English 4391-476, Fall 2006
Bill Lavender, Instructor
Contact
Information:
email: wlavende@uno.edu
phone: 504 280 7457
fax: 504 280 7317
mail: UNO Metro College, New Orleans, LA 70148
office: ED 118 (Education Building)
Quick Links:
About This Class |Grading | Logistics | Assignments | Texts | Concerning Plagiarism | Blackboard | Assignments (Detailed)
If you have enrolled in this class because you think, since it's online, it will be easy, I need to dispel that illusion immediately. Generally, internet courses are reading and writing intensive. Since we do not meet physically and have no oral discussion, you have to read what I would normally tell you in lecture, and you have to write what you would normally ask or say in class. This means that you will be reading a great deal more for this class than for a standard one, and you will also be writing a great deal more.
In addition to these general concerns of the electronic environment, this particular class has certain specific difficulties associated with it. First of all, it assumes you have a substantial background in literature, and that you've read a fair amount of both literature and criticism or theory. We will focus on poetry and fiction, but we will also be reading a fair amount of criticism and theory, and part of what we will be doing is comparing the new literature of cyberspace to print literature that came before. If you don't have a good background in literature, you can still do well in this class, but you will need to be doing research when our English graduate students, for example, will already be familiar with the material we are discussing.
Second, this class will utilize a wide array of technological resourses. Some of the work we will discuss will be written in Flash, some in Java, and some will even be in proprietary formats. There will be video and audio files in a variety of different formats. It will be your responsibility to view these files and contribute to the discussion on them. If you don't have the technology to view the files, it is your responsibility to either obtain it or go someplace where you can view the files. This is to say that technical problems are not an excuse. If you tell me you couldn't view a file, I will be genuinely sympathetic; certainly I've had my own problems with technical matters. But we will move on.
I can help you with minor technical difficulties, and certainly if you find links in the course pages that do not work, or other such discrepancies, notify me so I can fix them. But please note that though I may be handy with html I am not an expert by any means, and you will need to find your own technical assistance if you are having consistent problems with the technology. This is, in fact, an important part of the class; the more you understand about the nuts and bolts of the internet, the better your understanding of the differences between the new age of literature and the previous, print, era.
Your final grade will be based on the four assignments: class participation, mid-term, annotated bibliography, and the final paper. Class participation, mid-term, and bibliography each count 20%, and the final project counts 40%. See below for a description of each of these items.
Class
Participation: The course is divided into units that are one or two weeks
long, though some will be longer if the material we are studying that week
merits it, or if there is a holiday or other such factor. We do not "meet"
at a specific time. Each unit will consist of a reading assignment and a group
of discussion questions about the readings. You are to respond to the questions
on the Discussion Board, and you are to read your classmates comments and
comment on them also. These discussion questions may involve an element of
research; I may ask you to look things up on the web, for example.
Please note that these discussions should be discursive. That is, I expect
them to be grammatical and edited. They need not be finished essays, but you
might want to consider them first drafts for essays. Please don't use the
informal language of chat rooms here.
Mid Term: There will be a mid-term exam in the form of a short, timed essay.
Annotated
Bibliography: At the end of the semester you will turn in an Annotated Bibliography
of web sources you have consulted during the semester. The entries should
be a list of the most important sites you have consulted during the semester,
in the course of your research for the weekly assignments and the Final Project.
Each entry should consist of a page title, URL, and a paragraph of description
of the site. Click here to view some sample entries
from previous years. You should use these as models for your own entries.
Graduate students should submit 30-40 entries
for this assignment. Undergraduates should submit 15-30.
Final Project: Your final project will be on a topic pertinent to the class that you will select in consultation with me. For graduate students, it should be about 5,000 words; for undergraduates, about 3,000 words. I call it "final project" instead of final paper because I hope you will utilize some of the resourses we will learn about in this class and create a project that utilizes web resourses. The project may have a creative component — in fact I encourage you to experiment — but it should also have a scholarly aspect and involve research, and it should be annotated in such a way as to scrupulouosly avoid plagiarism (see below) and connect the reader to your sources. The Final Project will be due December 3.
Click here to read term papers from previous years that did good jobs with this assignment. By examining these projects you can get an idea of the many and diverse options open to you.
Special Requirements for Graduate Students: In addition to the requirements listed above, grad students will be held to a higher standard on all discussion postings; in general, grad students' posts are expected to evidence significant research relative to the assignments, showing not only mastery of the assigned materials but also investigation of ancillary materials that may have been mentioned or suggested in the assigned texts.
The class will be held on Blackboard at UNO. To get to Blackboard, you can click on the link on the UNO home page (http://www.uno.edu). Your login and password for Blackboard are the same as your login and password for your UNO email account, your LAN account, and your Webstar account, so once you have gotten into any of these systems you know your Blackboard login and password.
For this class you are required to use your UNO email account. This is because Blackboard interfaces with your UNO email. Since the account ID's are the same, once you have logged into Blackboard you will be able to log in to your UNO email. You can access your UNO email from the "Exchange" link on the UNO home page (http://www.uno.edu).
I realize some of you have never used this interface before, and that some of you are more adept at using web technologies than others. However, mastering a level of proficiency with the interface is a requirement, not an option, of the course. There are help files available online, and you can feel free to consult me in a pinch. This class is not a substitute for a "real" class in a classroom. It is a different experience entirely and has, in fact, many advantages over the normal classroom setting. But you can't make use of these advantages if you're baffled by the technology. You have a week before we actually start posting work; use that time to experiment, read, and familiarize yourself with the interface.
Most of the readings for this course will be drawn from web sources. Most of them will be free, but some of the hypertext literature we will look at may have to be purchased. I am also asking you to purchase the following paper texts:
McLuhan, Marshal.
The Medium is the Massage.
Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition.
This book is
recommended, especially for graduate students, but not required:
Nunberg,
Geoffrey, ed. The Future of the Book.
None of these books have been ordered by the UNO bookstore. I encourage all of you to order your books from an online source. I have compiled a page of online book-source search engines, here: http://www.uno.edu/lowres/books. You can get the books anywhere you want, but I suggest searching for used copies on Amazon. Let me know if you have any questions regarding obtaining the books. I will try to hold off on print assignments until two or three weeks into the semester, but after that I am going to assume you have them.
The reading assignments will be posted on Blackboard. In the event that Blackboard is inacessible for maintenance or other reasons, you may also view the assignments at http://www.uno.edu/lowres/classes/cyberlit/assignments.htm. This is an html file I maintain on the UNO server with a backup of the information on Blackboard. Please note, however, that this assignments page is subject to change and is updated frequently. Do not print it out and expect it will remain constant for the entire semester.
I encourage you to quote sources in your Discussion Board posts. In fact, it is impossible to make a good grade in this class without quoting. Your posts could possibly be as much as 75% other peoples' words. But please note that I will have zero tolerance for plagiarism. Whenever you quote, make sure there is absolutely no way your quotes can be mistaken for your own words. Open the quote with a statement such as "McLuhan says...", set it off from the rest of the text, and then close it with a parenthetical note clearly indicating the author and source location, usually a URL.
What is plagiarism? Click here for a thorough definition, and familiarize yourself with the concept. If you commit plagiarism, even in the discussion, you haven't just made a mistake, you have cheated.
The penalty for
plagiarism in this class is:
First incident: F in that Unit and a warning.
Second incident: F in that Unit and a second warning.
Third incident: F in the course.
About This Class |Grading | Logistics | Assignments | Texts | Concerning Plagiarism | Blackboard | Assignments (Detailed)
Online
Poetry Workshop, University of New Orleans
English 4391, Fall 2006
Bill Lavender,
Instructor
Contact Information:
email: wlavende@uno.edu
phone: 504 280 7457
fax: 504 280 7317
mail: UNO Metro College, New Orleans, LA 70148
office: ED 118 (Education Building)