Transforming Contemporary Cultures - Macro (MP520 F05)

This Week In Review

I just finished grading for up to week 6 and the grades will be in class next Tuesday - please make sure that you know your G-number so you can check to see where you are.

Here are a few things we'd like for you to keep in mind for the rest of the quarter. 

1. Make sure that when you quote from the textbooks that you cite the page number, or if you are using multiple books make sure to at least put the page number and title of the book so we know where you are getting the quote. 
2. Focus on the Synthesis - make sure you talk about the reading, work it into your other learning from the quarter and interact with it the best you can.  It needs to be in the "spirit of 500" words.
3. Listing resources is good but is now secondary to the synthesis work and the editing that needs to be done on your wikis.
4. You need to make sure to have at least one thoughtful comment on the group blog, otherwise you recieve a zero for that week in the "critique" part of the rubric. 
5. Again its important that you keep synthesizing and re-working these thoughts on your group subject - even stuff that is not directly relative may have other lead-ins or even point you in a different direction for other resources. 
6. Other than that keep up the good work, you are all coming up with some great material.  I am pointing friends toward your blogs for imformation on these issues and I know that other people will be doing the same. 

a tribute

speaking of transforming contemporary cultures...one person can spark a revolution.

Week 5 - Reading Lists and Student Updates

Welcome to Week 5 -- This marks the last week of our Internet search phase, and so, after this week, we will still be gathering information, not from the web, but from our required reading. However, only the source of information has changed, not the format of your posts. You will still look for ten ideas/sources/issues from the reading and comment on them in the form of analysis. Some of these resources may have little to do with your topic, and that is fine. Continue  to analyze them as to possible contributions and insights you have gained.

Weekly Reading (for weeks 6-10)
Week 6 Global Transformations (Ch. 1 & 2)
Week 7 Global Transformations (Ch. 3 & 4)
Week 8 Global Transformations (Ch. 5) & Globalization and Culture
Week 9 Inventing Popular Culture
Week 10 Weight of the World (any 200 pages)

In addition, our lecture topics and group work will now coincide. The following is the schedule for lectures and student updates/presentations for the rest of the quarter. Student presentations are simply an update to the class on your wiki project. Students will show the wiki using the projector and other students will offer feedback and ask questions. This may last from 15 minutes to a half hour, depending on the project.

Week 6
Ageism, Ableism (Lecture & Student Presentation)
AIDS Crisis (Lecture & Student Presentation)

Week 7
Global Media and Culture (Lecture & Student Presentation)
Global Media and Family (Lecture & Student Presentation)

Week 8
Global Technology Issues (Lecture & Student Presentation)
Issues in Africa (Lecture & Student Presentation)

Week 9
Religious Fundamentalism (Lecture & Student Presentation)
War, Militarism, Terrorism (Lecture & Student Presentation)

Week 10
International Economic Issues (Lecture & Student Presentation)
US Economic Issues (Lecture & Student Presentation)

Bad Links

To War/Terrorism group blog and International Econ group blog, please send me (Ryan) your links -- our current ones are not working...

Week 4

Greetings (from Ryan) -- I trust you had a good 'tech' day with Wess --

We have these days because we cannot assume you have worked with these tools before and we want to give time and space for questions and answers. 

Wess said that some of you are frustrated by the amount of techie stuff -- that the learning curve is pretty high. It is for this reason that I have not pushed the class reading thus far, to give you time to find your feet  --  however, I do want to know if you are overwhelmed. If you have been spending more than ten hours a week on your assignments then this is too much time. Please write me or Wess a note and we will look to support you in some way...

Wess also mentioned that you want the assignments more pinned down. Because of the learning curve, I have deemphasized the readings during this first part of the class. I will be giving you detailed reading assignments soon.

Some of you asked for the powers/practices sheet to be posted. I need to look into this -- at this point it is an unpublished article and I need to talk to a few people about copyright/permission/rights. In the mean time, use the hard copies passed out in class.

I understand that for many of us, podcasting is a new thing. Ultimately, you will be producing a twenty minute 'read' script of your wiki project. It may simply be reading from the web pages themselves. If your wiki project is longer than twenty minutes (when read), you will need to summarize in parts in order to produce a twenty minute podcast. Bear in mind, if you can record it digitally, we can handle the rest of the technology. Do not worry about the techie part of this assignment!! (Wess, if this contradicts anything you said today, let me know!!).

Regarding the lunch on Thursday, we would like everyone to post at least a paragraph on their blog regarding something that they learned at this discussion and something they might possibly apply to their project.

I know the class is 'outside-the-box' for many of you -- however, I think if you press on and keep going, it will become easier over time. Ultimately, I believe you will find the experience worthwhile and rewarding, especially as one considers the work as a service to the body of Christ.

Again, thanks for the flexibility you have displayed in the class.

Ryan

links for class today

Here are some of the links we will be using in class today

WIKIs
On writing articles in a wiki format
A Basic history

PODCASTS
A wiki about podcasts
What is podcasting

Podcast servers

1. Our Media
2. Archives
3. Pod Nova

Podcasting File Format

Free PC Recording software (thanks Ben).

 

New Books

Hey everyone - exciting news.  The new textbook, "The Weight of The World" has just arrived and is here at the bookstore.  This is the book that Ryan talked about in class on thursday which will be used as one of your required textbooks for the quarter. 

Using browsers

Some of you have said that you are having a hard time editing your blog posts because of the lack of editing tools available to you.  This is mainly a problem for mac users who work with the Safari browser.  It is a great browser but blogger has not updated its site to fully work with it yet.  I would recommend, especially if you are a mac user, to download the firefox browser (which is free).  After you start using that browser you will find that while on the blogger site there are more editing options for you.  Hope this helps.

Oh - I found another article on selecting a blog that is right for you - this may be something you will be thinking about after the class.

so far so good

I just finished grading everyone's posts.  Everything looks good.  I tried to post any extra pointers on your blog if I felt like that was in order but for this week I didn't grade too hard - pretty much if you did the work you got credit.  Next week I will be a little more picky.

the links: some of you need to use blogger's little "insert link" button on the website editor.  that will help clean up your links so that they a) work and b) aren't all over the screen.  I can show you how to do that after class if you would like.

the synthesis: for the most part if there was something missing it was this. The blogs that seem well organized (and were easiest for me to grade) were the ones that first posted the resources with some comments about why each was choosen and then in a secondary post afterwards a synthesis was made of the most important findings for the week.  This is where the main interaction comes if and where you take what you have read, heard and seen on other blogs and put it together in somekind of report-type way; where you interact and personalize it.

Finally the wikis this coming week Start adding to your wikis some of them were pretty bare but as long as you had a wiki and some outline that was fine.  This next week though start plugging into it and filling it out. 

Lastly a couple group-blogs aren't working on our end - so either you haven't posted or we have the wrong URL - if you haven't posted will you at least put an initial one up so we know its working - and if you see that yours is one that's not working (from the class blog side bar) and it shows up as the wrong address will you email us the correct one - in this case I wrote it down wrong. 

Week 3

Well, you've made it to week 3! Well done.

Each member of our class now has a blog!

We're starting to analyze and collect the research, we will talk about this in class today, but it looks like you have really jumped into your topics.

Note: I cancelled the two books that were late in coming:

Macedo, Donaldo, and Panayota Gounari, ed. 2005. The Globalization of Racism. Paradigm Publishers.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2005. Religion in Global Civil Society. Oxford Univ. Press

I ordered another book:
Weight of the World by Pierre Bourdieu

I will keep you informed when that book is made available...