CMS.360 | Fall 2012 | Undergraduate

Introduction to Civic Media

Assignments

There are five different aspects of this course on which students will be graded.

  1. Texts & discussion (20%): Students are responsible for engaging with all texts for the class, and coming to all course meetings prepared to discuss the week’s texts.
  2. Weekly reflections (30%): Expect to spend time (2-3 hours) each week on a reflection that you will post to the course blog.
  3. Discussion facilitation and synthesis (10%): Each week, a student (or pair of students, depending on class size) will be responsible for co-facilitating discussion of the assigned texts. This student (or pair) will also be responsible for synthesizing that week’s texts, blog posts, and discussion notes into a single topical post for the Center for Civic Media blog.
  4. Midterm project proposal (10%): At the semester’s midpoint, each student (or group) will present a final project proposal and work plan for feedback from the rest of the students and instructor.
  5. Final project & presentation (30%): The final project for Introduction to Civic Media is flexible, but is expected to be a significant original work that reflects both your understanding of the topics and texts covered in the course as well as your own ideas.

During the Fall 2012 semester, students in the class posted blog entries to The Center for Civic Media Blog.

In general, this reflection should focus on the week’s theme and tie together assigned texts, class discussion, posts on the course blog, additional materials, and your own interests. Additional instructions will be provided each week based on the topic.

First Blog Post

Introduce yourself, reflect on the 10 points workshop, and include your own definition of ‘Civic Media.’ Elaborate what you believe to be the (3–5) core principles of Civic Media - provide links to examples, with short explanations. In your entry, discuss your interest in the topic, write a bit about why you chose to take this course, and explain what it is you hope to gain by the end of the semester.

Near the end of the semester, we’ll revisit and rework our first posts on the nature of civic media, integrating ideas and examples from across the course syllabus. Blog post (required): Reread your first blog post for the course (your definition of Civic Media), and write a revised version with commentary. What changed, and what remained the same? What frameworks do you find most compelling? What are the key spaces for intervention in the future of Civic Media?

Second Blog Post

We’ll post our model of digital inclusion, to be developed in class. As a comment to that post (or as a standalone post if you prefer), attempt to use this model to analyze the hometown/neighborhood you grew up in, in terms of digital inclusion. Don’t attempt to be exhaustive - just use the model as a tool for reflection. What information and data sources would you draw from? What does the information ecology look like? What are the key inequalities, and are they interesting civic media projects or practices?

Your blog post can be a comment, or a standalone post. Be sure to select the category ‘Intro to Civic Media’ when you create posts!

Third Blog Post

Take feedback from the project proposal workshop, think about it, choose the project you’re most excited by, and write a blog post about it.

Fourth Blog Post

What is your theory of change? What role does civic media play in this? Create and post a diagram of your theory of social change. You can create your diagram however you like - pen and napkin, gliffy, your favorite tool, it’s up to you!

Fifth Blog Post

For this post, describe your model or progress on your final project.

Sixth Blog Post

Where are you with your project? Write about your progress.

Seventh Blog Post

If you wrote a case study draft for the Civic Maps toolkit, please complete that. This week you’ll complete a final draft.

Make a NewsJack, or series of NewsJacks. Write a short blog post (one page) analyzing your remix (es) in terms of the power relationships you chose to critique, reflect on, or reproduce.

Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Blog Posts

Project updates.

Blog Post Revision

Near the end of the semester, we’ll revisit and rework our first posts on the nature of civic media, integrating ideas and examples from across the course syllabus.

Blog post (required): Reread your first blog post for the course (your definition of Civic Media), and write a revised version with commentary. What changed, and what remained the same? What frameworks do you find most compelling? What are the key spaces for intervention in the future of Civic Media?

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The final project for Introduction to Civic Media is flexible, but is expected to be a significant original work that reflects both your understanding of the topics and texts covered in the course as well as your own ideas. Final projects may be completed individually or in groups, and may take the form of a case study (with a significant written component), an investment of time in civic media practice, with a substantial written reflection on that practice, or a Civic Media demo design accompanied by an analytical paper. Demo design (of games, applications, platforms, tools) may be a core component of the final project, but must also be linked to a written project paper that goes beyond description or documentation to place the demo in (theoretical, historical, and/or comparative) context.

Final projects may be completed individually or in groups, and may take the form of a case study (with a significant written component), an investment of time in civic media practice, with a substantial written reflection on that practice, or a Civic Media demo design accompanied by an analytical paper. Demo design (of games, applications, platforms, tools) may be a core component of the final project, but must also be linked to a written project paper that goes beyond description or documentation to place the demo in (theoretical, historical, and/or comparative) context. Final project summaries and links will be posted to the C4 blog.

A complete final project includes the following:

  • A blog post summarizing the project has been published at civic.mit.edu
  • Any multimedia elements of the project have been published online and are embedded in or linked from the blog post
  • The final version of the project text has been sent to schock AT mit.edu in either an open document format or as a pdf. This should also be uploaded somewhere (to the blog, scribd, book, etc.) and linked from the blog post.

In session 4, project proposals will be due. Come up with 3 short project proposal ideas (one to three sentences each) and add them to. You can also write ‘+1’ or your initials next to proposal ideas that you think are especially interesting and would consider joining for a group project.

During the last class meeting, each student (or project team) will formally present their final project as an IGNITE talk (5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, automatically advanced. Final projects are due on this date. Late projects will not be considered.

When developing final projects, consider the following theories, frames, platforms, geographic contexts, and uses of Civic Media:

  • Theoretical approaches to Civic Media: political economy, public sphere & networked publics, hegemony & resistance, identity formation.
  • Theories of social change and uses of civic media (dialogic, contentious, hacktivist.)
  • Frames: civic media, citizen journalism, media justice, public media, radical media
  • Platforms: print, radio, TV, internet, mobile, games, maps, music, theater, posters & murals, etc… Also consider cross-platform and transmedia approaches.
  • Geographic Contexts: hyperlocal & neighborhood news, city, nation state, regional & transnational, global.

Other potential themes:

Note: below you can find several examples of final projects from last year’s Intro to Civic Media class that received an ‘A’ grade.

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Course Info

As Taught In
Fall 2012
Learning Resource Types
Lecture Notes
Written Assignments with Examples
Projects with Examples