Pop Academy

Many changes are in store for Pop Academy, but most will not be visible on this site. For starters, I’m not teaching any courses with required blogging components this semester. Due in part to a changing of the guard with the required lower and upper level theory courses, I don’t have an elective this time around. With the quick turn around needed to teach the 100+ baby theory course plus the senior-level theory course I’ve been teaching a couple of years now, I didn’t want to spend valuable, scarce winter break time scrapping the existing syllabi just to work in social media. Further, I won’t be teaching the upper level theory course next fall, so no point in all that prep for a course I’ll be handing over to someone else.

However, I still plan on plugging blogs and Twitter as a great (ahem, all but necessary) resource for communication studies majors. Maybe I’ll even get some takers who want to build blogs from my Wordpress multiuser account. Meanwhile, a number of my pop culture and/or theory students from last semester have moved onto their senior research, where they plan to incorporate social media theory and use into project design. I can’t stress enough how cool it is to still see at least a handful of them actively tweeting pop culture and current events topics.

The absence of student blogs linked from Pop Academy this semester means I need to step up my game as the site’s sole contributor. I’ve needed to do so from Day 1, but fall semester was my heavy teaching load. In addition, most of my conference prep for the Media Studies Interest Group of the Central States Communication Association is complete. The conference isn’t until near the end of the semester, which helps, too. With the course release from the large lecture course and a lighter grading load, spring semester will allow more time for research and active blogging—which are one and the same given my goal of designing a social media in the classroom research study. Once I get into a teaching and office hour rhythm, I’ll be working on my IRB form and then participant recruitment.

In addition to the new study, I need to complete the Tila Tequila essay that’s been on the back burner for a year. Essentially, in the piece I argue how popular media has positioned her bisexuality as a lifestyle choice for ratings and consistently asked her to “prove” her orientation via physical performance. I may also have a Mad Men edited volume to work on later in the term if my co-editors and I have success with a publisher. Finally, I’ll be prepping Pop Academy, well the Critical Theory and Popular Culture class, for a high-density online run for the first summer session.

Oh, and I must mention today is the first day of spring classes. I teach just once, in fact I only teach one class daily Monday through Thursday this term. Here’s hoping for a good start to Spring Semester and lots of good writing time.

As the busiest semester of my life draws to a close on this final 90-minute stretch of highway returning from the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m relieved and panicked at the same time. On one hand, most of my academic duties for the semester are behind me. On the other, many tasks will present themselves in the coming days. My pop culture students take their exam tomorrow and begin group presentations this week. My theory students turn in their lengthy annotated bibliographies Friday. Some students are enrolled in both classes. To them I extend my sympathies. In all seriousness, it’s been a fast ride this term. Not only did I fly to Los Angeles and Chicago for conferences within a month of each other, during the same month I also flew to my hometown in the Midwest to attend to a family matter for a week and coordinated reviews for a division of a regional conference in my discipline. At the end of this marathon my body decided to shut down and contract a non-flu bug that kept me in bed for three days.

My students deserve much credit for grasping 300- and 400-level theories in my extended absence. The pop culture class in many ways has taught itself via the course blog and Twitter. In the theory class we relied on Skype and the department video camera to keep group presentations on schedule. I want to examine these classroom tech topics more closely once the semester is officially complete. Many research and pedagogy ideas came to me at the National Communication Association annual convention in Chicago earlier this month that I have to find time to digest. In short, I attended a daylong special seminar on intersectionality and feminism that may turn into a book project with other scholars. I also made some connections at an amazing panel focused on using social media in communication research. Google Docs and Wave may give my research agenda just the boost it needs to study social media in the classroom.

The Twitter project made perfect sense for the pop culture class. However, the non-graded use of Twitter by my students for their other classes makes a compelling case for Twitter adoption by other professors in my department. I have noticed an uncommon offline connection between the communication students via their online chatter. They started creating their own course hashtags and making associations across courses and professors. I’m looking forward to our Twitter wrap-up in class Wednesday but feeling bittersweet about letting my tweeps go.