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December 07, 2004

Course Rhythm

This may be the most important thing I have to say about the logistics for this course. It may not make immediate sense, but by the end of the semester, it will have become obvious.

By this point in your careers as graduate students, you are no doubt experts at the traditional semesterly rhythm of courses, which operate according to an economy of:

• a fairly well-defined subject area to be covered in the course of a semester;
• a relatively consistent weekly reading load (100-150 pages a week, sometimes more);
• ongoing, informal writing assignments (reading notes, short essays);
• lectures and/or class discussions focused on the explication of course readings;
• a capstone project, due at the end of the semester, typically modeled after the base unit of currency in our field, the 20-25 page academic essay/article/chapter

This model of the academic course is one we have inherited from print culture--it is focused around the consumption of books and targeted at the production of print scholarship. We will not be abandoning this economy altogether--we will still read a few books--but the majority of our attention and energy will be spent on the networks we study, and as a result, the rhythm of the course will change.

As I explain in the course requirements, the traditional elements of graduate coursework will be diminished substantially, in favor of more ongoing, exploratory, and inventive types of inquiry. Keeping a weblog bears many similarities to keeping reading notes for a class, but there are some important differences, not the least of which is the fact that your weblogs will spend as much time looking outward as they do examining the course material. There will be less in the way of required reading so that you will have the time to browse, to follow your own lines of inquiry, to respond to each others' work, and to contribute to the course site.

The advantage of this shift is that you will find yourself, at the end of the semester, already having accomplished more during the semester than you would in a frantic, end-of-semester seminar paper. And that's part of my point here. Ask any academic blogger, and you will likely find that they experience writing according to a much different rhythm than the typical academic, binge-and-purge cycle that characterizes many semesters.

However, and this is crucial, you will have to commit to this rhythm. Part of that commitment is built into the requirements themselves--you cannot simply post 50 entries in the final week of the semester and expect to pass this course. But part of the commitment has to come from each of you on your own. The rest of your semester will work against this different rhythm, as you balance this course with the up-and-down of other courses you take and teach. You will not be doing any less work in this class than you do in others, but that work will take a different form and operate according to a different pace than you may be used to. Embrace this change, and you may find yourself thinking about your other time commitments differently. Ignore it, and I suspect that you'll have a difficult time doing as well in this course as you hope to.

Posted by cgbrooke at December 7, 2004 10:05 PM

Comments

Posted by: tyra at December 8, 2004 08:40 PM