Course Description

Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide explains that his "book is about the relationship between three concepts-media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence" (2). With those words, Jenkins has provided a description of our course. To explain, there are quite literally thousands-maybe hundreds of thousands-of blogs now available to internet users. They range from personal blogs that aren't necessarily meant to attract attention or traffic to more organized blogs that very specifically draw attention (any number of news blogs, for instance). This class will be working with the second type of blog and will be concerned with the process of building a blog that attracts individuals who will contribute columns, reviews, and discussion to a litblog titled Book-It Blogspot & Zine located at http://book-itbz.blogspot.com/. The blog is intended as a space for young readers (and "young" is very loosely defined) to discuss the books they are reading. You will also be maintaining and contributing reviews to a blog titled BookWrites at http://bookwrites.blogspot.com/. Anyone can contribute to this blog.

Goals:

• Explore the intersections among "young" readers, technology, literature, writing, and blogs
• Become conversant in the issues that surround litblogging, both practical and scholarly
• Increase traffic on blog
• Become familiar with adolescent/YA literature and write about it in a public forum

Activities:

• Following are some possibilities as to what activities students will engage in:
• Assist in maintaining/monitoring/developing the blog
• Contact high school AP teachers to arrange for school visits
• Contact/query publishers for books to be reviewed/send those books to our reviewers
• Visit high school campuses with either Dr. Karen Roggenkamp or me
• Read column proposals
• Possibly attend NCTE
• Develop and implement ideas that will attract contributors and increase traffic. For instance:
  • Contact other bloggers who share similar interests
  • Identify other blogs that will include a link to our blog
  • Facebook (or similar) groups
  • Blogrings (register blog address, code on sidebar)
  • MetaxuCafe http://metaxucafe.com/ (community litblog network-register it-updates)
  • Litblogging community-book challenges "year of reading dangerously"; blogs specifically (a novel challenge-only publishes new challenges)

Assignments

(New Content) Journal and Activity Log & Miscellaneous Assignments: In a weekly discussion board in eCollege, discuss your activities, obstacles, issues, observations, and ideas in a blog developed for this class. Post this to the discussion board by Wednesday of every week beginning the first week of class. Also, keep a log of your time and activities. You will need to upload this to the dropbox in eCollege by midnight Friday of every week beginning the second week of class. I expect you to spend the same amount of time on this course as you would spend on any course that is important to you. That time, however, will be spent in different ways depending on your mode of participation. For instance, not everyone will be able to attend NCTE. Everyone should at some point, however, expect to accompany Dr. Roggenkamp or me on a high school campus visit.

Occasionally, I will ask that all of us collaborate on certain matters. For instance, we will need to create "Column Calls" to give to students, various flyers, find information regarding copyrights, create "goodies" that we can give away.

Annotated Bibliography: Toward the end of the semester (by midnight, Monday, November 24), you will need to create an annotated bibliography that deals specifically with converging technologies. The bibliography will consist of 15 entries, which should be a combination of scholarly articles and books. If you use an edited collection, do not use more than two entries from that text. You will hand this in through eCollege.

Book Reviews: Create your own column on the blog-come up with a creative title for it--and contribute ten reviews of adolescent/young adult books (including audio books if you're fan of those) to our blog (1,200-1,500 words). This shouldn't be too much of a hardship-you've probably read many more adolescent/YA novels than that. However, at least five of them need to have a publication date of 2006-2008. Here's the philosophy on the book reviews: why waste your time on writing a review explaining how awful a particular book is? If you don't like a book, don't write a review on it. Having said that, be honest about its flaws. Or, you can indicate that you don't really know what to make of a particular book. Sometimes, those are my favorite novels. If you have the courage, contact the author and let him or her know you've written a review of the book. Perhaps he/she will join in the discussion. As for the style and tone of the reviews, they need to be smart. You're writing for a sophisticated audience who likes to read and doesn't like to be "talked down" to. The reviews can be philosophical musings, humorous, sassy-develop your own style. If the book is sexually explicit, particularly violent, or contains language that might be offensive, that should be noted at the end of the review, just as you would see for a movie (something like "contains explicit language").

(New Content) Five of your reviews should be posted by the midterm mark (Friday, October 17), and the other five should be posted by midnight on Monday, December 1.

Final Project: The final project will take the form of a digital media production and will be collaborative. I'd like to see something that can be uploaded to youtube (and very possibly as a podcast). That means you'll be working with video cameras, editing, and so on. We want to advertise our program through this and how clever you are. If you're camera shy, you don't have to be in the video. Do not include images of minors (unless you're the parent of one of those minors!). It requires parental permission to include the images of minors. Please keep me posted on the progress of your production and let me know what ideas you're coming up with.

Evaluation

• Journal/Activity Log & Miscellaneous Assignments: 20%
• Annotated Bibliography: 25%
• Book Reviews: 25%
• Final Project: 30%

Details on Evaluation:

The Journal/Activity Log & Miscellaneous Assignments will reflect how much you have contributed to the class and is similar to a participation grade.

The Annotated Bibliography will be evaluated on how well it is written, how comprehensive your sources are, and formatting (MLA).

Your Book Reviews will be evaluated on style, voice/tone, and how engaging they are. Remember, subtext is good. In other words, you won't want to write boring reviews. I suggest that you write a review early in the semester so that I can advise you if you're on track or offer suggestions.

This would be a bored smiley face. You don't want this in terms of your book reviews.

The Final Project will be evaluated on your level of contribution, how well developed the project is, and how innovative, creative, and interesting. Again, subtext is a good thing, but there's also a fine line.

An Important Note: I've seldom been one who enjoys collaborative work (at least not until lately), but I don't really think any of you would want tackle the final project by yourselves. If you're not good with technology, then come up with good ideas. Good ideas really do count. And if as a class you want to do a couple of short videos instead of one long one, talk to me about it.

Academic Integrity

Don't plagiarize. You'll fail the course and ruin your career.

Classroom Etiquette

Students are expected to be civil, polite, and accommodating to differences of opinion. University policy provides the means for dismissing students who do not meet these requirements, and I take politeness very seriously.

Attendance: (New Content)

Attendance is a different animal with on-line courses. Unless experience s serious injury or illness, or have some kind of family emergency, there's no reason for you to not "attend" class. The discussion board and your activity logs will count as attendance. So, if you know you're going to be gone and won't have access to the course, post to the discussion board and hand in your activity log early. If you forget to pos and/or hand in your activity logt, then you have simply forgotten to show up for class. If you miss 3 posts and/or activity logs or more, I reserve the right to drop you from the class.

Dinner: (New Content)

Expect to be invited to dinner at my place on occasion. Attendance, however, is not mandatory. Also, toward the end of the semester, I suspect we'll need some kind of debriefing (at my house or at one of our finer dining establishments).Otherwise, I will probably have you write something wherein you discuss what you've done and learned during the semester. So, which do you want to do? Come to my place or write something? We'll talk about that more during the semester.

Americans with Disabilities Act:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal anti-discrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities. If you have a disability requiring an accommodation, please contact:
Office of Student Disability Resources and Services, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Gee Library, Room 132, Phone (903) 886-5150 or (903) 886-5835, Fax (903) 468-8148, e-mail: StudentDisabilityServices@tamu-commerce.edu

Final Thoughts:

This is not a traditional class by any means, even in terms of on-line courses. Rather, we will meet at the beginning of the semester to introduce you to the blog. After that, the course will be held through eCollege and through our own blog-a place where you can experiment. At some point during the semester, you will "go on the road," so to speak, with Dr. Roggenkamp or me as a way to introduce the blog to students in local and regional high schools. Dr. Roggenkamp will have access to the class blog and to eCollege.