I See What You Did There!

 We have done a sort of "reverse engineering" to discover what makes good blogs "good." This was a fun and interesting experiment, and, of course, inspirational and provocative towards helping us get ideas for our web and blog design. But, did you know it has some good theory behind it?

Read pages 1-8, and pages 40-53 from James Paul Gee's New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and "Worked Examples" as One Way Forward. 

Make notes in your blog entry about how you practiced this sort of "remediation" in learning to compose in a new medium, and how you leveraged the examples of others to develop your own "rules" for making a "good" blog and website.

Oh, and by the way, here are the "rules" you made:

• Clean Design: Easy on the Eyes, Good Colors, NOT unreadable fonts, etc.
• More Control: Easy to Find Stuff
• Message: Topic and Audience in mind
• Attention Getting: Interesting Headlines, Videos & Pictures
• Concise: with more available by links, no long scrolling
• Visual: Colors, Pics, Vids, Layout
• Writing Style:  Attention to grammar, voice, etc.

Reflecting on Technology, AI & The Future

This link directs you to a bog entry I wrote in May, 2015, shorty after I started using the Amazon Echo product, AKA "Alexa."

In this piece, you will find literary/cultural references to:

•  Erewhon
• Terminator
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Robocop
• I, Robot
• A FastCo article 

But no references to the wonderful readings covered in our class! So, you will read with a greater depth of understanding than most.

Enjoy.

What Makes Good Blogs Good?

This week, COMM 324 students will investigate what makes a good blog "good." In an emerging medium, it is often the case that we recognize what is "good" BEFORE we've articulated the rules and grammar and taxonomies whereby we know WHY it is good. And so, good examples can be used as exemplars to study so we might derive our rules and grammars for a new medium.


(We will read selections from James Paul Gee's New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and “Worked Examples” as One Way Forward in the coming weeks, but first, we will practice this approach of "reverse-engineering" a "good" example to discover what makes it good.) And, so...

Students will select (and explore thoughtfully) 2 or 3 blogs from the 2015 Bloggie Winners - as well as 2 or 3 blogs from TIME magazine's Best Bloggers of 2013 list. After reading and interacting with the blogs, students will enter in their blog entries the name of the blogs explored (with links) - and a descriptive list of elements and features that account for each blog being named as "best" or award-winning."

We will compare our findings in our class discussion, and propose heuristics and grammars from our findings!

Learning To Work in a New Medium

 The following was a "mock-up" of how to take notes on evaluating websites in the "infantile" period of development (late 90's) and in their current state of development. We asked students to use the Wayback Machine to compare a current popular website to an earlier version of itself to discover how early sites remediated content and communication practices from previous media.

 FROM CLASS NOTES: In their book, Remediation, Bolter & Grusin point out that new media develop literacies “by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television.” This process of “remediation” is seen in earlier media which refashioned one another: writing remediated orality, photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production, and television remediated film, etc.

McLuhan explains that each new medium contains the previous medium as content.

• Reading was the content of early Stage.
• Stage was the content of early Movies.
• Film or Stage is content of infantile TV.
• Chalkboard is content of infantile PPT.
• Print ads were content of infantile Websites.

While the Pepsi exercise below was intended only as a skeletal example, I was struck by the immediate evidences of how technology dictated literacies (monitor screen sizes) and how much social media and user-generated content has been incorporated into current websites!
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I explored the Pepsi Website from 2001and found a few interesting things:

• What's with all the empty space on the right? (Computer monitor resolutions dictated a smaller viewing area - 400x600 or 600x800 - PLUS the HTML coding didn't allow for scalable websites.)
• etc. Britney!
• etc. Games!

But the New Pepsi site is quite different!

• It has tons of photos!
• It has contributions from users!
• It is social media driven!
• etc.
• etc.

Vlogging Our Discussion Notes

What Makes New Media "New?"

In our first week of discussions in COM 324 (Readings in New Media) at Queens University in Charlotte, we discussed the following:

• Alan Turing and "The Imitation Game," The Turing Test, Predictions from 1950 for 2000 and Eugene Goostman;
• Isaac Asimov and predictions from 1964 for 2014, Facetime, Skype, Google Self-driving Cars, Roombas and more;
• Our Visions of the Future from film and television;
• Theodor Adorno's desciption of the "Culture Industry" and its power to "standardize" our thinking about the past and future and other things through its "non-democratic" machinery of one-way communication; and
• How President Obama and Kanye broke the grip of monolithic media power.

NOW, we enter the discussion of the one key element that makes New Media "New": AGENCY. It seems a "system of rejoinder" DOES exist, Theodor!

Each week, each student will READ ALL ASSIGNED READINGS, but will lead a thoughtful discussion on one or more of the readings/viewings as assigned in the previous class meeting. In preparation, each student will build a blog to record notes, thoughts and questions on the reading as a guideline for leading discussion.


Students may use whichever blog format they wish, but if student has no preference, the instructor recommends Blogger as an easy way to do a blog with a Google/Gmail account - the MAIN SITE IS HERE, and INSTRUCTIONS ARE HERE for Blogger.

For each reading assigned, the student will post the following notes in the blog before midnight Sunday:

1. Who, What, When, Where, Why, How? (Overview of the reading)
2. Most important, puzzling, sketchy, scary, incorrect, prescient, hopeful, intelligent, relevant, etc. points?
3. What questions are raised?
4. What implications are made?

Students will send blog URLs to Professor by Sunday Midnight.

**All readings and links for viewings are in the COM 324 My Course/Engage resources.