Over the next 10 days we will be reading VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES:
HOMESTEADING ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER by Howard Rheingold. The book is available at Shaman Drum on State Street, and if you haven't picked it up already, do so now.We won't be actually discussing, necessarily, each and every chapter in a formal way, but we will discuss the book over e-mail and during some real-time conferences in the classroom.
The purpose of reading the book is two-fold. First, we are reading it to learn more about the infohighway from factual and historical perspectives. Second, we are going to start learning about some of the cultural, societal, and economic issues surrounding the infohighway. This latter purpose is crucial because for your third papers you will be focusing on one of these issues. As I noted above, we will be using our e-mail group to "discuss" each chapter.
You will remember that this is an intro comp course, so it's time to do some writing. The kind of writing we will be doing for the book, however, will not include formal essays per se, but rather what we call "writing-to-learn" activities. That is, I'd like you to keep an electronic journal of your reading and share each one of your reading responses with the whole class via the e-mail discussion group I've set up called infohighway@umich.edu. What you need to do for each chapter is first read the chapter closely and then write a 250-300 word response to the chapter. While you need not cover each of the below, you might address one or two in some depth.
What did you find to be the most interesting part of the chapter? That is, what did you learn about the infohighway that you did not know before?Of course, you may come up with other ways to address the chapter, but the important part is that you show evidence of serious engagement with the text. You may write your reading response in a word processor or directly on e-mail. If you write in a word processor, of course, you'll have to figure out how to import or copy and paste your response to e-mail. Send your reading responses to infohighway@umich.edu. I also suggest you create folders or mailboxes for yourselves on Pine so you can keep track of what you and others have to say about the various chapters.If you had to summarize the chapter for someone in 50 words or less, what would you tell them about the main idea of the chapter?.
What idea or part of the chapter might you want to learn more about? In other words, what issue introduced or addressed in the chapter would you consider doing more reading/research/writing about?
What was the most confusing part of the chapter?
If you could interview the author, what questions would you ask him about the chapter?
If we were to have a class discussion about the chapter, what part or ideas would you like us to focus on?
The Reading Schedule:
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Modified: 3/4/95