Tutorial, Group Projects, Marks, and other sundry items

Tutorial
A reminder that this week's tutorial will be held in Calumet College's computer lab. The topic is basic web design:

Novice Web Authoring with Dreamweaver I
10:30am-12:30pm, Friday, March 3, 2006
Teaching Lab, Bootstrap Foundations Lab, 108 Calumet College

Group Projects
Following are some initial thoughts to start thinking about regarding your group projects. EACH GROUP MUST SEND ME A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF WHAT THEY ARE PLANNING TO DO BY THURSDAY AT 11:59 PM. APOLOGIES FOR STRONG ARMING YOU ON THIS BUT I WILL TAKE OFF SOME MARKS IF THEY ARE LATE.

· When: Presentations of the group projects will take place Mar. 24 and Mar. 31.
· Where: TEL computer lab.
· Grade Value: 20% (half of your 20% mark (10% overall) will be on the group effort regarding the website’s theme and content and the presentation and the other half on your individual effort. Your group will be more about the content you present and less about the technology, the technology – what you decide to include on your website – must be driven by the content/topic(I’ll talk more about in this week’s tutorial (Mar. 2).
· What: To research and present a key theme/topic concerning some aspect of interactive art and the “Networked Imagination” via an exemplary and (in theory) interactive website. The themes will be linked, broadly, to the courses lecture topics but I want to keep them flexible and open-ended enough so they can be formed around the particular interests of your group. Please relate your research in some way to the many theories about art, technology, and interactivity that we’ve presented you with this year.
· You are to conceptualize and mount a mock website and present it to the class. The project is to be partially expository (descriptive of a particular theme or art genre) and partially theoretical (linking the project to the relevant theories we’ve been touching on in the course). You should approach this as a teaching moment; that is, how would you tell us about or teach us (the rest of the class) about this particular interactive art genre if we were new to the genre? Warning: You will not get extra marks for the sophistication of the website or for how many “bells and whistles” it has. Your mark will be based on, in part, how relevant the technology/website is to your topic/theme. That is, the topic and theme will dictate how your technology will be framed. That means that you must give thematic context to your technological choices. In a sense, the “message” will serve your “medium” although, as McLuhan has taught us, you will be cognisant of the fact that the medium, as always, intimately influences the message, as well.

Individual Blogs
For those of you doing individual blogs this semester in lieu of last semester's paper please see me after the tutorial on Friday. For those of you that have not yet completed sufficient blog postings for last semester, come and see me as well after the tutorial.

Marks
I will have everyone's marks for the presentations ready by this Friday. Also, for those of you that handed in your term 1 papers late, I will also have them ready for you by Friday.

Tutorial Emails

Emails have been removed.

Feb. 24 Tutorial

We'll be meeting in Vari Hall on Friday.

For the first half we'll talk about group projects, confirm the groups, and share with the class your ideas. Make sure you've had at least one group discussion, however brief, about what you plan to do for the project and be prepared to share your ideas informally with the rest of us. Some of you have not sent me your group rosters yet; can one memeber of your group please do so before tutorial?

We'll then be taking 5 minutes to draw for group presentation times, which will take place Mar. 24 and 31.

For the second half of the class we'll be discussing Frankenstein and Haraway reading on cyborgs. Please have Frankenstein finished by Friday. Think about why we're making you read the book. Here are some questions you might want to ask yourselves after having read it: Why would Frankenstein be relevant in a course on network culture, art, and technology? Who does Dr. Frankenstein's character represent for our times? How about the monster? And what about the author, Mary Shelley? Is the fact that she's a woman writing when she is important? What about the people the monster encounters in his struggles? Whom do they represent? What does the monster desire and why? Is he just a monster or is he something/somebody else? Why is the book subtitled "The Modern Prometheus"? Should you be looking back to the Greek myths to see how it might relate to Frankenstein? How might an interactive artist be relating to such a tale? How does Haraway's essay on cyborgs relate? Can you come up with five or six (or more) concepts that you can glean from the book? Finally, go back to the simple question we posed at the beginning of the year: Why are human beings -- especially us late moderns -- either so enamoured with or despondant about all this technology stuff, anyway? Is Shelley's Frankenstein trying to grapple with this most fundamental of issues for modernity?

Finally, I'll be holding my office hours: 1:30-2:30 in Founders College. I'll tell you how to get there on Friday -- it's kind of tucked away. You can find out all of your marks then. Also, for those of you writing blog entries in lieu of last semester's paper, please come and talk to me either after tutorial or during my office hours.