Courses Designed by Students

Christy Moore

1. ME (Mechanical Engineering) 333T -- Technical Communications
In this course students will work on a research project concerning some developments in their field. The projects will be published on the Web and a student editorial board (made up of students who have previously taken the course) will select the best papers of the semester for publication in an e journal that will be linked to Mechanical Engineering's home page.

2. ME 3?? -- Engineering Ethics
This will be a writing component course with emphasis on readings about issues in engineering ethics. I'd like most of the projects to be collaborative.

3. ME 3?? -- I don't know what to call it
This may seem a little contrived, but I'd like to design a course that teaches students ways of using technology in their writing and presentations. I guess I'm thinking of a course that does some of the things this course (E388) does -- only for engineering students who are about to enter a profession that already values the use of computers in the design process.

David Liss

1. E316 or 314 Computerized drama: Students will read dramatic texts that exist on-line, sometimes using software specifically developed for particular plays. The focus of the class will be on how studying performance of drama--both performance that has been done in the past and performance that the students "design" is essential to understanding the multiplicity of meanings available in a dramatic text. Students will use various types of software to capture, view, and present performances of others and their own.

2. Computerized drama--graduate version (is this OK??) The description above also applies to this class, though this class will focus more than the undergraduate version on the authoring of software and on theories of performance and drama pedagogy. The aim will be an interrogation of the way drama is isually approached in literature departments and the implementation of pedagogical theories of performance as developed by the students.

3. E309--The Rhetoric Around Music--This course will examine the rhetoric around three musical styles that have produced striking controversy in American culture: jazz, punk, and rap. Students, by careful study of readings and films, will be expected to analyze rhetorical strategies that work to define these musical styles. Readings will include works of fiction as well as scholarly and popular writing about these musical styles. Students will have the additional opportunity to explore on-line texts and aspects of musical communities that have staked out space on the internet. The final project in this class will be a group project in a hypertextual medium (Hypercard, Supercard, Toolbook, or HTML).

Joanna Migrock
E 388 M
September 25, 1995
Proposed Classes
1) Masterworks of American Literature in the Virtual Classroom
Students will conduct their own learning by browsing through a wide array of hypertext documents on American Literature. There will be no class meetings or class times, although students will be expected to log a minimum number of hours at the on-line site.
2) Advanced workshop in Fiction
Rather than making multiple photocopies of their submissions, students will be able to post their works to a class site from which their peers can make comments. In-class discussions will take place in the form of Interchange sessions, which should not only provide the author with written transcripts of the feedback, but should allow for a range of comments not normally possible in oral discussions.
3) The Rhetoric of Administration (I need a better title)
We will examine a variety of commonly used administrative tools to better understand how they may be used both effectively and fairly. Tools discussed may include the short memo, instruction manuals, www pages, job interviews, policy statements, job descriptions, performance evaluations, meeting agenda and meeting notes.

Christine M. Griffith
Ideas for courses
Some rough categories or areas that I'm thinking about as possible course proposal topics:
(1) Gender and genre: films and film culture of the 1930s
(2) Rhetorics of gender and technology at the turn of two centuries (1890s/1990s)
(3) The cultural spectacle of women 1890-1920 (including images of suffragism, collective action, and the New Woman)
(4) Survey of American realist novels
Peg, I guess thinking about some possible course topics has already raised a few questions / dilemmas. I'm trying to be practical about the kinds of courses I'll actually have the chance to teach, assuming I write a dissertation and get a job. And one concern I had was about audience -- the types of courses I'm proposing might work at a large research university like UT, but may be too specialized for small liberal arts colleges (of which I am a product). When I was an undergraduate, for example, we had basically only large survey-type courses, of Romanticism, Victorian Lit, or American Poetry, for example. So even #4, survey of American realism, might be too narrow for a topic? Or would you suggest I aim for the ideal teaching environment? I guess I'm also not wholly satisfied with this list because it is maybe too gender-heavy for a lot of other university environments. I guess I'm trying to be realistic; if UT's English Dept. doesn't have any women Americanists, and no Americanists who specialize in gender or women, how receptive would far more conservative departments be to such course proposals? Finally, I'm uncertain about the appropriateness of these courses for computer classrooms. I'm not sure they make good candidates for courses to be built *through* technology, or whether I'd just be adding computers as window dressing. I guess the larger pedagogical question that I'm struggling with is how to incorporate computers in general, and this is something I'm still trying to figure right now, even as I'm teaching in the computer classroom. (I also don't know which of these I could use as a graduate course.)

Robert Linne
As for my proposed course plans:
Most of the courses in the Language and Literacy dept are relatively broad as compared to an English dept. So 2 of the courses I hope to plan are general- Theory and Pratice in the Secondary or Community College Literature Classroom and Teaching Comp. in the Secondary or Community College Classroom.
I also will plan a course titled Literacy and Culture. In this course my students and I will look at how home cultures affect a student's involvement in the American schools. The course will be heavy in sociolinguistics and will examine issues of race, class, and gender.
I will develop as well a course titled Cultural Studies in the High School classroom. In this course my students and I will construct ways to make high school English classrooms more relevant to students' lives through involvment in cultural studies, a la Giroux and Berlin. I would like to make this class *very* hands on as the students will work through their own cult studies projects in order to get a feel for the process. Well, actually all of my courses should be *hands on* but I feel like this one should be especially so, since many students have never looked at things like pop culture in an academic way.

Michele Maynard
Some early thoughts on courses to build:
This one even has a tentative title! "New Worlds, New Selves: Identity Construction in American Culture." This course would examine American literature and culture in relation to beliefs about/methods for constructing identities, whether of individuals, communities, or nations. Ideally, I would want to start by looking at some other cultural beliefs/perspectives on this issue, then start looking at Am lit, then end up looking at cyberspace as a "new world." I'd also like to work in something (or it might just be an on-going theme) about metaphors of topography/geography in these identity constructions.
I'd like to teach a class related to issues of literacy. Did you say one of our courses should be graduate level? If so, I'd probably make this that course. Basically, I want to look at various historical and cultural definitions of literacy, and maybe at pedagogies of literacy. Then we could examine the introduction of technology and see how that changes things (I don't know if you've read The Gutenberg Elegies, but I read it this summer and it drove me nuts. I thought it was very poorly and simplistically argued and a knee-jerk reaction to this issue, but he does raise some interesting questions that need to be addressed).
Finally (are there three? or do you want to just see 3 now, and the final number is still open?), I love American ghost stories and so would like to come up with a course on that.
I think at some point it would be really interesting to explore something like "disembodied voices," which of course would include internet, etc.

Mafalda Stasi
Courses I want to prepare during E388M:
1. E309 - Writing About Cyberpunk
(sort of cheating - I'll teach it next semester.... 8-) The title is "Writing About Cyberpunk" and I am totally cowed and awed by the great job that my sidecick Tonya is doing with it this semester. I'll have to work very hard to do something at the same level, so I'll be practicing (sp?) here. Ya'll have a look at her great web class site, the URL is: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~tonya/cyberpunk/ (explanation: we co-proposed the course; she teaches it in the Fall, I teach it in the Spring).
2. E-Whatever. Graduate class. "Gender Issues in Computer Networked Communication" or something like that.
This course should naturally stem from my main current interests i.e. from my dissertation (cool! yet-non-existent-stuff deriving from yet-non-existent stuff.... 8-)
3. E-Whatever. Either upper division or graduate class with a literary topic.
Still really murky. I'd like to do a genre rather than a period, and I'd like to use lots of multimedia for it. Something like a workshop where students produce a multimedia "book" inspired to their pet book. I'd love to dust off my first dissertation, on the Old Irish epic homologous to the Iliad. Maybe, "multimedia representations of Epic?" This would sort of tie nicely with the mitopoietic stuff I should deal with in the courses above. And of course I would end up producing a really cool Director presentation -- more cheating ... 8-)
This course should be in a workshop, hands-on format, where the teacher produces a project just like the students. (The main problem is that I will have to ask students to learn comparatively complex applications in a short time). Could be ideally cross-listed with the arts and with comp-lit, so I can get visually competent people and I can also get something different from the usual mainstream Epics.
[PLEASE I'D LIKE SOME INPUT ON THE DOABILITY OF THIS ON A PRACTICAL LEVEL. COOL AS IT MIGHT BE, TEACHING "APPLIED ANATOMY OF THE UNICORNS" IS NOT GOING TO BE VERY USEFUL FOR MY TEACHING PORTFOLIO...]
4. I have no idea. How about a traditional, sensible, doable course for once?
(Can I decide later on if I have time to do a fourth thing?)

Lynn Rudloff
My philosophy of rhetoric and composition: One primary aim of the writing course is for the student to develop an identity as a writer; a primary aim of post-secondary writing courses is for students to enter the academic discourse communities. Moreover, students construct themselves as writers through successful written communication and as scholars by joining the intellectual dialogues that constitute the commodity of the academy.
Undergraduate Course Proposals:
(1) Writing Ourselves and Others: Narrative Structure of Autobiography and Biography
Rationale: We construct ourselves (and our worlds) through language, each of us developing and refining (through revision) a collection of stories by which we represent who we are--or feel we should be. After examining examples of this genre, each student will select further reading material and analyze the language used to connect events into a public narrative. This analysis will be informed by representative articles on historiography or social constructionism that highlight the role or the author in creating, through interpretation, this "non-fiction" genre. Students will join the critical dialogue in these areas, moving finally into analysis of the less-formal media construction of public figures, such as politicians, entertainers, heroes and criminals, and of private figures of their own experience--with a guarded exploration of their own stories. Progress reports on their research, in the form of electronic journal entries, are themselves self-constructing narratives, and the class will analyze this material as well.
Examples of possible reading material:
Teddy "Blue" Abbott: We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
John C. Lilly: The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography
(2) Recovering "Reality": Writing about Ways of Seeing
Rationale: *How* we see determines *what* we see; that is, our belief systems determine what we construct as the "real" world. Looking at examples of writers re-visioning their understandings of the natural world and at scholarly articles that model the analysis of representations of "reality," students will be introduced to primary and secondary materials that fuel ongoing dialogues on constructions of reality. Students will join this dialogue by writing about the results of library research and their own personal observations. In addition, electronic journal entries will provide material for class inquiry focused on analysis of informing belief structures and connecting narrative devices. Students will take this method of inquiry into investigations of representations of reality in university disciplines and in popular media.
Examples of possible reading material:
Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Jane Goodall: In the Shadow of Man
Graduate Course:
The Story-Telling Animal: Social Constructionist Narrative Theory
Reading across such varied disciplines as historiography, psychology, mythology, cultural studies, and rhetoric, graduate students will investigate the growing body of theory based in social constructionism and narrative analysis. Linking these theories to the popular belief that modern cultures are rapidly losing social cohesion and moral/ethical commonalities, students will examine public commentary as tragic or comedic narrative that both reports and constructs representations of the nature of society or individuals.

Colleen M. Rodi
Here are some thoughts I'm having about courses:
1) A writing course (undergraduate) about World War II as it is represented in children's literature. I anticipate having the students read several children's stories/narratives about WWII (perhaps Diary of Anne Frank, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, etc...) and react to them both in argumentative papers (regarding author, audience, persona, etc...--and I plan to end the course with a major assignment involving an argument placed in a specific, and hopefully timely, rhetorical context. Still have a lot to work out about that) AND in journal writings. I think that computers, especially in terms of Interchange and Journal writings, will work well in this course.
2) A broad Victorian Literature course (always a passion of mine). I think in this course we'd do some standard readings (Bronte, Dickens) and some reaction-style papers. I'm thinking this could be either an undergraduate or graduate level course (depending on how intensely I choose to look at the literature). Don't really know yet how computers will fit in this one, except in the typical ways I mentioned in #1.
3) Language Acquistion (perhaps the best candidate for a graduate level course, and also a passion of mine). A Survey course of related literature. How do kids learn to talk? (Slobin, Chomsky, Donaldson, etc..) Perhaps--probably--an independent research topic required in this one. I think that computers would be especially interesting in a course of this nature, because "talking" on an Interchange is, for most of us, a relatively new medium of communication, an evolving language. I'm amused at the amount of discussion that seems to occur in Interchange discussion about how neat this new language opportunity is--I anticipate a lot of discussion about this thing we are doing on the interchange, the actual process we would be involved in. Ties in nicely with language acquisition.

Tonya Browning
E388M Tentative Course Proposals
E309M Writing About Technology or The Day the Web Stood Still
This course will focus on on-line technologies and how they shape our understanding and crystallization of the writing process. Different arenas of writing will be examined, with special emphasis on asynchronous vs synchronous discourse. Some examples include using newsgroups, the IRC, the WWW, MOOs and CU-SeeMe. All these examples contain text at some level. I would like my class to address how text is reshaped by its interface and if the discourse itself is altered as well. Students will read a plethora of online material, including Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown to discuss the rationale for protected discourse and the fear of the "interruption" of that discourse by the marginalized. Cypherpunks and phone phreaks will be a specific paper/project topic.

E316 American Literature The HyperNarrative
This would be a lower division literature course that is taught in the computer-assisted environment. A class list-serv would be implemented and hypermedia rather than web authoring would be emphasized. Students will participate in a semester-long project to build a hypertext that engages a particular "voice" in American literature. One primary example of multiple voices and styles will be Jean Toomer's Cane, a text that contains poetry, prose and a play. This hypertext will be a multiplied product, that students will "publish" via ftp. A short WWW page will articulate their approach and eventually serve as the link to the ftp of the project (in whatever format, but as a stand-alone app).

Graduate Course Design and the Virtual Text
This course will encompass aspects of traditional print/text design and then shift to the virtual environment. I would like to show students how they can build hypertexts from activities they have already practiced as readers/writers of text. We will investigate why hypertext is more than another representation of physical materials like text or images. Discussions of structure and nonlinearity would play a major role in this course. Readings would include authors like Tufte (Envisioning Information), McCloud (Understanding Comics), Laurel (The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design) Tognazzini (Tog on Interface), Bolter (Writing Space : The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing), Landow (Hypertext : The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology), Mullet and Sano (Designing Visual Interfaces). Assignments would be project-oriented and hypermedia would be stressed. Software like Director, Storyspace and Supercard would be utilized.
Michael Chorost

1.English 316K: SHAKESPEARE IN PERFORMANCE

Shakespeare needs rescuing from his own plays. They were never meant to be experienced the way undergraduates experience them: as texts. In addition, the sheer difficulty of reading Elizabethan English often denatures the pleasure of the experience.

In response to these constraints, innovative teachers have often had their classes stage portions of the plays, as well as attending plays and watching film productions. I propose to do all of these, and deploy two new tools as well: hypermedia, for situating plays such as Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear in filmic, historical, and scholarly contests; and MUDs, for enacting Shakespeare's characters in a roleplaying environment.

The MUD environment will enable students to read Shakespeare's plays as sources of character development, rather than as monolithic cultural constructs to be digested as best as possible. At the same time, the verbal environment will force closer attention to Shakespeare's language, just as staging forces closer attention to gesture and interpretation. Staging and MUDding, therefore, will play off of each other, each kind of roleplaying bringing out different facets of the drama. Students could stage an act on a MUD as a preparatory to staging it "live", for example; or reverse the sequence to examine the relationship between language and act.

Plays would be selected from Shakespeare's "genres", to ensure broad coverage and opportunities for comparision. Obviously, plays with relatively large numbers of strong, ambiguous characters lend themselves best to this sort of course. Ironically, the plays for which UT has the best hypermedia applications--Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear--would not be my first picks as plays, the former because its characters are less vividly drawn than in many other plays, and the latter because a single character acts as the center of gravity of the play. Nonetheless, I would work them in somehow, simply for the fun of working with the hypermedia.

Six plays will be selected from this list:

Tragedies

Comedies Histories

2. THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE (graduate course)

The thesis of this course is that the history of cyberspace reaches back, not to 1984, when William Gibson coined the word, nor to when ARPANET first came online in 1968, nor even to 1945, when ENIAC's tubes first heated up, but rather to the 4th century B.C., when Socrates was discoursing on Ideal Forms. Indeed, it can go earlier than that: the tropes of bodilessness, abstraction, modeling, and immortality that so characterize cyberspace today can be found in the Gilgamesh legend of 3000 B.C.

In short, the ideas that now make up what we call cyberspace have a very long history. Some of those are, in addition to the ones mentioned above:

The potential reading list for this course is vast. However, readings would have to include Phaedrus, Gilgamesh, Marc Shell, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Macroscope, 2001, Gödel, Escher, Bach, David Harvey, Vannevar Bush, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Derrida, Baudrillard, Michael Benedikt, and quite a few others.

3. English 309:THE UNBEARABLE ORDERLINESS of UTOPIAS

Must order always degenerate into tyranny? In this course we will ask the question: In the chaotic twenty-first century to come, will human beings be able to summon up the wisdom and imagination to create humane new ways of reconfiguring human society?

The course readings will be an intriguing juxtaposition of old and new visions of order. Readings from Machiavelli, More, and Hobbes will be used to illuminate George Orwell’s 1984 and Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. Paul Fussell's classic study of World War I will illuminate Edmund Burke’s conservative manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Al Gore’s liberal manifesto, Earth in the Balance. And we’ll read James Gleick’s Chaos, which has become a fertile source of metaphors for recent utopian thinking.

Since science fiction often tries to imagine alternative societies, we’ll watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, read Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Icehenge, and perhaps one or two other sf works, depending on class interests.

We'll be interested in the work of social and literary theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Richard Rorty, who have thought carefully about the viability of visions of utopia. Michael Benedikt's anthology Cyberspace: First Steps will have much to tell us about the "construction" of new kinds of communities online, and the utopian thinking which informs them.

Participants will write a one-page paper each week, to brainstorm ideas and stimulate class discussion. A 10-15 page final paper will be due a few weeks before the semester ends. As befits a Utopia, there is no final exam. Thus plays like Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, Hamlet,

Go to 388 course information

Questions? Email Peg Syverson: syverson@uts.cc.utexas.edu