In an effort to teach less next semester (since I’m administrating far, far more) I’ve outsourced 2/3 of the course I usually teach on digital media aesthetics to Rune Klevjer, videogame expert and Scott Rettberg, electronic literature guru. Then I’m picking up three weeks (so six lectures) in HUIN106, an undergraduate course on “Digital culture and norms”, which is co-taught by Hilde, who does a section on gender and technology and Magne, who does history of computing and open source. In total it means I might actually get away with really only spending 18.75 hours a week on teaching and administration, the way I’m supposed to. Hooray!

I’m looking forward to teaching into HUIN106. It was really rather nice figuring out what goes into the dossier, which had to get to the bookshop today for copyright clearance and copying. I’m going to do online communities, using the very pedagogical-looking overviews in Gunnar Liest¯l and Terje Rasmussen’s book. I figure we’ll look at MUDs and Usenet and chatrooms and all the rest of it. Then we’ll use Steven Johnson’s bit about the desktop metaphor to talk about how interfaces affect us, and we’ll look at Unix, Windows and Mac and compare that and then relate it back to the different interfaces for online communities. Bolter’s chapter on “Writing the Self”, along with Angela Thomas on how teenaged girls represent themselves online will take us into the self-expression side of things (I really must read Goffman, I promise I will this summer), which will lead on into blogs, and then on into ideas about democracy and power in online communities, and for that we’ll read the second chapter in Liest¯l and Rasmussen’s book, and my article on links and power, and Susan Herring et. al. on blogs.

Here are the articles and book chapters going into the dossier:

• Liest¯l, Gunnar og Terje Rasmussen. Kapittel 8 og 9 (ìVirtuelle fellesskapî og ìDigitalt demokratiî) fra Digitale medier: en innf¯ring. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2003. 97-125.
• Johnson, Steven. ìThe Desktopî, fra Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: HarperEdge, 1997. 42-75.
• Bolter, Jay David. Kapittel 9 og 10 (ìWriting the Selfî og ìWriting Cultureî) fra Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.
• Thomas, Angela. “Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl.” E-Learning 1.3 (2004): 358-82.
• Walker, Jill. “Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web.” Library Trends 53.4 (2005): 524-29.
• Herring, Susan C., Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt og Elijah Wright. ìWomen and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs.î Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, og Jessica Reyman (red.) Juni 2004. .

There’s no social software as such in there, or social network stuff. I might slip an online text in somewhere, I guess, and I’ll certainly show some of this in class.