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section: Attendance at section is manditory. Three or more absences will result in a grade of no pass. Sections are for discussing the required readings, discussing the lectures, understanding the assignments, and engaging in other supplementary activities (e.g., screening films, running demo software, etc.) designed to strengthen your understanding of the course material.
lecture: Attendance at lecture is highly recommended. Lectures have been designed to present a set of theoretical and practical tools useful for understanding and/or decoding the assignments and readings. Lectures will usually contextualize the required readings within a larger set of work and/or texts that is a superset of the assigned readings. After each lecture, the larger set of texts referred to in the lecture will be listed in the lecture notes available on the course website, so, in principal, it will be possible for you to miss a lecture and still keep up if you read the required readings and also all of the supplementary texts and works mentioned in the lecture. However, this require a much larger reading load. On the midterm and the final examinations you will be tested both on the required readings and also on the materials presented in lecture.
course email list: The course email list will be the means we (the professor and the TAs) will use to contact you, if necessary, between lectures and sections. If you do not subscribe to the course email list (by sending an email to <fdm20c-subscribe@yahoogroups.com>) we will assume that you are not taking the course and will drop you from the roll.
reading questions: Each week, before Tuesday's class, you will be required to send an email to your TA. For each reading listed in the week's schedule, you must compose a question about the reading. Thus, for example, if we are scheduled to read three texts on a given week, before Tuesday's class of that week you will send your TA three questions about the reading. Your questions will be judged on time (or late) according to the time of your email. No credit will be given for late questions. Your questions will be addressed and/or discussed during section. These questions will account for 10% of your final grade.
examinations: There will be a midterm examination and a final examination. The final examination wil not be cumulative. Rather, it will cover only the materials of the second half of the quarter. As described in the section above on lectures the midterm and final examination will cover the required readings and also materials presented in the lectures. The examinations will be primarily a set of short essay questions. One week before the examination, you will be given about three times as many questions as will be on the exam. At the exam you will be asked a subset of the questions. The midterm will be worth 20% of your final grade. The final examination will also be worth 20% of your final grade.
weekly postings to an online forum: By the end of the second week of the course you will choose a newsgroup, weblog, or other online forum. If you prefer, your forum does not need to be entirely textual in form; your chosen forum could also be a 2D or 3D chat environment in which comments are exchanged textually. You will be required to post to this forum at least once a week, but preferably more often than that. You will keep an archive of your posts/contributions to your chosen forum; your archive should also include a record of all of the responses you received from others on the forum. Each week you will be asked to send your TA an email containing this archive. These postings will be worth 10% of your final grade.
paper about an online forum: At the end of the quarter you will be asked to turn in a five page paper in which you describe the culture, politics, social dynamics, etc. of an online forum. We assume that the online forum that you will write about will be the same forum that you post to all quarter. This paper will be worth 20% of your final grade.
Specifics about the criteria we will use to grade your paper can be found by clicking on this link.
map of an online space: Before the end of the quarter you will be asked to create a map of an online space. We assume that the online space will incorporate your chosen online forum and also its "neighboring" and/or encompassing forums, people, institutions, etc. The final format of your map will either be some sort of network diagram (e.g., a social network and/or an actor-network and/or an ownership diagram, etc.) and/or a hypertext. Periodically, throughout the term we will discuss and present examples of such maps. The point of such maps is to present the larger context within which a media space and its participants exist. It is, literally, "the big picture." Your map will count for 20% of your final grade.
Specifics about the criteria we will use to grade your map can be found by clicking on this link.
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