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February 27, 2005
Visiting Days
For Marcia's and Krista's benefit: every year, we hold an event in our program where we invite our top several applicants for the grad program to join us for a couple of days. That event is fast approaching, and the students in question (six or seven of them) will be visiting our class on Thursday.
As much trouble as Watts presents to us, imagine how lost those students are going to be. So one of the things that I'd like to ask us to do between now and Thursday is to do a little mid-term review. Think about the ways that these fairly disparate texts might connect and overlap, and exactly what we've accomplished so far. Think about how you'd describe the course to people who are "in the field" but who have likely never seen anything quite like it. We've still got a ways to go, but maybe Thursday will give us a chance to take stock in how far we've come?
I'm going to keep the reading for next week relatively low, so that if we don't cover Watts to our satisfaction in class this week, we can pick it up for part of the class on the 10th.
Posted by cgbrooke at February 27, 2005 04:08 PM
Comments
"Where it's at":
To hit some high points for me, my brain is reeling around the concept of space, so when you ask, "how far we've come," I'm not thinking in linear progressions, but the buffet at Country Cookin' or the sampler platter at Red Lobster comes to mind.
- We've talked about audience and how this revisits imagined vs. invoked debates.
- I've struggled with ideas of public and private, which seem to have huge implications on the civic function of rhetoric, among other things.
- Our brains ached over remediation and trying to wrap ideas together about how to define a blog as more than just an online journal.
- We talked through ideas of dispersion and emergence, thought about networks as both material and social exchanges, and theorized affordances based on different models of inter-relating.
- Our most technical discussion to day centered on clustering and paths. Clusters are ordered, seen as inertial, call for triadic closure (which means if A knows B and B knows C, there is a high probability that A will get to know C). Clusters are homophily: we connect with who we like. Burke's identification. Clusters are communities. Paths, on the other hand, are disorder. Paths are links, the number of steps between points. My initial path to Marcia or Krista or Clancy, for example, was two steps (neither of which had a spacial relation): kubernetesNetwork(ed) RhetoricsMarcia or Krista or Clancy. However, the potential for the path is changed as we blog and may reduce to one step if there is a shared interest. It may also back out to two steps when that shared interest fades to new topics.
"I've got two turntables and a microphone"
Posted by: TR at March 1, 2005 06:57 PM