(image from Flickr user Wotba) 

EMAC 2322 -University of Texas at Dallas

Welcome to EMAC 2322, Introduction to Emerging Media. Spring '11.

Course Description:

In 2006 Time named “You” as the person of the year. What at the time seemed like a clever ploy to sell extra magazines now appears to have accurately captured the zeitgeist, the sense that “you”—or “we”—now control the media. During the initial rapid growth of the internet, the dot com bubble of the 1990s, much ink was spilled and many pixels flickered to debate the cultural impact of the digital network, and for a short time after the bubble burst, those who saw the internet as a passing fad seemed to have their day. But what is now clear after the rise of “Web 2.0” is that the internet changes things—and by "things," I mean everything. The way we share, create, and disseminate knowledge has fundamentally changed. What the particular contours of this change are have yet to be revealed, but I think it is clear that the next moment in our culture will be remarkably different from the prior.  The focus of this class is in understanding this change, particularly the way that media has changed and is changing. Accordingly, this class will serve as an introduction for Emerging Media and Communications majors and serve as a building block for the rest of your coursework. 

From Here You Might Be Interested In:

• Class Expectations
• Class Goals
• Class Requirements
• Schedule of Readings
• Class Notes Wiki 
• Group Project Guidelines 

Or you could download a paper copy of the syllabus (but that is only the paper copy as required by University policy this site is far more accurate and up to date).

Please see University Policies, for additional school wide syllabus information. 

For Tuesday December 6th.

No reading. 

You should spend some time working on your group project. These are do by the start of class on Tuesday.

(I added feedback to the "Discussion" link under each page, that has directed feedback for each group about how to improve what you already have. I did this instead of emailing one person in your group. I thought this would be more efficient.)

Final Paper Assignment due a week from Tuesday, December 13th, by noon.

Extra:

Here is the stuff we talked about in class.

-A humorous, or not so humorous short clip about ordering Pizza.

-The Article calling for monitoring all student data.

-My explanation of why monitoring all student data is a really, really, really, bad idea.

Editing the Class Wiki:

 There are three parts to this editing phase.

1. Categorize. We want to create categories that group together the topics we have been talking about and organize them in a way that makes them more readable, rather than just a list of "this is what was said." 

2. Compress, Combine and Move. Take the information from the class notes pages and move it to the Technodeterminism, Cultural Determinism, and the Internet page. You don't want to move everything, instead you want to combine things. So whereas you might have ten sentences that say the same thing you might reduce this to 3 to 4 sentences. The tricky part is to do this reducing in a way that also keep what is unique and important about the 10 sentences.

3. Cite. In many cases you will want to provide citations and links to things that you reference here.

You should edit stuff that you didn't originally write. Don't be afraid to use the talk/discussion page to leave notes for your fellow classmates discussing the editing and saying what you have done and what you think might need to be done.