Mid-semester evaluations

I wanted to write a post to thank you for providing feedback to me about how the class is going so far. I also wanted to summarize what you all said and let you know what I'm thinking as far as incorporating your suggestions.

  • Many of you said that the openness of the discussions is working well for you. Some of you requested more theory/lecture. I'll attempt to do a bit more of that each week, but not too much since I don't want to take time away from our group discussions which I agree are a good aspect of the class.
  • Many of you expressed concern about being able to get through all the readings. I hear you. Figuring out how to get through more material than you could possibly have time to is an excellent skill to cultivate now! (It's part of the reason graduate instructors assign an impossible amount of reading - as a scholar there is always more to read than you will have time for.) So, my tips would be to read/skim with intention - what are the major points/arguments, how does it relate to the week's theme, how does it relate to the field of social media in general. If particular articles are especially interesting to you, then you can go through and read for the details. I would recommend closely reading at least a couple of the assigned articles each week so that you have something productive to bring to the in-class discussion.
  • You also asked that discussion be more focused on the material from the readings. Part of my rationale for not being more reading-focused is that I see the weekly readings as providing all of us with the background material to then show up to class and have an informed intellectual discussion that can go in new directions beyond the readings. But I take your point that our discussions could be more rooted in the specific theories and arguments from the readings, so I will keep that in mind going forward.
  • One person asked for a weekly recap of "what we discussed (or thought we discussed) over Twitter throughout the week." I like this idea! Let's try it. As I said in class, one reason I am requiring you to participate in Twitter is to get your own first-hand experience of a social media platform, with all of its affordances and limitations. So it's ok if you end up hating Twitter and ultimately don't find it useful for you - that's interesting in itself! Many of you said you liked the Twitter component of the course, which is interesting too.
  • Some of you asked that I take a more active leadership/guidance role in the discussions, to encourage more variety of students to speak. I hesitate to silence or call out specific students because I want to be sensitive to varying levels of comfort with speaking in front of groups. My request to you all would be to be cognizent of your level of involvement and, if you are someone who speaks a lot, to try to defer to other voices when possible. I will also make an effort to actively draw more of you into the discussions.
  • There were a couple requests for more visual materials. I'll work on that. It can be tricky to balance (1) getting to everything from the readings with (2) offering new visual texts during classtime, but I'll try to balance the trade-off between the two.

Feel free to add comments to this post (or contact me privately) if you have any further thoughts!