I'm teaching two sections of an undergraduate honors seminar next semester at the University of Maryland, which I'm really excited about. Here's the course description:
HONR298T: Rip, Mix, and Burn: Social Creativity Online
When the British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his opium-induced fragment "Kubla Khan" in 1816, he prefaced it with a short note complaining that the poem remained unfinished because he had been interrupted by a visitor while composing it, a mysterious "person from Porlock." Ever since then the word "Porlock" has been used to signify the intrusion of the outside world into the creative process, and the romantic conception of the artist as a brooding, solitary figure who spurns the distractions of society remains with us today. Increasingly, however, the person from Porlock has become not an obstacle to creativity, but a precondition of it. The internet and other advanced information technologies have ushered in an era of networked creativity whose importance is reflected in the proliferating number of terms we now have to talk about it: "social software," "social media," "the creative commons," "Web 2.0," "participatory culture," "folksonomies," and "p2p [peer-to-peer] technologies." The purpose of this seminar is to analyze these collaborative values; explore their relationship with knowledge production and artistic expression; experiment with the emerging class of software tools, such as blogs and wikis, that support them; identify the legal issues that dog them; and study the social behaviors that underpin them: tagging, linking, texting, modding, and mashing up, for example. We will look at popular sites such as Wikipedia, MySpace, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube; and examine the promise and perils of the unofficial slogan of the Web 2.0 generation: "rip, mix, and burn." Additional topics will include fan fiction, the line between fair use and copyright infringement, user-generated content, geotagging, and machinima (the use of video-game engines to create animated films).
Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to interact with social media in a variety of ways, from blogging to social bookmarking to remixing content in the public domain. Final projects will be designed in close consultation with the instructor; possibilities include an analysis of fictional blogs, the development of a third-party tool for Flickr, or the creation of an artwork that repurposes software or mobile technology for artistic ends (maybe you want to text message a short story or launch your own online community art project or virtually tag your physical environment).
In addition to electronic readings, the syllabus will likely contain selections from the following print sources:
Rebecca Blood, We've Got Blog
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
Keith Aoki, et al, Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law?
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture
David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web