What is it
The journal is an important part of the work you will be doing this semester in New Media 1: Perspectives. It’s a place for organizing, playing with, clarifying, and logging what you experience and are learning in the course. The journal will be kept in weblog form and will be evaluated twice in the semester. You should have at least three substantial entries in the journal per week. Substantial is defined as 250 words minimum.
Method
The journal should contain observations on new media, examinations of supplementary materials found on the syllabus, clarifications of notes taken in class, observations and analysis of material that manifests new media ideas and issues (as you come upon it day to day), and descriptions of games, websites, experiences that reveal new media principles at work. Consider the journal as a place for collecting, practicing, organizing, and ruminating over the specific ideas we cover throughout the semester. In all this, you need to be focusing your attention on acquiring, using and manipulating the terms and ideas we cover in class.
In this course, we will be covering fundamental new media ideas, vocabulary, examples, and experiences that demonstrate change over time, process and product, narrative structure, team collaboration, design thinking, and questions about systems.
Here’s a list of things the journal might cover:
1. Observations on new media in general, whatever comes to mind
2. Game-play descriptions. Let’s say you enjoy playing games, either video or card. How do these objects reveal new media principles at work
3. Descriptions and analysis of different kinds of systems
4. Descriptions of experiences relevant to new media, such as regular use of forums, websites, weblogs, chat, distance messaging, distance education, digital comics, comics, films, other
5. Film, story, game, art and digital art reviews as they are relevant to new media.
6. Conjectures on the future and the past relevant to new media. What is information farming, for example?
7. Analysis of new media terms and techniques. For example, where are you encountering automation, hypertextuality, narrative structure, and participatory media in the world around you? This may be particularly relevant if you maintain a weblog or website.
8. Examples of systems and software relevant to new media
9. Discussion of texts, such as stories, that play with new media concepts, such as Neal Stevenson’s novels or Philip Dick’s stories
10. Considerations of the capital side: business, industry, mass communication. Apple, for example, or Skype or Facebook.
