A few of you mentioned you couldn’t download the syllabus when looking at the final paper assignment. You can download the syllabus from here, and the final paper assignment is below:
MAJOR PAPER:
Conduct original research on an online trend or digital media in which
you have some interest. A list of suggested topics will be distributed. Collect all articles
and books written about the topic. Read them. Analyze them, and synthesize their
meaning. If there is a shortage of written material about your topic, conduct original
research; do phone or email interviews with original sources. Analyze and synthesize the meaning of the interviews. Draw a conclusion about the direction of the trend or
technology. The paper should summarize and synthesize the state of the trend or
technology and make an argument. The final paper should be 12 to 15 pages long. It should be a publication-quality paper. It should be copiously cited using APA format.
Grading: You will be evaluated on the comprehensiveness of the review, clarity of the
argument and written composition, use of APA format, and the quality of the main
argument. The paper counts for 33% of the final grade.
Five readings for Monday. “Wikiworld” is the only Science Fiction reading I ever assign. It is a short story that imagines the US Government if it was replaced by Wikipedia. On the heels of the Andrew Lih book, it should be very thought-provoking. “Why Craigslist is Such A Mess” appears at first not to be very related to government — but we’ll discuss in class why I assigned it.:
- Point-and-Click Politics - by Micah Sifry, Wall Street Journal, Oct 30, 2010
- We’re in open government’s beta period - by Alex Howard, O’Reilly Radar, 14 September 2010
- Can People Help Legislators Make Better Laws? Brazil Shows How - by Cristiano Faria, Tech President, April 29, 2010, 2:19pm
- Wikiworld - by Paul Di Filippo
- Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess - by Gary Wolf, Wired Magazine
Assignments due in class on Monday, Nov. 7:
- Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. by Malcolm Gladwell, from The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/9edwPK
- What Gladwell Got Wrong: Beyond “Like Button” Activism by Sam Graham-Felsen, from The Huffington Post: http://bit.ly/clcneg
- Michael Silberman: 350 Global Day of Action: A New Bright Line for Digital Organizing: http://a.nicco.org/v6vKUV
- Twitter and Activism by Biz Stone from The Atlantic: http://bit.ly/c3ZFPn
- Malcolm Gladwell’s Response to Critics of His New Yorker Piece on Social Media by Mike Isaac from Forbes.com: http://bit.ly/cFKmJC
- Michael Silberman: Looking for What Works: Best Online Organizing Reads of 2010: http://a.nicco.org/tcrZbS
Just three readings for Wednesday:
- Persuasion Points Online: Helping Harry Reid, One Click at a Time
by Jon-David Schlough, Josh Koster, Andy Barr, and Tyler Davis
http://a.nicco.org/ve7oCT
- “Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon
Volume 7, Issue 2-3, 2010
by Kevin Wallsten
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/witp20
- “The MoveOn Effect: Disruptive Innovation within the Interest Group Ecology of American Politics.” Presented at the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism Annual Conference, University of Pennsylvania, May 1 2009.
by David Karpf
http://davekarpf.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/moveon.pdf
Assignments due in class on Monday, Nov. 7:
- Add one article on Delicious
- Write a blog post about the last two weeks of readings covering journalism, media, and technology.
- Read the following articles for Monday:
- Online Tactics & Success: An Examination of the Obama for America New Media Campaign - download the PDF here.
- The New Organizers, What’s really behind Obama’s ground game
Zack Exley
The Huffington Post
http://bit.ly/7XB0bK
- How the Internet put Barak Obama in the White House
By Colin Delany
e.politics
http://bit.ly/5WMAOS
- Neighbor to Neighbor: How Obama Targets Undecideds Block by Block
By Seth Colter Wallis
The Huffington Post
http://bit.ly/8JBOs5
- Pulling Off Houdini’s Trick
By Nancy Scola
Personal Democracy Forum
http://bit.ly/7ewwt5
Due in class on Wednesday, Nov. 2:
- Add an article to the class delicious feed
- Here are the readings for Wednesday, our last set of readings on journalism and the digital age:
- Ben McGrath, Search and Destroy: Nick Denton’s blog empire. The New Yorker (Oct. 18, 2010).
- Raffi Khatchadourian, No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency. The New Yorker (June 7, 2010).
- Jaron Lanier, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, from Edge.org (5.30.06).
- Peter Daou, The Triangle: Limits of Blog Power, originally posted on Salon’s Daou Report, September 19, 2005.
- Dave Winer, Whitehouse.gov should be a super-hyperlocal blog, at his blog Scripting News (Nov. 7, 2010).
- Franky Branckaute, State of The Blogosphere in 2010, at The Blog Herald (Sept. 20, 2010).
Here are the readings for Wednesday - a continuation of our examination of the impact of the internet on journalism:
- Kevin Kelly, 1,000 True Fans, at his blog, The Technium. (March 4, 2008).
- Patricia B. Gray, Owner Mark Cuban Trades Stocks on Sharesleuth’s Findings Before They’re Published. Wired Magazine, (September 27, 2007).
- Dan Conover, 2020 vision: What’s next for news, at his blog, Xark. (March 20, 2009).
- Dave Winer, The reboot of journalism, at his blog Scripting News (March 19, 2009).
- Amanda Michel, Get off the Bus: The future of pro-am journalism. Columbia Journalism Review, (March/ April 2009). (Electronic reserve.)
- Doc Searls, After the Advertising Bubble Bursts, at his blog (March 23, 2009).
- Susannah Breslin, The numbers on self-publishing long form journalism, at her blog (Oct. 19, 2010).
Due in class on Monday, Oct. 24:
- Add an article to the class delicious feed.
- We’re moving into a unit on technology and it’s impact on journalism. Last year I noticed a blog post on Dave Winer’s Scripting News about Jay Rosen’s class — and discovered that several of the readings are ones I was already planning on assigning, but there are some new ones, too. Jay has his class read a series of speeches by news executives — and then a series of pieces from a broader set of sources. We’re not going to read the news executives speeches — but we will read Dave’s post about the news executives, and a range of other pieces. So a special thanks to Jay and Dave — and here are your readings for Monday:
- Dave Winer, Readings from news execs, at his blog Scripting News (Oct. 25, 2010).
- Jeff Jarvis, The Last Presses, at his blog, Buzzmachine (Dec. 5, 2005).
- Eric Alterman, Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper, article in The New Yorker, (March 31, 2008).
- Nick Carr, The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net, Britannica Blog (April 7, 2008).
- Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, at his blog. (March 13, 2009).
- Steven Berlin Johnson, Old Growth Media and the Future of News, at his blog. (March 14, 2009).
- Dave Winer, Sources Go Direct, at his blog Scripting News (May 15, 2009).
Please take a moment to fill out the Course Evaluation.
Here are your readings for Monday — and one video!
I should also have the mid-terms graded by Monday, and we’ll spend some time reviewing them in class.
Due in class on Wednesday, Oct. 5:
1. Create a Wikipedia account, create a user page, and add your name to this page. You may wish to add some biographical information. For example of user pages, you can check out the user pages of last year’s Wikipedia Ambassadors: Dick Clark, Michael Chen, and Ryan Malloy. (My Wikipedia user page is here.)
2. Find an article in an area where you have some expertise. This may include:
- a policy issue where you have some expertise and experience (for example: state absentee voting)
- a policy issue where you have done academic research (for example: The Global Fund for TB, Malaria and AIDS)
- an institution where you have worked or studied (for example: The Concord Monitor newspaper)
- your home town (for example: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
- your hobby or deep interest (for example: a specific writer or poet)
Choose a topic or keyword that is well established in the discipline, but only weakly represented on Wikipedia. If there is a lot of literature available on the topic, but only a small amount of that information exists on Wikipedia, that is the best situation to work from.
What to avoid in chosing a topic:
- Trying to improve articles on very broad topics (e.g. Law) or articles that are already of high quality on Wikipedia (“featured articles”)
- Trying to improve articles on topics that are highly controversial, e.g. Global Warming, Abortion, Scientology, etc. (Note: start a sub-article instead)
- Working on topics that are only sparsely covered by literature
- Starting articles with titles that imply an essay-like approach, e.g. The Effects That The Recent Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis has had on the US and Global Economics instead of Subprime mortgage crisis
3. Choose a single article for your work. Evaluate that article :
- Comprehensiveness: Determine what content is missing from the article. Does the article cover significant aspects of the topic?
- Sourcing: Assess the quality of the cited sources. Are the sources of high quality relative to what is available?
- Articles must rely on information from published sources, resources known for fact-checking such as:
- Mainstream press (newspapers and news channels)
- Published books
- Magazines (technical and industry standards)
- Documentaries
- Scholarly journals
- Neutrality: Is the article written from a neutral point of view?
- Readability: Is the article readable and well written?
- Formatting: Does the article adhere to the Wikipedia Manual of Style?
- Illustrations: Is the article adequately illustrated?
4. Write a blog post on your blog of a minimum of 500 words:
- Link to your Wikipedia user page (so that Nicco and Stephen can find it!)
- Explain what article you picked and why you picked it.
- Write an evaluation of that article. What is missing? What sources would you considering adding?
