in the big questions, and how to integrate a broad set of ideas into a useful group of conceptual relationships for each student.
By the end of the semester, you should have a framework within which you are able to better understand the role of interactive technology in organizations and society. You should understand the current trends in the interactive industries, and some of the constraints under which they operate. You should possess the skills needed to find useful information, make sense of it, and present it in an organized and compelling fashion. You should also have, at some stage of development, a design philosophy: a personal understanding of what values you hold important, and how best to achieve those ends.
Communication and Organization
The course is led by Alex Halavais. You can reach me via Skype (voice or text) at “halavais” if you need a more immediate response. For short questions, you can post to twitter (with the #501a hashtag). For more involved questions, email him at 501@halavais.net. Finally, you can drop by during my open office hours, Wednesdays, from 3:15 to 6:15 in FOB 23 on the Mt. Carmel campus.
Format and Practice
Like many graduate courses, this is in a seminar format. It is expected that we will read a set of material together and collectively arrive at a shared understanding of how it might inform our thinking. Rather than take up valuable face-to-face time with lecturing, I have recorded a set of lectures I will ask you to listen to before class meetings. Please come to the meetings prepared to discuss the readings and other materials for the week.
This is a particularly demanding course, in terms of pace and breadth. You should plan to spend about 9 hours each week outside of class in preparation. For each two-week module, you are expected to read through a set of articles: generally less than two hundred pages in total, and listen to set of audio lectures I will record. In addition, I’m asking that you track on a small number of regular blogs, listed as “Regular Readings” on the course site. As you read, listen, and explore, you should be coming up with your own formulation of what is essential and important in the material, and putting this into your own form of post. These posts shouldn’t be merely opinion pieces or expressions of personal taste; in synthesizing the work, you should be providing value to your readers, including your fellow course participants and readers out on the wider web.
The Module Topics are as Follows:
- Module 1: Development of Interactive Technologies (8/31 – 9/13)
- Module 2: Mass Interaction (9/14 – 9/27)
- Module 3: Games, Simulations, and Interactions (9/28 – 10/11)
- Module 4: Informing Professions (10/12 – 10/25)
- Module 5: Interactive Production (10/26 – 11/8
- Module 6: Legal, Ethical, and Policy Issues (11/9 – 11/22)
- Module 7: Future of Interactive Communication (11/30 – 12/6)
- Final Presentations (12/9)
The Blog
In addition to your interactions in person, you will be interacting via your collective blogs during the semester. You are expected to post a minimum of once each week, with a minimum total of at least 300 words each week. These are minimums, you should certainly strive to write more. Your posting should be completed, at the latest, by Tuesday evening, to give everyone a chance to read your views before class. You may find it more convenient to post in smaller bites, and posts to Twitter and replies on your classmates’ blogs certainly count toward that total.
The posted work should be made up of reflections on the readings and other materials we are engaging in during the week. Many of these posts are entirely up to you. Ideally, these posts will draw on your thinking about interactive systems and their design, but you generally have a great deal of latitude here. Particularly useful are links to relevant materials (and their discussion), rants, manifestos, tutorials, and critiques. You mandate is to be informative and interesting. If you draw comments and responses from other seminar participants that is a good indication of success. Many previous participants have engaged broader publics, as well.
Although the topic of many of the postings is up to the author, you will need to use one or more of them responding to the readings and lectures. Generally a response paper provides a thoughtful analysis of the arguments or ideas presented in the materials from the module, and draws from them evidence for a particular, unique thesis. Participants should feel free to draw from their own experiences, and from other things they have read or learned, to make sense of the ideas presented in the work. Do not use this as an opportunity to summarize all or part of the work: the idea is to assume that everyone has read the assigned work, and use it as a jumping off point for presenting a further development of the ideas, or a critique of them. We will be using these observations to help shape our discussions each week. One clear indication of the quality of your posting is whether it helps to shape the discussion in our weekly meetings.
Since others in the class will be responding to the same readings, you should read through what your classmates have already posted. This will ensure that your own response brings up unique ideas or states your position in a unique way. It also gives you the opportunity to respond to others’ opinions in your own work. If you are concerned that your ideas may already be adequately explored in others work, extend their discussion and critique it, or post early enough that this is not an issue.
Most weeks, I also ask you to try something and report on it, or otherwise have specific blogging requests in some of the modules.
Participation in Discussion
This is a large class for a seminar, and it may be difficult to enter into the discussion actively. On many evenings, I will split the class into smaller discussion groups to work out an issue and report back to the class. In any case, you should come to class having thought about the readings, lectures, and other materials, knowing what their central arguments are, and having questions and thoughts ready to share with the others in the course.
I am confident that everyone will show up prepared, but to ensure this, I will do two things. First, expect to be put on the spot with questions. Throughout the semester, I will call on you at random to “brief” an article or issue. This means, you should be prepared to both provide a general overview of a reading (what its main thesis is, what points support that thesis, what evidence is used in that support), as well as being able to reply to more specific questions. Second, I may distribute pop quizzes at some of our meetings, asking the same kinds of questions of everyone. My intent here is not to cause anxiety, but to make our meeting the most effective they can be, and that can only happen if participants take the time to engage the materials.
Website Proposal
By the end of the semester, you will produce a proposal for a substantial website. While there are a number of different platforms and contexts in which interactive communication takes place, a familiarity with developing work for the web is a core competency, and will be a focus of a significant part of your early coursework. This course is intended to expose participants to a range of social media, and to the state of the art and future development of those media. The intent of the proposal is to demonstrate a clear need for a site, evaluate the current media addressing that need, and detail a plan for a website that will meet that need. Those of you who are concurrently enrolled in ICM502 (which should be the majority of you) will be developing the visual comps for this site as part of that course. And those who continue in ICM505 will be implementing that design.
You may work on the project as an individual, but I will encourage you to work toward completing the proposal in teams of two or three.
There will be several times during the semester that I will ask you to produce early pieces of this proposal, from brainstorming ideas, to benchmarking existing sites, to thinking about user needs. At the end of the semester, I expect you to produce a brief, professional presentation of your proposal.
Evaluation
Blogging will account for 40% of your total grade, participation an additional 40%, and 20% of the grade will be the result of the project proposal. I will arrive at your final grade for both blogging and for participation by averaging your participation in 13 weekly sessions. That is, I drop your lowest weeks in each case.
What this means is that if you need to be out of town, or are ill, or simply need a break, you can take a week off without it hurting your grade in any way. That said, any time missed beyond this week–no matter the reason–will negatively affect your final participation or blogging grade in the course.
At the end of each module, each participant is asked to reflect very briefly on her work during the module in short, private self-evaluation in a journal on Blackboard. Consider, as you look over what you have produced during the module, whether your work is sufficiently probative with relation to the materials we’ve read, watched, or listened to, whether it has engaged others in the class, and whether it stakes out a clear claim or argument and defends it well. Likewise, have you helped to create a good discussion in our seminar meetings, and contributed to our collective understanding of the issues?
You are welcome to express your personal learning experience within the course in these reflections—including your frustrations, epiphanies, or questions you would rather remain private, your reflections on the course, and your readiness to move on to the next module. The journal should reference the grading rubric (below) and the assignments explicitly. This need not be a sizable undertaking; a short paragraph is plenty unless you feel the need to say more.
I will reply briefly to your entry, along with an indication of your grades for the module.
The blogging for each module will be evaluated according to the following rubric:
In order to receive a D for the week, the participant must have at least one posts representing a response to the readings and lecture.
In order to receive a C for the week, in addition to the above requirement, the blog entries should be relatively free from grammatical errors, should make use of the conventions of writing for the web (for text: double-spaces between paragraphs, the use of hyperlinks, and the like), and should be structurally sound (for text: have a thesis statement, topic sentences for each paragraph, subheads for longer entries, and the like). We will discuss these conventions for writing, video, and audio as we move through the class. At least one of these posts should explicitly address the readings for the module, and demonstrate the student has understood and critically assessed them. The writing should total at least 300 words (or the equivalent in non-textual media), and be posted 24 hours before our meeting.
In order to receive a B for the week, in addition to the above requirements, the entries must represent a clear understanding and articulation of the readings and other content of the course, and be presented in a consistent, persuasive style. The postings should demonstrate that the author has managed to read and determine the most important elements of the readings, integrate, compare, and contrast the ideas in these readings, and draw connections between the readings and the author’s own experiences and learning from outside the course. In other words, she should reflect an informed opinion of the readings, and explain how she has reached that opinion. She need not like or agree with the readings, but she should explain why we should adopt her view of the material. At least one of the postings should be made at least 24 hours before our meeting, and is likely well in excess of the minimum word counts.
In order to receive an A for the week, in addition to the above requirements, the seminar participant must both teach me (and the rest of the class) something we did not already know, and engage other members of the class or the broader community on the web. Obviously, I cannot tell you what it is you will teach or show me, as it will be unique to the student, but every student comes to the classroom with a rich history of professional and personal experiences that can be applied to the problems we are addressing, and every student has the capacity to be creative. The author should make use of what she has learned in other classes, at work, and in her travels to unlock or explain some of the concepts we are exploring. Think seriously about a mass audience, and what you can do to interest and inform them. As participants go through each module’s materials, they should actively track down more information in areas that interest them and report back to the rest of us.
Note that these criteria are cumulative, so that an A requires mastery of the subject matter, as well as a cogent, grammatically correct set of posts. Creativity and originality do not make up for poor grammar and spelling, or a failure to engage the reader.
Please note that all of this reflects work that is completed during the (Monday to Sunday) week in question. Work posted after the week is complete is considered as part of the following week. Because the lowest week is dropped, this does not put anyone at a disadvantage if they find themselves unable to complete the work during a week, and does not put the instructor in the position of “arbiter of excuses.”
Success
There is a good chance, if you are a new graduate student, that you are accustomed to being at the top of the class, and considered exceptionally capable. Every student in this course has been at the top of their undergraduate classes or leaders in their profession. It is my job to make you stretch, and although you may not appreciate it every week, by the time we are finished, I hope you will be happy with what you have accomplished during the semester.
Chances are, if you are overly concerned with your grade in the course, graduate school is not for you. On the other hand, I would be disappointed if you did not want to do well in the course. My advice for doing well is as follows:
1. Plan your time wisely. Some people suggest that the reason they like to hire people with graduate degrees is no more than that graduate students have demonstrated an ability to make good use of their time and are comfortable working under pressure. I expect you will need about seven to nine hours each week, outside of class, to complete the work of the course. We all have other demands on our time, but you should schedule and protect this time. More than any other factor, successful students in the past have made the time to get work done early in the week, and students who were fighting the deadlines did poorly.
2. Go beyond the minimum. At a minimum, I expect you to read and think about the readings and lectures, and present that thought in an interesting way. A tossed together response that demonstrates a superficial understanding of the topic and little original contribution is frustrating to read, since it wastes your time and mine. There are times when pro forma performance is acceptable, but I have high expectations for your capabilities, and hope you will show me your best work.
3. You are not a blank slate. In every course I teach, students come in with a valuable set of personal and professional experiences. This is more obvious in the case of someone who is late in their own career, and may have many years of media or other professional experience. While not as obvious in the case of younger students who may have recently finished an undergraduate degree, I guarantee that you have had experience that can be brought to bear on the problems we will be discussing. The degree to which you can connect these earlier experiences to the work we do in the course will determine, to a great extent, how much you learn and how well you can apply it. Learn also from the experiences of your fellow participants.
I do my best to be a fair grader, but in order to be fair, it means that I have the responsibility of making an A in my course be representative of only the best work of the semester. I also have the responsibility to you and to the program to not pass students who do not demonstrate a capability for graduate work at this point in their lives.
Policies
At the beginning of the course we will discuss the problem of plagiarism and proper citation. At its root, plagiarism constitutes misrepresenting the authorship of work for a course. If you make use of another’s ideas, this must be cited. If you make use of words and phrases that are substantially similar to another’s work, you must cite this. If you make use of phrases that are identical to another’s, regardless of the length of the phrase, you must place these in quotation marks or in block quotes.
Please refer to the Quinnipiac University Academic Integrity website (http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1046.xml) for information about Academic Integrity and proper student behavior. Students are expected to be familiar with these university policies. Forms of dishonesty include:
- cheating or helping another to cheat on an exam
- using a paper authored by someone other than yourself
- plagiarizing another’s written work (papers or outlines), in full or in part, including failure to properly cite all sources
- deliberately distorting information
- falsifying information (e.g., reason for absence)
Students found guilty of any of the above will be subject to sanctions, usually a failing grade for the course, and will also be reported to the Academic Integrity Board.
Students with disabilities who wish to request reasonable accommodations should contact: John Jarvis, Coordinator of Learning Services in the Learning Center, Tator Hall Room 119 at (203) 582-5390 or at john.jarvis@quinnipiac.edu. More information may be found at http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1168.xml . Quinnipiac University complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
If it becomes impossible to meet on campus (due to weather, or other natural or man-made disasters), I will clearly post this on the web, and we will make other arrangements to continue our work virtually. Please visit the site regularly for updates and information.
I am always happy to chat not only about the topics of the course, but anything else you would like to talk about. If you feel overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or just whelmed, please do get in touch online or in person.
