Seminar: Special Issues in Social Media
Special Issues in Social Media
Dr. Carmel Vaisman
A. Seminar description:
This seminar is designed to support any research project a student wishes to undertake within the field of digital culture studies. For this purpose, we will familiarize ourselves with a selection of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that are pertinent to contemporary technoculture issues. The selection of frameworks for each year will be determined according to the needs of the students and will be applied on topics such as gaming, digital death and online afterlife, online cute cats, virtual and augmented realities, wisdom/danger of the crowds, digital religion, identity and relationships with virtual characters and robots, etc.
B. Seminar requirements
Readings and Participation. Seminars are based entirely upon reading assigned materials prior to class and discussing them in class. All students are expected to actively participate in these discussions and will be graded for it. The discussions will be structured as debates between students/groups or gamified exercises, designed to practice argumentation styles, perspective shifts and develop research related skills.
Final seminar/term paper. Students should have a preliminary direction or rough interest for a paper topic as early as possible so the steps for pursuing it could be elucidated and exercised in class. However, it is also possible to take up a new pursuit introduced during classes. One of the lessons (week 8) will be replaced with personal meetings to discuss the specifics and
jumpstart your research project. Students will submit a seminar paper on a topic of their choice by 14 May 2017. Term papers differ from seminar papers only in their scope and length but require the same research skills and are submitted by 5/2/17.
Recommended Length of the papers (double space or 1.5 space; title page and bibliography not included) is between 18 and 25 pages for seminar papers and between 8 and 13 for term papers.
C. Grading
Your seminar grade will be calculated as follows:
Participation/readings/in-class exercises 20%
Seminar/term paper 80%
