Awakening Ideas about the Sleeper Curve: EBIGFY (Including S.G's Boobies)

Monday, June 8, 2009

EBIGFY (Including S.G's Boobies)

In Steven Johnson’s Boring Book, Everything Bad Is Good For You,

Telescoping, Probing, Multi-Threading, And Flashing Arrows,

Help Characters Share Entertainment, Information, and Complexity,

But Schoolwork Sucks Steven Seagal’s Kickass Boobies.

Gracefully composed by....

Omar Mustafa

Kylor Roberts

Tyler Hamilton

Ryan Geiselman

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Theoretical underpinnings

This site is a collaborative class response to Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. Over the course of the class term, the students of the course were encouraged to spend an hour a week negotiating a new (to them) television show, video game, or web site. While there were many other assignments along the way, the final paper was to be a case study of how the texts they interacted with all quarter did or did not exemplify Johnson's argument. In the book, Johnson proffers the theory of the Sleeper Curve: that the much-maligned pop cultural texts are so structured that they make our brains work harder to follow them. The students were to weigh their texts, based on their research, in light of the specific components of Johnson's theories.

Thus, the students were testing what Lalita Vasudevan and Marc Lemont Hill call a "pedagogy of media": "the various ways that media texts function as sites of public pedagogy that authorize particular values, beliefs, and identities while contesting or obscuring others" (3). Perhaps the assignment is a fairly narrow one, as it asks students to evaluate how the shows/games/sites encourage them to assume identities of intelligent consumers of media. Nonetheless, while their task here was not so much to critique the "values" that the texts encouraged their readers to construct, you will see that many could not offer their critique without doing so in some way.

The posts at the site are in three categories: the case studies the students conducted, their overall responses to Johnson's theory of the Sleeper Curve, and, in a nod to Dr. Valerie Kinloch, a "found poem" that small groups of students pulled from the semester's key terms and associated words.

Enjoy!

Vasudevan, Lalitha and Marc Lemont Hill. "Moving beyond Dichotomies of Media Engagement in Education: An Introduction." Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility. Ed. Marc Lemont Hill and Lalita Vasudevan. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 1-12.

Awakening Ideas about the Sleeper Curve

Monday, June 8, 2009

EBIGFY (Including S.G's Boobies)

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Post a Comment

Theoretical underpinnings

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