DPI-659

Final Paper assignment

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:04:04 -0500

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.

Assignments for Monday, Nov. 21

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 09:06:00 -0500

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 for Monday, Nov. 14

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:29:51 -0500

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

Assignments for Wednesday, Nov. 7

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:51:57 -0500

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 for Monday, Nov. 7

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:52:54 -0400

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

Assignments for Wednesday, Nov. 2

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:07:15 -0400

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).

Assignments for Wednesday, Oct. 26

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:55:00 -0400

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).

Assignments for Monday, Oct. 24

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:25:00 -0400

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).

Assignments for Monday, Oct. 17

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:45:00 -0400

Please take a moment to fill out the Course Evaluation.

Here are your readings for Monday — and one video!

EFF: On Location Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever by Andrew J. Blumberg and Peter Eckersley (August 2009)
EFF’s Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy by Stanton McCandlish (April 2002)
Sun on Privacy: Get Over It by Polly Sprenger (January 1999, Wired)
The Eternal Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier (May 2006, Wired)
Facebook CEO Doesn’t Believe in Privacy by Eliot Van Buskirk (April 2010, Wired)
Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing by Steven Johnson (May 2010, Time Magazine)
Eli Pariser: Filter Bubble, or How Personalization is Changing the Web - TED talk video.
Eli Pariser: 10 things to Pop your Filter Bubble

I should also have the mid-terms graded by Monday, and we’ll spend some time reviewing them in class.

Assignments for Wednesday, Oct. 5

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:40:02 -0400

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?

Assignments for Monday, Oct. 3

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:13:00 -0400

Due in class on Monday, Oct. 3rd:

Keep reading ‘The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia’ by Andrew Lih; you need to have it finished by the end of next week.
Add an article to the delicious feed.
Pick a Wikipedia article for evaluation on Monday. 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 choosing 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

Assignments for Wednesday, Sept. 28

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:37:30 -0400

Due in class on Monday, Sept. 28:

Read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond. It is available online here; scroll down a bit, and you’ll see it in many, many languages. But the online version can be challenging as a reading experience, so I’ve sent around a PDF to the class through the Google group.
Read “What is Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly. It’s also available in multiple languages.
Keep reading ‘The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia’ by Andrew Lih; you need to have it finished by the end of next week.
Add an article to the delicious feed.

Thanks nicco

Student Blogs

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:02:00 -0400

Akiko http://www.akiko-sugaya.net

Alex http://www.alexway.ca

Anthony http://www.thrivalhive.com

Bashar http://www.imcurious.org

Carlotta http://www.englishstudentblog.wordpress.com

Catherine http://www.cdleland.com

Claude http://www.true212.com/news/

Dan http://www.iamrealmandan.com

David http://www.ricorzo.com

Diane http://www.dianechang.net

Dorit http://www.doritz.wordpress.com

Hanna http://www.hannasiegel.com

Jaime http://www.rapaportbarry.com

Jane http://www.jjmediablog.wordpress.com

Jeff http://www.jeffreyyoungdotorg.wordpress.com

Jenny http://www.jennylm.com

Jeremy http://www.jaytalking.net

Jon http://www.jdhollander.com

Jonathan http://www.jonathanablakley.com

junko http://www.clinkvoices.org

Kristina http://www.kristinaredgrave.com

Leora http://www.leorafalk.com

Lilly http://www.lweinbergHKS.com

Lise http://www.ameasureoflight.com

Logan http://www.logangibson.com

Luis http://www.luiscapelo.info

Lynn http://www.lynnfine.wordpress.com

Maja http://www.hondabgd.wordpress.com

Maria http://www.mariadavydenko.com

Martin http://www.martinoblog.wordpress.com

Matt http://www.mattmabe.net

Matthew http://www.matthewhenschel.com

Meghan http://meghanmediablog.com/

Melissa http://www.melissag659.us

Mengliu http://www.carrouselgomerry.wordpress.com

Michael http://www.thedailycollegiate.com

Mike http://www.hickory-street.com

Nicandro http://www.captainofmysoul.org

Nick http://www.nickmumm.com

Paul http://www.paulthomas173.wordpress.com

Philipp http://philippessl.com

Rey http://www.reyfaustino.org

Rhoda http://www.rhodsterdotorg.wordpress.com

Rodney Cocks

Rodrigo http://www.www.rodgarza.com

Rory http://www.roryjhsmith.com

Sacha http://www.sachafeinman.com

Sean http://www.sean-barney.com

Siv http://sivmeisingseth.wordpress.com/

Susan http://www.awatchedpot.com

Sushma http://www.cadrethegiant.com

Talmage http://www.talmageblog.com

Thao Anh http://www.ThaoAnhTran.com

Tyler http://www.celalu.wordpress.com

Valentine http://www.hks-newmedia.com

Yael http://www.shots4peace.com

Zacky http://www.dago78.com

Discussed in class

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:11:49 -0400

A few things we discussed today in class:

Someone in class asked how the bidding process works. Here is a good video of Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, explaining it.
The Google Grants application is here, and here are two companies that help non-profits manage their Google grants: Gott and Common Sense Google Grant Management.
You can follow the class twitter hash tag #mppdigital here.

Assignments for Monday, Sept. 26

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:09:44 -0400

Due in class on Monday, Sept. 26:

Write your second blog post, a reading review of Stephen Levy’s In The Plex. Remember: Summarize, Analyze, Synthesize.
Buy $10 worth of Google AdWords. Remember to set a date limit. Here’s a good video tutorial on how to buy AdWords.
Read these two short articles on the Obama White House and their use of SEO and SEM:
- “ObamaCare”: Google Ads on the World As It Is
- The SEO White House
Buy & start reading Andrew Lih’s “The Wikipedia Revolution”.
Add an article to the class delicious feed.

Assignments for Wednesday, Sept. 21

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:54:06 -0400

Due in class on Wednesday, Sept. 21:

Finish reading ‘In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives’ by Stephen Levy
http://amzn.to/o6O1ZT
Add one article to the class delicious feed.

Assignments for Monday, Sept. 19

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:38:52 -0400

Due in class on Monday, Sept. 19:

Finish reading ‘In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives’ by Stephen Levy
http://amzn.to/o6O1ZT
Add one article to the class delicious feed.

Assignments for Wednesday, Sept. 14

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:49:29 -0400

Due in class on Wednesday, Sept. 14:

Make sure you have submitted your website name (& blog post on Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”) using this form: http://bit.ly/dpi659blogs
Start reading ‘In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives’ by Stephen Levy
http://amzn.to/o6O1ZT
Add one article to the class delicious feed.

Once you've got your blog

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:57:44 -0400

Please fill out this little form so I know where to find it:

http://bit.ly/dpi659blogs

Thanks

Assignments for Monday, Sept. 12

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:17:26 -0400

Due in class on Monday, Sept. 12:

Finish reading ‘Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations’ by Clay Shirky
Use InstantDomainSearch.com to find an available domain; I recommend using Wordpress to purchase the domain, but you can also use another registrar like GoDaddy to purchase it. You will need a credit card. It should cost approximately $15. Remember to say “No” to all of the additional offers they will try to sell you.
Setup your Wordpress.com blog
Post your first blog post — a reading review of Clay Shirky’s book. If you need a video Wordpress tutorial, this one by my friend Chris is excellent. You might want to skip the first 5 minutes.
If you do not use Wordpress to purchase your domain, but instead use another registrar, then you need to “point” your domain to your wordpress blog. I will show you how to do this briefly in class on Monday, but I recommend you try it before class, instructions are here.
You must post at least 2 articles to del.icio.us — I will email the username and password to the Google Group. Here is a link that will teach you how to create a Delicious bookmark. DO NOT CREATE A DELICIOUS ACCOUNT — use the class’ shared account.

I mentioned blog platforms in class. Here are some of the more popular ones, other than Wordpress:

Blogger
Posterous
LiveJournal (I think the LiveJournal stats page is particularly interesting)
Open Diary
SquareSpace
Tumblr (This website is actually a Tumblr blog.)
TypePad
Windows Live Spaces
Wordpress
Xanga