Pop Academy

While it’s not an official event, the above title helps me prepare my mental game for the summer pop culture course. Beginning Monday, 25 students should have registered a Pop Academy blog, which means more #commnerd content aggregating on this site until the end of June. I’ve been guilty of not posting regularly, however my Twitter game is still in full force, and I hope these new Pop Academy inductees will inspire me to keep the blog momentum for the fall class in August. Two sections of more than 50 students total will take over the site. However, the fall classes will be hybrid, meaning we’ll mostly meet in person with supplemental blogs. I’m stoked for the summer section, though, since it’s the first time Pop Academy will be online only. I challenged myself to craft (hopefully) helpful instructional posts and complementary video introductions to the material. I’m fortunate that a few of the students created blogs from Wordpress.com for my previous gender courses, but that still means I have about 20 students new to the tech. I hope I’ve channeled my geeky Wordpress mentors (you know who you are) enough to help my students get started.

It should be an interesting first week since I’ll be spending the first week of class away from my home office. I’m in the middle of a two-week “working vacation” visiting family in the St. Louis area. My mom’s place doesn’t have reliable wifi, so I’ve hacked my Droid and MacBookPro with PDANet to get secure https access and also plan to escape to coffee shops for afternoon grading. The course is divided into types of critical theory (Marxism, Feminism, Post-structuralism, etc.), of which I’ve paired with discussion topics related to current pop culture products and processes. I’ve got posts scheduled to go live a couple days prior to deadline and will occasionally post random pop culture musings depending on the headlines. We’ll also be using Twitter, but I have yet to schedule time-released Tweets via HootSuite , my latest Twitter obsession. It’s going to be a total nerdfest, or commnerdfest I should say.

I’ll have to post more later regarding my latest pop culture addictions and reflections, but for now I’m going to enjoy this beautiful sunshine some.

The folks from University of Cincinnati interviewed me at the Central States Communication Association conference in April. Shame on me for forgetting my mentor Laura Perkins’ name momentarily.

Soon we’ll be giving Pop Academy a bit of a makeover. Since I didn’t teach pop culture this semester the site has been in mostly a holding pattern. I’ll be teaching an online version for five weeks beginning late May to about 30 students. In addition to upgrading all the necessary plugins and features, I need to decide if I should delete former students as users so it will be easier for the summer students to find each other for the Buddy Press features. I still plan on having students maintain individual blogs, but since we won’t be meeting in person for group projects, BuddyPress is more essential than ever. I’m thinking that the final week of the summer class might be devoted to developing a group blog around an assigned critical theory and/or genre/product/process of popular culture. I’m interested in feedback from other folks who use blogs for online courses. Any helpful tips you can share are MUCH appreciated. For those of you who took the class last fall, any final thoughts before graduation that you think might be helpful in the online design of #comm326?

I’m going to keep the Twitter project and most other assignments from the fall class. I plan on updating the pop culture resource links based on what’s popular now. For example, Jersey Shore wasn’t on in the fall, but now it’s taken over pop culture–so has Tiger Woods, Jesse James and other “sexters/cheaters.” I need to take some time to craft the blog discussion topics, but I also want to leave the course design open-ended enough that enrolled students can bring their own interests and ideas to the blogs. That’s about all the creativity I can muster on this busy Wednesday.