Understanding Media Studies

Department of Media Studies & Film

CRN 6760

Understanding Media Studies is a required colloquium for all Media Studies students in their first semester of study. Students must register for the Monday night lecture and an online discussion section; online students register only for the online discussion section and access recorded lectures and lecture materials through Blackboard. Recordings will be posted within 24 hours of the class meeting. Every week, members of the Media Studies Principal Faculty and other invited guests from the University and the wider field of media studies and practice will share their own work and methods, thereby exposing students to the varied dimensions of research and practice in the field, and particularly in our Department. Over the course of the semester, students will meet the instructors, support staff, and colleagues with whom they will work throughout their graduate studies; become familiar with useful University resources; and develop skills and practices needed for graduate study. Students will complete several reflective and exploratory exercises leading incrementally toward the completion of a comprehensive academic plan, which will help students to map their own paths through the program and will serve as an essential advising document. Grading will be pass/fail.

Shannon Mattern, Ph.D.Barbara Adams

Adam GannawayTodd Kesselman

Sam TobinSanja Trpkovic

Alessia Giustiniano

LECTURE: repository•Syllabus

•Readings•Lecture

recordings and presentation

material

DISCUSSION SECTION:interaction

•Discussion•Assignment

submission

Our Class Blackboard Sites:All general course documents and recordings – e.g., recorded lectures, lecture materials, readings, up-to-date syllabus, etc. – will be available in the lecture’s Blackboard site (CRN 6760). This site will be used primarily as a repository of material; we won’t be using any of its interactive features.

All discussions and discussion section-specific activities will take place in your discussion section’s Blackboard site (CRN 6761-6768).

Syllabus:most up-to-

date syllabus

Lecture Notes: lecture

recordings and

presentation materials

Resources:class readings

Announcements: look here for new updates, special instructions for downloading materials, etc.

Lecture Recordings

• Technical Associate: Alessia Giustiniano– Records each Monday night lecture– Posts lecture and support material by

Tuesday evening• First week: by Tues 11:59pm• Subsequent weeks: Tues 6pm

Lecture Recordings

• Online-only students: view video w/in Blackboard asap

• Join classmates in your Discussion section

• On-site students: welcome to watch recordings if you miss lecture – Expected to attend in-person

• Join online discussion

Whom to Contact for What: For the sake of efficiency, we ask that you consider your TA’s your first points of contact; they can address all issues regarding attendance and other class expectations, assignments, research skills, project development, and general course-related concerns. Shannon will assist the TA’s with any especially complicated issues, and is happy to speak with you about general academic issues and any discussion section-related concerns that you do not feel comfortable addressing with the TA’s. If you’re having problems with Blackboard, please contact New School Online.

Every week, members of the Media Studies Principal Faculty and other invited guests from the University and the wider field of media studies and practice will share their own work and methods, thereby exposing students to the varied dimensions of research and practice in the field, and particularly in our Department. Over the course of the semester, students will meet the instructors, support staff, and colleagues with whom they will work throughout their graduate studies; become familiar with useful University resources; and develop skills and practices needed for graduate study.

Course Requirements and Grading:Grading is pass/fail, but, as with all required courses, students must have a ‘B’ average in order to pass the course.

Attendance and Participation. Attendance at the weekly lectures is expected. On-site students are expected to attend in-person and sign in with their TA’s each week, and online students are expected to review all posted recordings and support material. More than three excused absences, any unexcused absences, or excessive tardiness – or, for online students, failure to review the recorded lectures – will negatively impact your grade.

Discussion Section Participation: 20%. Online students should first make sure to review the week’s recorded lecture and lecture material, which will be posted by 6pm on Tuesday of each week, before joining the discussion. All students are then expected to post two or three substantial comments during each discussion week. Specific requirements are listed under each week on the course schedule; note that for some weeks, particularly those in which assignments are due, there is no online discussion. Comments posted after each week’s deadline will not count toward your participation requirement, and failure to post for three discussion weeks may compromise your ability to pass the class.

By substantial, we mean synthetic (i.e., in that it reflects an attempt on your part to think collectively about the weeks themes and assigned texts and, if appropriate, references these texts), critical, analytic, and reasonably lengthy (i.e., at least 100 words). Please read or, at the very least, skim all of the other posts, and, if you choose, respond to others comments in your post.

Nota Bene: Some online communication formats seem to give us license to speak or write more colloquially or unguardedly than we otherwise would. Remember that the writing style and content youd use for/in a text message, an email to a close acquaintance, or an anonymous posting to an online discussion group arent the same as those you’d use for a class posting. Blackboard posts should be collegial and professional not necessarily hyper-formal, just respectful and well put-together.

Professional Website. Must be online by September 29; please share the web address with your TA. You’ll be posting all subsequent assignments to this site. (If you have any concerns about sharing your work online, please consult with your TA.)

Intellectual Autobiography: 20%. Described below. Due October 6 @ 6pm.

Abstracts: 10%. Described below. Due October 27 @ 6pm.

Literature/Media Review: 20%. Described below. Due December 1 @ 6pm.

Academic Plan: 30%. Described below.

Required Texts:

Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (New York: Phaidon, 2001).

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

Additional readings and resources will be posted to the RESOURCES area in the lecture’s Blackboard site (CRN 6760).

Please consult the syllabus, posted in Blackboard, to review the weekly schedule.

Assignment: Professional Website: Online by September 29.If you don’t already have your own website, create one. The New School provides web space for all current students (link in syllabus). If you want your site to live beyond your years at The New School, you might consider paying for web hosting. If you’re new to design, try iWeb, or use a simple blog.

Your site will serve as your academic and professional portfolio. You can use it to chronicle your progress through the program; it’ll help you remember what you’ve learned – and someday, it’ll allow you to reflect on your graduate experience. Plus, if you invest some time and energy in it, the site can function in self-promotion; it could help to get you a job, or an acceptance to a PhD program.

At this stage of the game, you needn’t worry about aesthetics; you’ll learn about that in later courses. For now, we’re concerned with site content, some of which you’ll create in this course.

Value of Professional Websites

See Henry Jenkins, “Public Intellectuals in the New-Media Landscape” The Chronicle of Higher Education (4 April 2008).

http://cms.mit.edu/ http://www.henryjenkins.org/http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/http://www.projectnml.org/blog

http://sterneworks.org/ http://malenel.wordpress.com/ http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/ http://michaelcosentino.com/http://www.rezaaslan.com/

Reflective Journal

“‘off-loading’ device” : “allow[s] the learner to take stock, evaluate and ‘deposit’ ideas and feelings about the learning experience” (58)

dynamic: “a depository for a range of information in a range of media, which is added to and consulted on a regular basis” (59)

Possible Contents: bibliographic database, project glossary, contacts, correspondence, activity log

See Carole Gray & Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design (Burlington, VT:

Ashgate, 2004).

Reflective Journal

Document the failures

Evaluate the pace and progress of your work -- e.g., key incidents, decisions, realizations

Brainstorm, think aloud, have insights, make decisions, make changes, ask ‘what if’ questions, make plans for improvement

See Carole Gray & Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); http://www.biad.uce.ac.uk/research/rti/riadm/issue1/abstract.ht

m

Commonplace Book

http://mycommonplace.com/

"Most children like to collect things. At four I started to collect documents of my own development as correlated with world patterns of developing technology. Beginning in 1917, I determined to employ my already rich case history, as objectively as possible, in documenting the life of a suburban New Englander, born in the Gay Nineties (1895)-- the year automobiles were introduced, the wireless telegraph and the automatic screw machine were invented, and X-rays were discovered; having his boyhood in the turn of the century; and maturing during humanity's epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic19th into the dynamic 20th century. I named my documentation the Chronofile. —From Synergetics Dictionary citing Citizen of 21st. Century, (U, or 0, Chap. 1), 1 Apr'67 (http://www.bfi.org/node/105)

Do very hard things, just for the sake of it.

Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were in yours.

A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius--the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this "scenius” --it means "the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene." It is the communal form of the concept of genius.