This week in LIS 201 (week 1)

(Each week I'll copy the relevant section out of our syllabus as a reminder, OK?)

Week 1: Introduction to four information societies

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 03

Lecture meets this week at 11am in Humanities 2650 for 75 minutes.   Students are expected to attend all lectures and to take notes. Within 24 hours of each in-person lecture, I'll link a PDF version of any slides I showed in lecture 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 may quiz you on the readings as well. (Unsure how closely you should be reading these? The professor has posted twoannotated 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.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

• David Auerbach, "The stupidity of computers," n+1 (2012). 
• Andrew Chadwick, "Some conceptual tools," in Internet politics: States, citizens, and new communication technologies (2006). 
• Alfred D. Chandler jr., "The information age in historical perspective," in Alfred D. Chandler jr. and James W. Cortada, eds.,A nation transformed by information: How information has shaped the United States from colonial times to the present (2000). 
• Susan J. Douglas, "The turn within: The irony of technology in a globalized world," American Quarterly (2006). 
• Paul Edwards, "Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems," in Thomas J. Misa et al. eds., Modernity and technology (2003). 
• Paul Edwards, "Thinking globally," A vast machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming (2010), 1-25. 
• James Gleick, "After the flood," in The Information: A history, a theory, a flood (2011). 
• Adam Gopnik, "The Information: How the Internet gets inside us,"The New Yorker (2011-02-14). 
• Stephen Lubar, "Introduction," in Infoculture: The Smithsonian book of information age inventions (1993). 
• Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, "Introductory essay," inThe social shaping of technology, 2nd ed. (1999). 
• David E. Nye, "Critics of technology," in Carroll Pursell, ed.,A companion to American technology (2005). 
• Merritt Roe Smith, "Technological determinism in American culture," in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does technology drive history? The dilemma of technological determinism (1994). 
• Frank Webster, "What information society?" The Information Society (1994).
• Langdon Winner, "Do artifacts have politics?" (1986) in Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The social shaping of technology, 2nd ed. (1999).

FIGs partnering with LIS 201 this year

Each year LIS 201 partners with at least one First-Year Interest Group or "FIG" course; this year we are partnering with two!  In a FIG, students take two or three linked courses simultaneously, staying with the same small group of fellow learners in each course.  Here are this year's FIGs:

FIG 34: Internet and Society (section 304 of our course, with Darcy)

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 videogames. 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. 

FIG 44: Objects of Science (section 310 of our course, with Ellen)

What do a peregrine falcon egg, a book of wood samples, and the Washburn Observatory have in common? Aside from their beautiful curves, all are objects residing on the UW‐Madison campus that have the potential to tell a story about science and culture. This FIG takes science in a brand new direction by starting from its objects such as these. We will look at them as material culture, that is, as things that can unlock hidden stories about the cultures in which they were made and made sense of. We will ferret out objects from multiple collections and museums on campus, such as the zoology museum, the physics demonstration equipment collection, and even the ceramic collection at the Chazen Museum of Art. And then we will figure out how to make sense of them and communicate what we found.

• In ILS 275, “Knowing Science Through Its Objects,” you will learn how to think about these objects as part of the history of science and its surrounding culture.
  
• In Inter L&S 102, “Exhibiting the Material Culture of Science,” you will go behind the scenes of museum know‐how and learn how to interpret and exhibit science objects.
  
• Drawing on knowledge from LIS 201, “The Information Society,” you will try your hand at interpreting objects in digital form.
  
• We will visit multiple museums, on campus, in Madison and in Milwaukee and bring in a number of guest experts to help us think together about objects, science, and culture. 

By the end of the semester, you will have learned much about science and its history, methods of interpreting objects, and communication through multiple media. Plus, you will have discovered many hidden by‐ways of the UW-Madison campus which you will enjoy for the rest of your UW career!

Important deadlines for Fall 2013 semester

In a large course like LIS 201, there's a fair bit of jostling as students add and drop the course during the first week or so.  Please keep these important deadlines in mind:


Friday, September 6, 2013

• Last Day to Enroll without $25 Late Initial Enrollment Fee except Specials and Guests

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

• Last day to drop courses or withdraw without DR or W grade notation on Transcript 

Friday, September 13, 2012

• 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.

Friday, September 20, 2013

• Last Day to pay tuition and fees without $100 Late Payment Fee 

Reader for fall 2013 is ready at Student Print

Our required course reader is ready for purchase at Student Print.  This year it will cost $34.70 (on recycled paper) which is about a third of the cost of a standard textbook.  All proceeds go to the student-run non-profit Student Print business.  Their hours are weekdays 9:30-6:30.  Make sure to bring the reader to your discussion section each week!

See you in lecture later this morning ...

Getting ready for Fall 2013!

Hi folks.  If you've stumbled upon this blog, I bet you're wondering if this year's iteration of my course "The Information Society" will look at all like last year's.  Well, yes and no.  I've just finalized the course reader and I can tell you that 90% of the readings are new this year.  But the basic structure of the class will remain largely the same.  And just like last year, I'll be working with a team of fantastic teaching assistants who are all graduate students in the School of Library and Information Studies.  We'll have fun and we'll learn a lot this semester, I promise.

So feel free to poke around this web site until it goes live on the first day of the semester, but remember: I reserve the right to tinker up until then.

Digital Studies Certificate

Don't forget, this course counts toward the Digital Studies certificate. The Digital Studies certificate is a 15-credit interdisciplinary program open to students from all majors and departments. It requires:

• 1 core course - Either LIS 201, Com Arts 200, Journ 176-Media Fluency, or Art 107. As an LIS 201 student, you've already met this requirement!
• 4 courses - From the list at digitalstudies.wisc.edu/courses. These 4 courses CAN overlap with courses from your major. You need one class from each of four areas: Digital Media, Digital Practices, Visuality in Digital Design, and Digital Information Structures.
• 1 capstone project - In any course that can overlap with another class project or directed study.

To learn more or find out about advising opportunities, visit http://digitalstudies.wisc.edu.

Help tip for Ignite presentations

Helpful advice from one of our TAs:

For those of you having technical difficulties with the Ignite format, you might want to consider taking advantage of Software Training for Student's "Ask a Trainer" program (http://www.doit.wisc.edu/training/student/index.aspx). [...] After you register with Software Training for Students, you can set up an hour-long one-on-one appointment with a trainer who specializes in power point.

How to read the readings

In discussion section this week, your TAs will likely discuss "how to read the readings" -- in other words, how to use your course reader actively, taking notes, underlining key arguments, circling key terms and their definitions, and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for yourself so you can remember what you found exciting about each article and what you found frustrating.  To help you get a handle on this, I've uploaded copies of this week's two course readings (by Webster and Auerbach) with my own annotations to the "Handouts" section of our web site, so you can see what kinds of things I pay attention to when I read.

Any tweetlings in class today?

Just tweeted ...

Getting ready to teach #uwlis201 in the scenic Chemistry Building. See the course web site at lis201.blogspot.com

Feel free to use hash tag #uwlis201 in your tweets about our course!