Good news! Only three people have yet to sign up for presentation slots: Melanie E., David H., Mark R. You all can see the schedule on the main course page.

Every day that I drive down to Tri-Cities I think up awesome final projects. Too bad you all aren’t in my brain! But have no fear, as I’m ready to do that teacher thing where we help you narrow down the ideas you have by asking probing questions. You’re all welcome to start that process any time now…bearing in mind that next week is your mid-term and then the blog post for the Friday after that is a short proposal for your topic.

For those who have asked about grades, my plan has always been to show you the list after your midterms are graded. That way the grades will reflect a greater portion of the work. However, you are welcome to e-mail me and request your current grade. A reminder about the participation portion of the grade: if you’re not in class, you can’t gather points. Those writing assignments in class are going to be more frequent as you work to synthesize the readings (and essentially are in lieu of an exam or two) and serve to reward those who are actually in class (that steady group of 35-37 of you).

On to Dibbell. As I said, although “A Rape in Cyberspace” is seventeen years old, it serves several purposes. It’s historical information, in that you get a sense of the types of virtual communities that would eventually give rise to the ones in which you operate now, and it illustrates very real issues regarding the split (or not) between virtual and physical worlds and our interactions in them. When asked what this essay is about, you all had different answers, of course. Yes, it’s about virtual rape. Yes, it’s about the growth of a community and problems of creating rules for governing the space. Yes, it’s about the consequences in the physical world for things that happen in virtual worlds.

This piece in particular would be a good starting point for a number of possible projects, or at the very least a good supporting element for any discussion of virtual communities.

Before I forget to tell you, I’ve updated the course calendar to include the presentation timeslots and their owners.

As of now, the following people still need to claim a spot: Kaitlin C., Melanie E., Hannah G., Andrew H., David H., Mark M., Mark R., Spencer T.. Do so, so you know what date to plan for!

Although Tuesday was the first of four days on gender & sexuality, the readings for Tuesday focused on gender & sexuality in gaming. This is for good reason, as gender & sexuality runs all through many (popular) video games—from Lara Croft’s “fake polygons” to the hypermasculinity exhibited in some first- and third-person shooters.

But I wanted to start the discussion with a little James Gee. Specifically, some of his learning principles as discussed in What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy. The writing assignment/question had you discuss one of six (of the 36) learning principles whose brief descriptions I supplied, and associate that principle with something that you read for today and also know from your interactions in the world. This is the sort of concept-linking that this course is all about.

I thought you performed from admirably to awesome. When coming at Gee’s learning principles from this angle, their applicability may seem obvious. And for the most part some of them are—but this text is a foundational one in several fields of study: pedagogy, for one, including lifelong learning.

We only scratched the surface of discussing games and approaches to games/attitudes toward games, but when we continue on Thursday this discussion of gender & sexuality in games, and then move to gender & sexuality online in general, keep in mind the interplay between games and culture in general.

As par for the course, the majority of you who did the assignments did a good job. The “divide” in this class is less about skill and more about just doing the work or not. I guess that’s good? Easier to grade, I suppose. I will point out—for for documentary purposes than anything, because I don’t expect to change the work habits of anyone disinclined to do it—that the different between doing an average job (3 out of 4 points for a blog post) plus the point reserved for the commenting portion of the assignment and an average job but skipping the comments is pretty big. For the former, you would end up geting 82% of the possible points, or 20.5/25 for the blog, while the latter would give you only 62% of the possible points, or 15.5/25 for the blog. In other words, if you give away these relatively easy points in the blog assignments, there’s no way you’re getting an A in the class. [Current overall grade spread based solely on participation & blogging: 10 in A range, 8 in B range, 10 in C range, 5 in D range, 11 in F range.]

One thing that has struck me throughout this course is how a good number of you ignore parts of the assignments—the due date and comments, to be sure, but also crucial parts like “summarize the text” or “find articles by an author”. I don’t know if that’s a willfull disregard of the assignment or just not knowing how to do it (I tend toward the latter). Finding texts in the library, and summarizing texts (again, here’s a link to some guidelines and here’s another), are two fundamental things you should have learned in your Introductory Writing classes, and practiced throughout the other classes you have taken to get to this level. If you were never taught those things, then see me after class to get on a path toward learning such things, as without a good working knowledge of summary, argument, and avoiding fallacies, you won’t do well on your final papers. And I want you to do well on your final papers.

Believe me, I wouldn’t harp on this so much if a) it weren’t important and b) I didn’t care about your academic well-being.

Anyway.

For those of you who carefully read the Nakamura chapters and understood her academic arguments in support of the overall purpose of this book, her work, and the field of study with which she (and many others) are engaged—good for you. This set of people included those who struggled with the text (as you should), who attempted (and for the most part succeeded) in lifting up the critical framework for “the social optics of race” and applying it to different films, and for those who found appropriate and acceptable ways to disagree with an argument using standard academic rhetoric. The latter does not include saying Nakamura, her ideas, or the entire fields of cultural studies are stupid, retarded, or wrong.

Avoid, when making arguments of your own, the following fallacies (and all the rest, but these are ones I saw littered throughout the posts): ad hominem, appeal to ridicule, appeal to spite, hasty generalization, personal attack, poisoning the well, straw man. Want to learn more about fallacies? Here’s a list.

To be sure, I don’t particularly care if you agree or disagree with any theorist we read, or feel that entire bodies of work and fields of study are bogus. I do care that you can synthesize, engage with, discuss, and make arguments in appropriate ways in an academic setting. For those of you who are, good on you. For those of you who aren’t. you’re just making yourself look bad and people aren’t going to take you seriously no matter how smart you are.

I swear this is going to be the last time I talk about this, because it really eats away at my soul and it’s unnecessary for the half+ of you who are doing a good job.

About blog assignment #6, as I said:

What I will do after assignment #6 has been completed is compile everything into a post of my own and essentially summarize your posts while providing what will be akin to a group annotated bibliography. This bibliography would then be available for you while doing research for your final projects, which should use some of the works by some of these important theorists.

However, I’m torn about this now, as so few of you provided bibliographic information. I’m not your research lackey! The idea of working with you to compile a class bibliography was a gift! A URL to something you found on the internet is not a bibliographic citation. Here’s a blog with appropriate bibliographic stuff in it, and a few others did the same.

I might just pull together a bibliography from the posts that included bibliographic information. Feel free to edit yours.

Now, blog assignment #7 is due this week. It’s the last blog assignment before you take your midterm. DO A GOOD JOB.

Don’t think I didn’t check in on your blogs when I was gone, for I did!

But I am going through now and giving them the once-over for real (evaluating/grading, etc). I will be leaving a comment on the most recent assignment post when I get to it, and it will say (for everyone) “I have evaluated your posts and comments (where applicable) for assignments #5 & #6. Before Tuesday 2/23 I will have written summary comments about the assignments and posted them on the course blog.”

That’s my plan—tonight I will work on those posts and then tomorrow we will get back on track in class. You can expect to start class with a writing assignment!

[Also, for those students who expressed interest, here is the text of my presentation from the conference at Yale.]

My plan is to evaluate your blogs but no longer to leave my own comments, as your commenting communities should be in full swing.

I will be posting a summative comment for each assignment. In other words, I will write a post that contains my comments about your posts overall. I will do this for blog assignment #5 (due last Friday) as well as blog assignment #6 (due tomorrow) and then moving forward.

(or Thursday, 02/18, either, but that was already on the syllabus)

We will not have class on Tuesday, 02/18. We will wrap up Nakamura in class on Tuesday 02/23 (in addition to the regular reading scheduled for that day).

For a participation point in lieu of class, you can write a blog post that highlights/summarizes a particular passage from chapter 5 of Digitizing Race and explains its usefulness with regards to Nakamura’s overall argument(s) (see “Introduction,” the reading we’ve already done, for clear delineation of the arguments she says she is making).

Do blog assignment #6 for Friday as usual. Please pay particular attention to the part of the assignment that says to summarize, and remember what it means to summarize a text.

I will see you in class on Tuesday 02/23.

Blog assignments 0 through 4 gave each of you to earn 21 total points toward the eventual total of 71 points for blogging. Blogging overall is worth 25% of your course grade.

Below are the current points earned by team for blogging, through assignment #4.

Team Turkle
105/126 possible points
participant range: 13-21

Team Manovich
78.5/126 possible points
participant range: 9-20

Team Haraway
108.3/147 possible points
participant range: 7.5-20

Team Gibson
106.5/147 possible points
participant range: 4.5-19.5

Team Lessig
90.3/126 possible points
participant range: 11.3-19.5

Team Rheingold
89/126 possible points
participant range: 12.5-17.5

Team Kitchin
95/147 possible points
participant range: 6.5-20

Team members, feel free to guilt your classmates into doing their work for the sake of team pride.

Today began with a writing assignment. I asked one question based on a statement made in Chapter 2 of Digitizing Race, then I asked you to identify something about the arguments Nakamura made in Chapter 3 regarding The Matrix. trilogy, Minority Report, the Apple iPod ads, and the “Other”.

My expectations for every class are that you do the reading such that you can identify elements of the main arguments throughout each text.

The remainder of the class was held in open fishbowl format to discuss these same elements; for the most part this went well although there were clearly times when the discussion ranged far from the arguments being made. If you were to take the fishbowl discussion and turn it into a paper, those would have been pages to cut—the content was tangentially related to the argument and would not have produced a good, logical flow for your analysis. Keep that example in mind as you think about things to discuss and eventually write for your final papers.

More than half of you have now signed up for a presentation slot; be sure to sign up so that you can put it on your schedule and plan accordingly. Since the final project is a large portion of your grade, and the presentation counts for a good portion of the project grade, you don’t want to do a half-assed unprepared job of it. Right? Right.

Blog post #5 is due today at 5pm, per usual. It would be nice for everyone involved if more than half of you did it on time—give it a try. Win friends and influence people.

As a class, we did the Alllooksame.com test: Faces and scored “below average” (a 5, if I recall correctly) on the recognition of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people based on “looks.” Then we discussed (albeit briefly) what it meant to be “below average,” and then many people offered personal information and anecdotes regarding ethnicity-in-boxes and self-identification of same.

Ostensibly, this discussion was based on chapter 2 of Lisa Nakamura’s Digitizing Race ( “Alllooksame? Mediating Visual Culturs of Race on the Web”) but I didn’t get much response when I asked questions that were intended to tie our personal responses to the numerous meaty arguments Nakamura was proposing in this chapter.

For Thursday, you should have read Nakamura’s chapter 3, “The Social Optics of Race and Networked Interfaces in The Matrix Trilogy and Minority Report.” I will try to have some clips to show, but I do expect you to be able to articulate some connections between your personal reactions and responses and the text itself. Blog post #5 will have you work closely with a passage of interest to you, so consider Thursday the opportunity to work out your thoughts!

As of this moment, the blog assignments for the rest of the semester are now available.

Also now available is the Final Paper Assignment Sheet (PDF). I will pass this out in hard copy format in class on Tuesday, but I won’t go over it until you all have a chance to look at it and formulate questions.

At this point, you now have all the information about everything you’ll be asked to do for the remainder of the class. The take-home mid-term will consist of four essay questions (in which “essay” means “750-1000 word responses”), although I’m not going to tell you what those are. You can imagine these questions will be very similar to blog prompts, and contain multiple sub-questions you should address in your responses.

Plan your semester accordingly! As part of planning your semester accordingly, you can sign up for a presentation slot any time. You do not have to create an account at Doodle— just enter your name in the text field and select the time slot you want. If a slot as already been taken, it will no longer be an available option in the form that you see. Obviously those who access the scheduler the earliest will get the best choice of slots.