Awakening Ideas about the Sleeper Curve: Johnson poem

Monday, June 8, 2009

Johnson poem

The information pervert blogged, sharing boring free porn on MySpace, face book and you tube while the comedy craigslist play station was expensive the x- box was red while people surfed Google for the call of duty therapy produced by Mel Gibson directed by Steven Spielberg with a relaxing series of a HD entertainment on the idiot box with a “hug fight”. Steven Johnson and Steven Seagal while Adam Sandler sucked bobies.

Paige Byers, Haven Moore, Dorothy Vaughn

No comments:

Post a Comment

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

Johnson poem

No comments:

Post a Comment

Theoretical underpinnings

Blog Archive

Labels

Search This Blog

Contributors