The first image from the series, provided to students as part of the assignment.
For those of you interested in the Money, Power, Communication course, here’s the first assignment. I’ve provided the students with an ad campaign in PDF format (which is where I drew the image shown in this post). They’re to analyze the series of images, then dig into a specific image from the series of their choosing.
We’ll do an in-class analysis of the image shown here, which is the first in the series to help give them some sense of what the assignment will look like.
I’ve provided the PDF of the assignment here, but unfortunately the full size of the PDF for the images is too large for easy upload here. If you’re interested, contact me, and I can share via DropBox. Many thanks to my colleague Tzarina Prater for her help selecting the images from her awesome collection:
This term, I get to teach a new course titled “Money, Power, Communication.” I’ve taught brief versions of it in summer sessions, but this is the first semester version. The goal of the course is to both help students to think about key economic and business issues by examining how those topics are talked about across a range of media.
In light of global financial crises, continued emphasis of business and market news, such a course seemed to be worth tackling. I’d love to hear any thoughts or comments on the course. Eventually, I’d also like to put together a panel on teaching similar courses and topics, so if anyone’s interested, I’d love to hear more.
The new term’s about to start. I’m teaching the games course again (yay!) but have been conscripted into teaching the equivalent of second semester Freshman Composition. Plugging away to put the finishing touches on syllabi now.
More importantly, it should mean I’ll be back to my usual semi-regular posting, and hopefully it won’t be about the perils of teaching writing as a non-writer.
The most interesting thing so far, has been the purchase of the software Scrivener, which I’ve been using to help make sense of the syllabus for that class.  I’m not terribly deep into the program yet, but I found it very useful for helping me to both gather a range of documents I was interested in and to help flesh out a structure for the course itself. The next challenge will be to figure out how to incorporate Endnote into it. If I can do that fairly easily, I might make the switch from traditional word processing software to this just because of the range of additional functions. If anyone else has used it, do feel free to drop a line with tips about it. I’m sure I’ll post on it again.
So I’ve been working on a course for awhile now, focused on portrayals of economic issues in mass media. In part, this came up out of some of the back channel discussions over one of the theme weeks at In Media Res that I participated in, focused on economic education. Since then, I’ve taught two abbreviated courses as intensive sessions, and the classes and discussions have been great.  That led me to want to try and develop a full-term course. Here’s a first draft of the syllabus with readings, but without most of the topics clearly defined.
Anyone want to give some thoughts for other readings I should consider? I’m going to try to keep it to two articles a week for the readings, and I’m currently debating some that specifically explain economic concepts.
That work/life balance has been a frequent topic on blogs by academics – see Reassigned Time 2.0, Academic Cog, Scattered and Random, and New Kid on the Hallway for some of my favorites, though there are a ton of others out there. Part of what makes the Antenna series interesting is the recognition by something more formal than an individual’s blog that this is an issue and the focus that Antenna itself brings.  Because Antenna is specifically focused on media and culture, it seems to suggest there are some features about that field of inquiry that poses a particular (though not necessarily unique) problem. Tackling what those might be would certainly make for another interesting post in the series. I’d start by suggesting that media positions sit at the nexus of the Arts & Sciences and Business, and so likely exemplify both contradictions and challenges within any institutional structure (for example, which pay scale should they really be on?).
Academic jobs are great examples of the benefits and misconceptions about information labor and employment. It’s not hard for most of us to remember times when someone expected we could easily find a job wherever we’d like. But the academic job market isn’t really like that, especially not if you want to be on the tenure track.  That lack of mobility and the general scarcity of jobs is part of the structural features that creates many of the difficulties Ben and the people commenting on his post reference. Similarly, academic labor exhibits the highly creative, highly skilled tendencies of information labor. This means that there should be relatively high costs to get there – training isn’t cheap. This is certainly true of academia. Market economics suggest that this should equate to high salary, and while this is often true compared to national averages, it’s rarely true when compared to the actual costs to get a degree or to other creative industries.
In this week’s Media Industries class, we’re tackling intellectual property. I spent a fair bit of time trying to find some exercise that explored some of the tensions that go into this. That became problematic because most of the examples I found emphasized a particular dialectic of artists versus management.
Recent debates though show that there is a tendency for “old media” to dominate the structure of intellectual property policy and that consumers and audiences have a stake in such policies that seems to go unconsidered in most examples. So this is my attempt at crafting an exercise for my students to run through. I’d love feedback on it or examples of exercises that other people are using.
This is exercise is designed to be able to be revisited when we tackle particular industries later, but it is also very preliminary. Any thoughts are appreciated.
One of the assignments for the Media Industries course has students following media industry trade publications to help them get a sense of industry trends and to give some fodder for their end of class discussions. They’ll submit three different trade reports over the course of the term, with the expectations of each changing slightly as we go through the term. I’m debating making them follow at least two different publications over the term, so that they won’t entrench with one industry.
Here’s a copy of the assignment for the first Trade Report:Â Trade Report I
In addition, on the course blog, I’ve provided them with an introductory list of trade publications to consider. I’ll include the list here, and if you can think of any that I should add, I’d appreciate seeing them.
Here’s the list;Â if you can think of any that I’m missing, feel free to mention them in the comments:
No better antidote for the back-to-school blues than a decent opening round in the classroom. The first sessions went well, including the opening night of MC 341. For those of you who were curious about what the syllabus looked like, here’s the final draft. Longer form details on the assignments aren’t included – though I’ve got drafts of them – because I like to shape the final versions of them just before handing them out based on what’s happened in the class itself.
Just playing with this at the moment, but I thought I’d post it as at least one friend has been talking about what a syllabus incorporating political economy could look like.  I’ve tried to balance this course so that there’s a healthy dose of it.  Maybe more important to note is that I had to make some choices – some due to my perception of how things are organized at my institution and some because of the expressed interests of students – about what media industries actually get included here.
But I thought I’d share and invite some feedback. I’ll post the final draft of it later if there’s interest.
The following are the slides for my presentation in the Popular Communication section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research in Istanbul, Turkey. The images, except for the screen shots and package images from the various Sims franchise of games and Zynga’s Farmville- -so the charts and diagrams – are my own and, so, my copyright. They are drawn from a number of projects. I post them here in hopes of allowing the conversation to extend beyond the conference.
I should also note that this project began with an In Media Res exhibition discussed previously.
