General Philosophy

One of the great things about an online course is its flexibility. However, this freedom comes with responsibility as it puts more pressure on students to be self-motivated and organized. This page offers you some guidelines for participating in this course. You are not required to follow these guidelines, but you might find it helpful to do so, at least for the first few days. You should plan to spend 7 hours a week online. In other words, you should image the time you spend in Ning and PBwiki as equivalent to the time you would otherwise have spent in class.

You could spend a hour every day, but that's not my recommendation. Instead I suggest you spend 2 hours and 20 minutes, 3 times a week (e.g. MWF). If you show up less than 3 times a week online I think it will be very difficult for you to be an active participant. So if you want to log on four or five times a week, that's fine too, but I'm going to provide some guidelines for the 2 hr 20 min/ 3 times per week model.

1. 15 minutes: Go to your profile page in Ning and write a brief blog post reporting on what you've been doing. For example, maybe you've read the first two parts of Neuromancer. You could give us your general impressions and put forward some questions and/or comments about it. What did you find interesting? What was confusing? What does it remind you of? And so on. The idea is just to give your reactions here.
2. 20 minutes: Read your classmates blog entries and make a couple comments. You don't have to comment on everyone's, but maybe you can answer someone's question or chime in with your agreement or disagreement with something your classmate said.
3. 45 minutes: Check out the Cyberpunk Literature group page in Ning. There will be some ongoing discussions there. I will also post various interesting things I find around the web. You don't have to read everything or participate in every discussion, but take a look at what's going on and find at least one place where you can participate in a substantive way. The course discussion is an important opportunity for you to demonstrate your understanding of the course material. It's likely that you'll find something in the class discussion that will link to a related project in the course wiki.
4. 45 minutes: Investigate the wiki. As I said, there will likely be something in the discussions that will point you to an active project in the wiki. If not, in the sidebar on the wiki, at the bottom, there is an area that lists "recent activity." This will tell you which pages on the wiki have been recently added or altered. Visit those pages and make some contributions. Or, if you want, create a new page. You can also make comments on wiki pages.
5. 15 mintues: Go back to your profile page and add another entry to your blog. Write about what you've done for the last two hours and try to synthesize it all in your head. Were you able to build from the questions and interests you identified at the beginning of your session? Did you discover new questions or interests? How is the class coming together for you? What do you see building? What are you learning? What are you going to do next?

So that will work if you come three times a week. If you come four times, maybe you only blog once per session. Maybe you choose between spending time in the Ning group discussion or the wiki. Maybe you'll only check out your classmates blogs twice a week. Whatever you do, I'd like you to blog about your activities. Keep in mind though that in Ning your member page will track your activity. You can delete things from this activity list if you want, but it will provide a record of what you've done.

I do recommend that you document your wiki activity on your Ning blog. There are various ways I can track individual activity in PBwiki but there is no definitive way of automatically tracking what you do. As such I suggest you document all your substantive work that you want to be sure that I do not miss.