This week in LIS 201 (week 05)

Week 05: The global network society

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

• Networks of cities

This week I will distribute a list of terms and essay questions to study which will help you prepare for our first in-class exam next week. (I will probably distribute these on our course news feed.)

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• William Lazonick, “Globalization of the ICT labour force,” in R. Mansell et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies (2007).
• Christian Sandvig, “Connection at Ewiiaapaayp Mountain,” in L. Nakamura et al. eds., Race after the Internet (2012).
• Jan A.G.M. van Dijk,"Social structure" in The Network Society(2006).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Finish the final draft of paper #1.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#7 and #8) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Turn in a printed final version of paper #1.
• Review for first midterm exam.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

No online activity this weekend. Study for your exam next week.

The dangers of automation?

Interesting review today at The Verge that relates to our lecture this week — a new book on the dangers of automation by Nicholas Carr, called The Glass Cage:

He paints a scary picture. Planes are crashing as pilots are lulled into a stupor by autopilot. Financial markets flirt with disaster as traders place too much faith in algorithms they barely understand. Doctors are acting like robots themselves as they rotely click through prompts on diagnostic and billing software. And something more ineffable is taking place, Carr worries, as automation subtly cuts us off from the world.  [...]  Carr takes a broad approach to automation, so any technological abbreviation of a task would qualify. Google’s auto-completing searches automates inquiry, Carr says, while legal software automates research, discovery, and even the drafting of contracts. CAD automates architectural sketching. Thanks to an explosion in computing power, more and more things are getting automated, and Carr worries that it’s all combining to degrade our skills and insulate us from the world. "When automation distances us from our work," Carr writes, "when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives."

Check out the review here and tell us what you think, if you have a moment.

This week in LIS 201 (week 04)

Week 04: The postindustrial service economy

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

• Depression to deindustrialization

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Isaac Asimov, “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014,” New York Times(16 August 1964).
• Thomas J. Sugrue, "'The damning mark of false prosperities': The deindustrialization of Detroit," in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996).
• Laurence Veysey, "A postmortem on Daniel Bell's postindustrialism," American Quarterly 34:1 (1982). 
• Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano [chapters 1-3] (1952).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Complete your peer reviews of your fellow students' paper #1 drafts, posted as comments on their pages of the discussion section wiki.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#5 and #6) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you'll explore the Prelinger Archives, which contains thousands fantastic vintage educational and corporate promotional films, some of which deal with information and communication technology. Many of these films are in color with sound, and most are short (15 or 20 minutes).

• Search the Prelinger Archives for the most interesting vintage film for a 21st century class on the "information society" that you can.
• Please note: Within each discussion section, every student needs to find a different film to post! This means you need to see what's already been posted in your section to avoid duplication! (Students who do this assignment earlier might have an easier time of it.)
• Post a link to your film on your discussion section blog and make an argument about why this film is useful to students of our modern information infrastructure -- what can we learn from the film you found?
• Watch at least one of your fellow students' suggested films and post a comment with your reaction.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 03)

Week 03: The electromechanical control revolution

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

• The control revolution and modernity

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• James Beniger, "The Control Revolution," in Albert H. Teich, ed.,Technology and the Future (1990).
• William Cronon, "The busy hive," in Nature's Metropolis (1991).
• Simon Head, "The rise of the reengineers," in The New Ruthless Economy (2003).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Post your rough draft of paper #1 to your personal wiki pages (create a separate subpage so that your peer reviewers can just "comment" at the bottom).

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#3 and #4) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Your TA will set up peer review groups ( 6 students in each) and post these on your discussion section wiki in case you forget.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you are going to explore some historical news databases.

• Pick a term relating to the modern information society  -- ” "world wide web" or "computer" or "cell phone" or "digital divide" or ... well, use your imagination. The only constraint is that you can't pick a term that one of your fellow sectionmates has used (so it is in your interest to do this assignment early!)
• Try to find the earliest journalistic use of this term in three different historical newspaper databases provided by ProQuest: the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
• Now take the same term and try to find its earliest use in three different scholarly article databases: ProQuest, Project Muse, andJStor.
• Write a brief post on your section blog about the ways in which your term was first used, and whether it still has the same meaning today.
• Visit another student's post and comment on what they found out about the term that they explored.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

The costs and benefits of sponsoring literacy learning

Here's a short analysis piece from the New York Times that illuminates some of the issues that Deborah Brandt's article from this week tried to analyze: the costs and benefits of sponsoring literacy learning, especially across communities and school districts that vary widely in their wealth and resources:

People disagree, quite strenuously, on the best curriculum for teaching children to read. But all participants in the reading wars agree on some other things: Early reading is crucial — a child who does not read proficiently by third grade will probably fall further and further behind each year. American schools are failing: two out of three fourth graders don’t read at grade level.

And they agree on something else: any reading curriculum works better if children who are struggling get the chance to work, one on one, with a tutor. [...]

The problem, of course, is that very few principals can afford it. A single teacher dedicated to individual tutoring can work effectively with a small number of children each week. How many teachers would be needed to help all struggling students? The schools where tutoring is most needed, moreover, are those that can least afford it.

Is there a cheaper substitute that’s still effective? Health care in places where resources are short benefits from task-shifting: moving jobs to the lowest-trained and lowest-paid people who can do them well. That way, the expensive professionals can concentrate on the things that only they can do.

Resources are always short in education. So it is welcome news that two recent studies show that task-shifting tutoring programs can work on a wide scale — and that scale can be achieved relatively affordably.

Check out the whole piece and tell us what you think in the comments.

Should everyone read Harry Potter?

An interesting post over at Scientific American connects to many of the print culture themes we discussed in lecture this week:

For decades it's been known that an effective means of improving negative attitudes and prejudices between differing groups of people is through intergroup contact – particularly through contact between “in-groups,” or a social group to which someone identifies, and “out-groups,” or a group they don’t identify with or perceive as threatening. Even reading short stories about friendship between in- and out-group characters is enough to improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups in children. A new study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reading the Harry Potter books in particular has similar effects, likely in part because Potter is continually in contact with stigmatized groups. The “muggles” get no respect in the wizarding world as they lack any magical ability. The “half-bloods,” or “mud-bloods” – wizards and witches descended from only one magical parent – don’t fare much better, while the Lord Voldemort character believes that power should only be held by “pure-blood” wizards. He’s Hitler in a cloak.

Check out the whole post and tell us what you think in the comments.

This week in LIS 201 (week 02)

Week 02: Print culture and literacy

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 09

• Print culture and literacy

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Deborah Brandt, "The means of production: Literacy and stratification at the twenty-first century," in Literacy in American lives (2001).
• Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, "A framework for the history of publishing and reading in the United States 1880-1940," in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4 (2009).
• Ted Striphas, "E-Books and the Digital Future," in The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control(2009).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article report, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.  An article report should briefly summarize the main argument of the article, and then pose a question or comment in response. You will also want to say a little something about the author of the article and the way people responded to it. What can you find online about the person who wrote the article? Can you find any online reaction to the article? (It probably came from a book, and you can probably find book reviews.)
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms (which will have been previewed in lecture)
• Two four-minute student speeches (#1 and #2), one on each of the readings (and two two-minute student extemporaneous responses).  Your TA will designate a classmate to record your presentations on digital video. The recording will be either emailed to you or uploaded to your discussion section wiki (which you'll be joining this weekend). After watching the recording, you must email your TA with one substantive way in which you could improve your delivery.
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Discuss tasks and strategies for writing assignment #1. (Rough draft due on wiki by start of next week's discussion.)
• Discuss the written presentation grading metric.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you'll learn how to use your discussion section wiki:

• Please click here for a wiki tutorial
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 01)

(Each week I'll post a reminder from the syllabus of upcoming assignments and activities.)

Week 01: Introduction to four information societies

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 02

Lecture meets this week at 11am in Humanities 2650 for 75 minutes.   Students are expected to attend all lectures and to take notes. By the Friday after each in-person lecture, I'll upload a PDF version of any slides I showed in lecture to our Box site (and link the site to the lecture title). We may also experiment with lecture-capture technology to record the live lecture experience; if this works, I will provide links to those videos as well. Any student seen Facebooking, shopping, chatting, gaming, or otherwise multitasking with a distracting non-class activity in lecture will be asked to close their laptop  -- even if you are typing notes at the same time.

• Introduction to the course

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

Buy your course reader from Student Print and read the articles below. Each week, you need to have your readings completed by the time you get to discussion section, in order to be able to discuss them with your TA and fellow students. We will quiz you on selected terms from the readings as well, which will be revealed at the end of each lecture.

(Unsure how closely you should be reading these? The professor has posted two annotated examples of readings, to show what he highlights when he reads through them.)

• Greg Downey, "Introduction: Communication meanings and social purposes," in Technology and Communication in American History(2011).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

Just make sure to read through this web syllabus.

DISCUSSION SECTION MEETING

All discussion sections meet this week; consult your schedule.  Students are expected to attend all in-person discussion sections. If you are absent from section, you must email your TA within 24 hours of the missed section. If you are absent from two discussion sections in a row, you will receive a concerned email from the professor. After that we will refer your absence to the Office of the Dean of Students!

• Meet your TA and your fellow students in person! (Your TA may have you create a "table tent" to help everybody learn names.)
• Discuss the syllabus and grading.
• Your TA will assign you to specific weeks and readings for your prepared oral presentation and your written article critique. (You won't know when you'll be called upon to do your extemporaneous oral presentation.) These will all be listed on your section wiki (which you'll join next week).
• Discuss techniques for effective oral presentations.
• Discuss the oral presentation grading metric.
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

Nearly every weekend you will have online homework and writing.  This weekend, after your first section meeting, you'll learn how to use your discussion section weblog. 

• Please click here for a detailed weblog tutorial.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

Important deadlines for Fall 2014

All of these deadlines can be found at the Office of the Registrar web site.

Friday, September 5, 2014
Last Day to Enroll without $25 Late Initial Enrollment Fee except Specials and Guests.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Last day to drop courses or withdraw without DR or W grade notation on Transcript

Friday, September 12, 2014
Last Day to Add your first class without Departmental & Dean's permission - All Students
Last Day to Add Courses without Departmental approval - All Students
Last Day for 100% tuition adjustment on dropped classes.
SPECIALS AND GUESTS ONLY: Last Day to Enroll without $25 Late Initial Enrollment Fee

Friday, September 19, 2014
Last Day to pay tuition and fees without $100 Late Payment Fee

Friday, September 26, 2014
Last Day for 50% tuition adjustment on dropped classes
Last Day to Apply for Pass/Fail Privilege - Undergrads/Specials/Professionals
Last Day to Convert from Credit to Audit - Undergrads/Specials/Professionals

Friday, October  31, 2014
Last Day to Drop courses - All Students
Last Day to apply for Pass/Fail Privilege - Graduate Students
Last Day to Convert from Credit to Audit - Graduate Students

Friday, November 21, 2014
Last day to withdraw without academic penalty- Undergrads/Specials/Professionals

FIG partnering with LIS 201 this Fall

Each year at least one "First-Year Interest Group" or "FIG" partners with LIS 201.  Here's our FIG for this year:

Internet and Society

The main course of this FIG, “Information Literacies in Online Spaces” (LIS 301), explores information and digital literacies needed by today’s online consumers and producers.  Topics include “new literacies,” media education, digital divides, information quality, and online risks. To investigate these issues, we complete four case studies: Wikipedia, blogs, online video, and online video games. Issues to be covered include access (digital divides, power relations in online communities, regulation), analysis (assessing credibility, evaluating risks, analyzing representation) and production (video making, blogging, game making).

The course engages students in key debates and research related to information and digital literacies, relates concepts covered in the other FIG courses to students’ own experiences, and develops digital literacies and production skills. The three courses that comprise this FIG prepare students with reading, writing and analytical skills that will be useful across the humanities and social sciences.  Past students have gone on to major in journalism, communication arts, economics and computer sciences.

Digital Studies Certificate - All three courses on this FIG count toward the Digital Studies Certificate. To qualify for the Certificate, students complete 15 credits that include one Core course and four additional Topical courses. LIS 201 is one of the Core courses, and LIS 301 and Com Arts 346 are Topical courses. By completing this FIG, only two additional courses are needed to qualify students for the Certificate. (Note: one of the additional courses needs to be in the area of visuality in digital design and the other needs to be in either the area of Digital Practices or the area of Digital Information Structures.)  Please see the website for more information about the Certificate: digitalstudies.wisc.edu