As I prepare to teach a course in the spring called “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics,” I’m weighing out the benefits and risks of opening the course to an online audience.
This would involve sharing the syllabus online (though not the readings themselves, which would have to be purchased or “found” elsewhere) and moving some of our discussions to a public blog, as opposed to using the password-protected, registered-students-only Blackboard software (which many courses at this university now use).
It’s not an online course, and much of the class would still take place in a formal classroom setting. But my hope is that the public dimension could enrich class discussions both by allowing others (around the world) to participate to some extent, and by making our public conversation more accountable and potentially more meaningful. Seems to me that a commitment to open-access education calls for this sort of thing.
The University of Vermont may be a public university (though, technically, it’s a bit of a public-private hybrid) but it is far from being an open university — in fact, it’s quite expensive to attend — and I’m sure that my own little effort at making it a bit more open may carry risks I haven’t yet anticipated.
One that I have anticipated is that public speech carries responsibility: thoughts shared online have a way of coming back to haunt us, and students could learn that the hard way if they don’t internalize it at the outset. (Of course we could all use pseudonyms — except for me, that is.)
I’m curious to know about other experiments in university courses going public. If anyone has thoughts on this sort of thing, let me know.
The brief course description reads as follows:
Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics
This course presents an advanced introduction to media studies in the context of social, political, and environmental movements that make use of, and in the process transform, the new media environments in which social and political life increasingly takes place.
We will study debates in “media ecology” and the cultural politics of new media, from Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media as sensory extensions of humanity to theories of “media convergence” and of new media as open, dynamic, and complex socio-techno-ecological systems.
We will draw on these theories to study and assess media use in such social movements as the anti-corporate globalization movement, the Occupy movement, Wikileaks, the “Arab Spring,” backlash to the “Innocence of Muslims” film trailer, the climate change and climate justice movements, “tactical media” interventions such as “culture jamming” and “hacktivism,” and various forms of “ecomedia” and “biomedia” activism.
In addition to readings, discussions, and writing exercises, students will be expected to carry out, individually or in teams, (i) an in-depth critical analysis of some media form, product, or text, and (ii) an applied media production project. One goal of the course may be to contribute to the development of an open-access, online Ecomedia Research Network.
chris long @ psu has tried this as part of his digital dialogue blog with mixed results as a notorious troll, who used to push his wares in some circles hereabouts, jumped in on one of his classes so heavy moderation would be helpful.
i think the main problem has to do with the very varied levels of knowledge that might come into play and getting people to stick to the tasks/texts at hand.
good luck will be interested to see what you end up doing.
I like the idea, but I share your concern about students’ political thoughts being shared online possibly coming back to haunt them. That might be an overly prudish viewpoint considering most of today’s students are active on Facebook and other social media before they even get to college — hence many of them may be more savvy with regard to reputation management than we often give them credit for — but I do think it best to err on the side of caution.
One really simple option that might be worth considering is setting the “noindex” and “nofollow” attributes on your specific posts which are used to host the discussions. This would prevent most search engines (the reputable ones, anyway) from indexing the material, so, for instance, a simple Google search of a student’s name or pseudonym wouldn’t turn up the material. The flipside, obviously, is that doing this could also narrow your potential audience dramatically because nobody would just stumble in from a search engine. It’s a useful WordPress SEO option in some instances, though, particularly when you don’t want perfunctory material on your site to be indexed.
Going hand-in-hand with the above idea, you could also craft a landing page for search engines to index which would describe the course in its entirety (including the syllabus there would make sense) and inviting public participation. Through strategic use of keywords likely to attract the type of participant you desire, you could then use that landing page to funnel these visitors on to the discussions themselves — a system commonly used for qualifying leads in online advertising.
DMF makes a good point about comment moderation to stave off trolls. I’d strongly consider using a good, free WordPress comment management plugin like Disqus, Livefyre or IntenseDebate to facilitate engagement and make moderation a bit easier. In particular, Livefyre’s “real-time” commenting is sort of a commenting/chat hybrid which could do a lot to help foster discussions.
Another option would be the excellent Echo which is used by The Washington Post, NBC News and Slate, among others, although Echo may be prohibitively expensive (they may also have a program for educational institutions, though, so it couldn’t hurt to check).
It might also be worthwhile to touch base with somebody at USC Annenberg because this sort of thing sounds like something they might try. You have a lot of options, so opening up part of the class to public participation certainly doesn’t have to be an “all-or-nothing” proposition. Good luck!
Thanks for all those very useful suggestions, Billy (and dmf). I’m leaning towards a new blog with its own landing page (as suggested in your third paragraph, Billy), and I’d have some comment management capacities already built into the WordPress software my server uses, but I’ll consider the various other options as well before I make a final decision about what’s feasible for this course.
I appreciate both your thoughts.