*** Preliminary Draft -- Subject to Change ***

Explorations: identity, community, and voaction
An AU University College Seminar
GNED-140.080C, Fall Semester 2009

Professor: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
e-mail: ptjack@american.edu
office: Leonard Hall, first floor (General Education office)
office hours: TBD
AIM: ProfPTJ
blog: The Duck of Minerva

Padawan: TBD
e-mail: TBD
office: TBD
office hours: TBD
AIM: TBD

[PROCEDURE FOR HAVING A SCHEDULED OFFICE VISIT WITH PTJ: regular office-hours are open and unscheduled, and are generally some combination of first-come, first-served plus a periodic triage for time constraints and the like. These hours may change from week to week, but generally will be Thursday afternoons when possible. During these regular office-hours, I am guaranteed to be in my office and available for a face-to-face chat. If you cannot make it to regular office hours, and you don't want to just drop in and take your chances, you have to make appointments with PTJ by e-mail. First, check PTJ's calendar online (http://http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick); second, request an open timeslot; third, wait for an e-mailed confirmation before writing the appointment into your own schedule.]

This course will meet Tuesdays and Fridays, 9:55am-10:10am, in the classroom on the first floor of Leonard Hall. There will also be some co-curricular activities scheduled on Wednesdays during the regular University College lab time, one Friday evening baseball game, and one Saturday expedition. There will also be optional Sunday pizza dinners several times during the semester, held from 6:00-7:00pm in the floor common room; please let me know on the Friday preceding each dinner if you plan to attend, so that I can order the proper amount of food and soda.

Course Objective and Description

The purpose of this course is to provide an opportunity for you to explore your place in the world, and how you as an individual fit into the various communities to which you belong. This may sound trite, but it is also in many ways the purpose of undergraduate education: to gain a better sense of yourself, and to translate that sense into a concrete plan of action for getting the most out of your university experience. As such, we will engage in three forms of "exploration" over the course of the semester. The first involves a set of readings that explore issues of identity and community; these readings are alternately theoretical, to give the students an intellectual context, and literary, since literature often provides a clearer illustration of conceptual themes and issues than is possible when dealing in the world of accidental facts. The second involves a set of exercises and site visits in Washington DC. The capital city is a marvelous place to explore the ways in which identity and community are displayed and presented; much of the downtown area is a national stage, and students can be helped to “read” national monuments and museums and the like in order to see what they are saying about personal and national identities, and about the relationships between them. The site visits will allow you to explore various ways of handling the identity-community relationship, and to critically engage these various arrangements. The final form of exploration in the course is more specifically related to questions of career and major. Part of this involves self-assessment exercises such as the Meyers-Briggs personality trait inventory; part of this involves a series of invited guests who come to class and present “critical autobiographies”—in effect, tell their stories of how they got into the professions that they are in.

This is the course for you if you are looking to spend a few weeks intensely reflecting on what you might do with your next four years of schooling, and to do so in the company of classic authors and a group of classmates enagged in a similar exercise.

LETTER GRADES. At appropriate times during the semester I will be providing letter grades for the analytical essay and its revision, as well as for your team's simulation participation and for your blogging. The university also forces me to provide a letter grade for your overall semester performance. What do these grades mean? A letter grade for an individual assignment is my assessment of the extent to which you have met the goals and requirements of the assignment, whereas your semester grade is my assessment of the extent to which you have met the course requirements consistently throughout the semester. I do not grade on a curve; grades represent less how you perform relative to your classmates and more how you perform in absolute terms.

Letter grades will be assigned according to the following criteria:

• A: outstanding work
• B: solid, capable work
• C: satisfactory work
• D: unsatisfactory work
• F: failure to meet minimum goals

I will also provide more detailed feedback about your performance in these and other aspects of the course periodically, or upon request. Make an appointment or drop by my office.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. The General Education Program requests that all General Education instructors reproduce this statement on academic integrity in their syllabi: "Standards of academic conduct are set forth in the University's Academic Integrity Code, which can be found in the University catalog. By registering, you have acknowledged your awareness of the Academic Integrity Code, and you are obliged to become familiar with your rights and responsibilities as defined by the Code. Violations of the Academic Integrity Code will not be treated lightly, and disciplinary actions will be taken should such violations occur. Please see me if you have any questions about the academic violations described in the Code in general or as they relate to particular requirements for this course."

Let me add that Web-based plagiarism does you no good, particularly since I have access to the very same InterNet search engines as you do; you probably won't get away with it, and the penalties are quite severe if you are caught. And just so there's no ambiguity: the Academic Integrity Code applies to all course work, including blog entries, and any material used during a simulation presentations. We will go over appropriate ways to acknowledge the use of material authored by others at various points during the semester, as the occasion warrants.

But let's hope that this is the only time that the issue of plagiarism will come up during the semester.

UC Common Event

Still working the details for this one out.

Readings

I have ordered six books for this course. The first is The Presentation of the Self in Everday Life, by Erving Goffmann (Anchor, 1959). The second is Augustine's Confessions; please use the Oxford World's Classics edition that I have ordered. The third is Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (Vintage, 1995). The fourth is Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah et. al. (University of California, 2007). The fifth is Antigone by Sophocles (Oxford, 2007). The sixth is Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (Ace, 1987). All of these books have been ordered at the campus bookstore, and placed on reserve at the campus library.

There will also be several articles assigned throughout the course of the semester; these will be available on-line.

ProfPTJ's Blogging Rubric
Fall 2009 edition

What is a blog? Short for "weblog," a blog is a publicly-accessible online journal to which you can post thoughts, reflections, links to other websites, and the like. There are free blog-hosting services like blogger.com, as well as services that charge a small fee for hosting. The major advantage of a blog from my perspective is that it is viewable by anyone with a web browser, which means that anybody can join in the conversation; a secondary advantage is the fact that blogs are part of the wider web-based 'Net, so that bloggers can, through their posts, join in wider conversations that take place between sites.

Why do you require blogging for this course? Once upon a time I assigned students traditional journals or weekly one-page critical response papers; such an exercise does get people thinking about the material outside of class and promotes self-reflection, but it had two major drawbacks: each student was simply carrying on a one-on-one dialogue with me, and if I got a bit behind on replying to those weekly papers the dialogue ground to a halt. Blogging serves the function of a weekly critical response paper, but goes one better by encouraging conversations between students outside of class, since all of the posts are publicly accessible.

Why create blogging groups? Rather than having each student maintain an individual blog, which might promote individual reflection but might impede conversation as each student focused on their own blog to the detriment of others, I will divide the class into groups of three to five people-a "blogging group"-and have each group maintain a blog for the course of the semester. Participating in a blogging group gives you a ready-made set of conversational partners, a series of posts that you would really have to work hard to avoid reacting to in your own posts, and an opportunity to try out ideas in a group setting before bringing them to wider class discussion-or to elaborate on a portion of the class discussion afterwards.

Are we confined to our own group's blog? No. I will make all of the blog addresses available to everyone once they are e-mailed to me. You are welcome to read other groups' blogs, and comment on things that are posted there, or to reference them in your own posts-preferably by including links to their posts in your own.

Your individual blogging grade-everyone will get an individual grade, although one portion of that grade will be the same for all members of a blogging group-will depend on three factors: the extent to which your course blog meets technical requirements; your individual posting history; and your conversational performance.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS. Each blogging group will create a blog before the second class session. The blog's url, and the real name and user ID of everyone enrolled in the blog, should be e-mailed to me as soon as the blog is set up. I am indifferent as to the blog hosting service that you use; I use blogger.com, mainly because it's free and easy to set up. Each of these blogs must have the following features:

• Every member of the blogging group must be a member of the blog as an individual. In practice this means that each member of the group must have their own user ID, so that posts that they make will be clearly identified as belonging to them. You need not use your true name as your blogging ID, as long as I know who you are.
• The blog must permit comments on individual posts. You may choose to permit anonymous comments or you may require people to create a user ID in order to comment.
• Each individual post must have a readily-accessible static url that people can use to reference the post. Different hosting services have different ways of making this static url available to readers, and you should make sure that your blog makes it obvious how people can obtain that address.
• Finally, each blog must have some easy way that a viewer can bring up all posts written by a specific author. With Blogger, this is a matter of using Google's "Blog Search" technology and then adding a link to your blog's template, but note that you have to add the search links to the blog template; it is not enough to simply set up the blog! Other options exist for other blogging platforms.)

Every member of a blogging group will receive the same grade for this portion of their score; fulfilling all of the technical requirements gets you an A on this section. However, I am not going to take class time to explain how to do any of these technical issues. If you have technical questions, I suggest that you either a) hit the 'Net; b) ask around; or c) come to see me during office hours.

INDIVIDUAL POSTING HISTORY. Each student is required to post two different kinds of things on their group's blog. The first category, a response to the weekly discussion question, must be online before 9:01am on the Thursday of the week in which the question was posed (so that everyone will have a chance to read and perhaps react to the post before Friday's class). The second category, consisting of "reflective" postings that begin with class discussion, or from an issue raised by any of the week's reading(s), or from a point raised by someone else in one of their blog postings for the week, must be online before noontime on Monday of the following week. Hence, a typical week looks like this: Tuesday, discussion question tossed out; before Thursday 9:01am, response to discussion question posted; Friday, class; before the following Monday noontime, weekly reflections posted.

Note that you need only post replies to nine of the twelve weekly questions that I will toss out during the semester, but you have to post reflections on every week of the course, without exception. That includes the last week of the course, making for fifteen reflective posts in all.

Each enrolled student will keep a record of all of the postings that she or he makes, broken down by weeks. This record, which you should keep on your hard drive and update after you post an entry or make a comment on someone else's entry, should clearly indicate the static url of each entry that you make and each entry to which you have posted a comment. An easy way to do this is to make each week's section of the record look like the following:

Week X
Discussion question: http://blah.blah.blah
reflection: http://blah.blah.blah
comments: http://blah.blah.blah; http://blah.blah.blah; http://blah.blah.blah.

[Obviously, you should replace the X and blah.blah.blah by the appropriate information for each posting.]

Each student will be required to submit a report containing the information from their blogging record to me by e-mail twice during the semester: once in the middle of the semester (must be received by 5:00pm on XX October), and once at the end of the semester (must be received by 5:00pm on XX December). The e-mail in question should contain either clickable hyperlinks or plain text urls that I can cut-and-paste into a web browser. Do not submit the blogging report as a Word document or other kind of file attachment, or I will return it unopened.

Fulfilling all of the weekly posting and report-submission requirements will guarantee you an A in this portion of your score.

CONVERSATIONAL PERFORMANCE. If the previous two portions of your blogging grade were marks for technical merit, this is the portion of your grade that depends on creativity and artistic flair. In order to blog well, you need to be an active part of a series of online conversations. You signal your participation in such conversations in three ways:

• Referring to other people's posts in your own, preferably by embedding a link to their post's static url in your own post. Note that you are in no way limited to referring to posts made by other members of the class; the blogosphere is a vast place these days, and you should feel free to explore it-and link to relevant parts of it.
• Commenting on other people's posts, and reacting to comments on your own posts. This is the most direct way to engage someone in conversation: reacting to something that she or he has specifically written. Commenting is not strictly required, but it is the sort of thing that I expect stellar students to be doing on a regular basis. Once again, you are not limited to commenting on posts by other members of the class, or to posting comments on blogs maintained by class blogging groups. And you are in no way limited to posting one comment, especially if the author of the original post posts a comment to your comment...
• Using trackbacks to signal that a conversation is going on. If you find a post and want to post about it yourself, you can send a "trackback ping" to the first post indicating the static url of your post. That way people reading the post on which you have commented will know that there is a post out there in the blogosphere that discusses it or refers to it.

The point is that you need to be an active participant in online discussions over the course of the semester. Quantity is not the central issue here; the quality of your posts and comments is much more important. References, comments, and trackbacks are simply ways to trace the conversational threads, as is the individual posting record that you are maintaining.

I will send each enrolled student a mid-course report on their blogging at the approximate midpoint of the semester, and a final report will accompany their graded final analytical essay.