Today’s Plan:
- Attendance (11:17)
- Naming Finals (how to get on a prof’s good side)
- Clear up quiz confusion, troubleshoot Canvas (11:20)
- Review sentences (11:30)
- Syllabus (11:45)
- Proposal Project (12:05)
Naming Files
If you want to get on a prof’s good side, use the following template for naming files:
marcsantos-theysay-pokemongo.docx
Trust me on this. Notice: no spaces, no capital letters.
Review Sentences
I pulled a few sentences from Canvas to talk about quickly.
- Michael Farren and Adam Millsap wrote an article disagreeing with Timothy B Lee’s argument that Pokemon Go is everything that is wrong with late capitalism.
- While Timothy B. Lee argues that government should be in charge of making the Pokémon Go economy work for everyone, Michael Farren and Adam Millsap argue that the players decide if they want to play the game or not. I agree with Farren and Millsap because the game is free to download, so the choice to pay for special features is up to the player themselves.
- I agree that the new online economy does bring money away from the local consumer and puts it into the pocket of the larger corporations, but I do not believe that this is something that is necessarily a bad thing in general. This craze is more than just a big business making a lot of money. It also is promoting the average person to go outside and interact with others when he/she might not have otherwise. This gets people in different areas where they would not be otherwise and trying new things.
- While writers Michael Farren and Adam Millsap believe Pokemon Go represents the best of capitalism, I believe it represents the best of social interaction. Since the widely popular app has been released I’ve seen more kids outside and interacting than ever before. Some have said in the past that ‘these kids are always on their cellphones’ or ‘kids these days don’t know how to interact with one another’. The Pokemon Go creators use this to their advantage by creating an app that forces some to go outside and walk/talk to those they may run into while trying to catch a pokemon.
- I found myself siding more with the article that backs up how the Pokemon go app is helping regional inequality, due to the fact that it has sprang many positive, active, and social opportunities.
Syllabus Review
Let’s take a few minutes to look over the syllabus and highlight course policy.
Identifying a Community
As I mentioned in our first class and throughout our discussion of the syllabus, you will spend this semester writing in a particular community. Let me emphasize that I say writing in a particular community and not writing about a particular topic. This is because my research and experience firmly support that writing is a dialogic activity; thought emerges from the interaction of brains, spaces, activities. And, as I have already indicated, this course is about teaching you how to invent, develop, arrange, and exchange a thought. That’s what “writing” means to me.
This means we need to find (a) space(s) in which people write, comment, share, reflect, and most importantly *theorize* your activity. By theorize, I mean that people aren’t just reporting news about your activity, but analyzing, debating, critiquing, exchanging, the best elements of your activity, the best ways to appreciate your activity. We will talk about this more as you develop your projects, but at minimum I am not interested in projects that report *what* happened, or perhaps even *why* it happened, but projects that explore the implications of those whats and whys.
I also recognize that you are all unique individuals, with specific interests, diverse previous experiences with writing, and unique trajectories. I have designed this class to be as flexible as possible–to allow you to practice and the kind of writing you want. While the default settings for this course involve fandom, I am more than willing to read that word as liberally as possible. For instance, if your ambitions aim at graduate or law school, then you might want to develop a more academic approach to this course. You could start a blog and write short summaries and responses (what in academic speak we call review essays) of academic articles every week. Academic discourse is a very particular kind of discourse, with its own genre expectations that differ pretty significantly from general public discourse and/or professional writing.
The last time I taught this course, I had 24 students. Six of them engaged in the kind of project I described above, conducting research for 10 weeks and then writing a 15 page final paper. The other 18 students, however, wrote in communities on a wide range of topics: video games (Fire Emblem, Diablo 3 and Blizzard, politics (one focused on the Republican primary and, specifically, on how Trump was viewed by traditionally conservative news sources, movies (the Star Wars franchise), fishing (a local fisherman wrote about his own experiences fishing with other fisherman), and others.
Over the next few weeks, I will be working with you to help you identify an interest and to find spaces and authors invested in your topic. Don’t worry if this feels a bit overwhelming at first.
Homework
To get us started on the path to the proposal, the homework asks you to begin thinking about and researching a potential topic. To this end, I want you to post to Canvas a 5 to 7 sentence description of one fandom you might engage, along with a link to one article of interest for people in that area [Canvas Proposal Post]. Provide an intelligible summary of the link (it might be helpful to use a They Say template here). BE SURE TO EMBED THE LINK. You can find quick instructions for hyperlinking in Canvas here (scroll down a bit).
If you have an idea of a topic, a good way to start is to Google: best X blogs 2015.
I also recommend going to medium.com and doing a few searches for your topic.
Also, at some point over the next week, you should think about coming to office hours to discuss your project. My hours are M & W from 1:00-2:00 and F from 10-10:45. My office is Ross hall, 1180D. I am also available by appointment if those times don’t fit your schedule. We can talk about potential topics, locate some useful resources, and think about where to put your writing.
