Safe zones, Summer I, RSS feeds....

The management @ Some Assembly Required is proud to announce that this blog is now a certified safe zone!  If you have any questions or concerns as part of the GLBTA community, have any questions or concerns regarding GLBTA issues, or have a good lead for another outfielder for my fantasy baseball team, please feel free to contact me!....

Summer I started today, and Opening Day for my two courses are tomorrow: COMM 220 (Intro to Mass Communication) and COMM 396 (Mass Communication Theory & Research).  After this semester, the term "mass communication" will be little more than a foil for the term "media studies," which personally makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.  Both classes will be blogging, so I am hoping to get a little traffic from BSC folks (though I LOVE LOVE LOVE hearing from friends and family far afield, make no mistake!).  This is the second summer I've had students blog--I'm looking forward to getting feedback from new cohorts.  And, of course, it's always a blast for me to read what you all are doing as well--I love how I can click on your response to me and see your own blog.  (Geez, I sound all saucer-eyed, but it's a beautiful thing!)...

 Finally, check the RSS feeds I've installed on the bottom of the blog.  I will try to add different stuff as I go this term, but with AABS coming up this week, it is indeed right and salutary that we have feeds from both the English-language weekly The Baltic Times and the Lithuanian daily Lietuvos rytas.  Ask me how to add RSS feeds to your blog or webpage (hint: painfully simple)!

The past between them

Truth...and reconciliation? Why would children of Holocaust survivors and children of Nazi perpetrators come together to explore "the past between them"? Here's a video from CBS circa 1992 on such a meeting at Harvard University--it just popped up on the H-Net listserv thanks to Mona Sue Weissmark of Northwestern University.

Sorry that the video isn't loading--follow the link!

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=4079008n

"Could you describe the RUCKUS, sir?"

This fall my COMM 399 course on popular music is going to be using the legal download service RUCKUS--currently available for free for BSC students, $8.99 / month for faculty. It'll serve as a shared music database for the course, meaning I won't have to force my students to buy a CD of Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love--the 33 1/3rd book will have to suffice!

I got the service up and running for myself yesterday, and so far find myself gravitating to a) albums / songs I already own, but have "locked up" in box currently in our storage room, like Tindersticks or b) obscure remixes from bands I've liked for 25 years, like Talk Talk. So far not a whole lot of exploration, but a lot of aural "comfort food."

It makes grading finals go down a little bit easier, dig?

Blogging about blogs!

My goodness, how did it get to be a week before graduation? I vaguely remember this buzz in my ear saying that Spring Break was almost over, and now here we are with two days of finals left. How did that happen?!?

So with the end of 396 this spring, I've completed a year-long experiment in requiring blogs from students. Feedback has been mixed to mostly positive--and I figure even for folks who aren't at all into it, they're able to speak from experience now. It's been a worthy experiment, tied to Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture, which talks about convergence as something that's happening in audiences as much or more than in hardware (hence his term "black box fallacy" to describe the PS3, the iPhone, or what have you).

I'd be curious to hear from 396ers on this--what's your take on this blogging thing? Was it valuable to have an alternative venue for working through your thoughts and ideas regarding media studies? Did it give you any added sense of "community" in 396 or beyond? And hey: anyone continuing after the course? (Let me know, and I'll link you as an alum on my site--feel free to do the same!)

With finals winding down (yeah right, 25 research papers are due in 42 hrs 28 min) I'm hoping to get back on the blogging wagon. In the meantime, here's what NOT to do for your video blog: