Chris Boese's Portfolio

Course Syllabus: JOUR 494 Pollner Seminar Syllabus

University of Montana, Missoula:

Who controls a free press? Blogging and the citizen journalists' challenge to Mainstream Media

Fall 2005 Syllabus

Instructor:  Dr. Christine Boese
Meetings:  11 am to 1 pm Mondays in 2nd Floor Journalism Library & Honors Computer Lab
Class Blog:  www.serendipit-e.com/494private 
Office Phone:  406-243-2934
Office:  208 Journalism Building
Office Hours:  1-3 pm Weds., Tues., Thurs. unless I'm meeting with other classes. I'll also be available M-F during the day most days

Texts and Electronic Tools:

Available in the campus bookstore. The Gillmor text can also be downloaded free online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp, but I want you to bring the book to class, so you'll need to print the whole thing out somewhere. Also, the two optional texts are usually available with two-for-one discount pricing as a package deal at Amazon.com.

Required:

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, For the People. Dan Gillmor. O'Reilly Media Books, 2004. See also http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp.

Recommended:

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Rebecca Blood. Perseus Publishing, 2002.

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture. Perseus Publishers ed. Introduction by Rebecca Blood. Perseus Publishing, 2002.

Blog Software:

Each student will be setting up at least two (if not more) individual blogs as a course requirement. One will be a blog publishing forum and the other will be a professional journalism portfolio you can use to archive your clips and career achievements and show to potential employers (also part of your final grade). DO NOT jump ahead, as I will walk you through the process if you don't have a blog already. There are certain advantages to pre-planning and I want to make sure you understand the features and options before you plunge in.

The software I hope all will use (unless you are already a web-tech whiz-bang) can be found at Typepad.com. There is a low monthly fee, but I want to make sure you set up the account that will best fit your needs. I know that free blog accounts can be set up at places like Blogger.com (and even LiveJournal, egad!), but ultimately you will find future options limited at the free sites, and this is an investment in your professional credibility. Whiz-bangs may consider excellent products such as WordPress or Drupal, but prepare to be technically challenged by the installation and maintenance (and onerous comment spam, something Typepad has cured).

Finally, I'm hoping some adventurous students will take a stab at podcasting this semester, and Typepad just set up the easiest on-ramp to podcasting I've seen so far, to go along with its streamlined interface for photoblogging and mo-blogging. Typepad has also indicated that video-blogging will also be supported with the new podcast features.

Course Description

New Yorker press critic A.J. Liebling wrote in 1960, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." In this course we will examine and participate in one of the most radical restructurings of media ownership since moveable type displaced monks copying manuscripts by hand. Now the price of owning a "press" has fallen to nearly zero. In this time of great social change, the media landscape and its "powers that be" seem thrown into chaos. Some (like RIAA) are fighting the changes while others embrace them. The stress of change also releases great creative energy. These are exciting times for journalists! We will compare the social structures and technologies of broadcast and interactive media, and discuss the idea of a coming "convergence." We will also launch our own blogs and join the larger blogging "ecosystem." Along the way, we'll conduct online research into the bloggers' challenge to mainstream media (or MSM, as they call it), in an attempt to discover what is giving this grassroots journalism movement its power.

No specialized technical knowledge or web-building skills are required to take this course. We will learn to maintain web templates and style sheets with blog software. We will also learn practical writing strategies and media management skills for interactive journalism. By the end of the course, each student will have created a polished professional portfolio blog as well.

Course Syllabus: English 314 Technical Writing

Clemson Spring 2000

SECTION 100 T_TH 12:30-1:45 PM 302 Martin Laptop Classroom
SECTION 016 T-TH 3:30-4:45 PM Daniel 304 Computer Lab
Please wait 10 minutes if I am late to class.

Dr. Christine Boese
Office: 605 Strode Tower
Phone: 656-5416
Office Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays 2 PM to 3 PM or by appointment. (Wednesday Office Hours are held in P&A 82B, through the Communications Center)

Course Requirements and Policies

Please Note: This syllabus is subject to change and revision. Please stay on top of any modifications or changed reading assignments.

Required Texts:

(Available at Off Campus Student Bookstore, corner of Sloan and College)
Professional Writing Online, James Porter, Patricia Sullivan, Johndan Johnson-Eilola. Allyn & Bacon: 2000. (An E-Textbook. You purchase a slim Student Guide and an Access Code to the Online Text. DO NOT LOSE YOUR ACCESS CODE.)
Writing Handbook To Be Announced (I am waiting for a particular new electronic handbook to become available online).

Course Description

According to The Student’s Guide to First-Year English & Advanced Writing:

English 314 is designed primarily for students in engineering, computer science, textile chemistry, and forestry. This course helps prepare you for the kinds of writing tasks you will perform in careers such as systems programming, software development, water resources management, transportation, wood utilization, and health and safety inspection, among others. The technical writer must meet the following challenges:

• Write more often to audiences within an organization than to audiences outside.
• Often write for audiences with some technical background or with little or no familiarity with technical subjects.
• Write more about the physical and technological environment than about people.
• Observe, record, and use physical data.
• Analyze and explain drawings and other graphic representations of physical reality.
• Describe and define processes, mechanisms, concepts, trends, and issues.

This section of English 314 will be highly computer intensive, whether a laptop course in the smart classroom in 302 Martin or a non-laptop course in the Daniel 304 Computer Lab. You have very likely not encountered a class like this before. We will be simulating a real world industry situation the entire semester, and all of your writing will exist within that context. As such, you will be not merely completing assignments. You will be in professional workgroups, with project managers and designated tasks. In order to complete these tasks, you will have to communicate often and well, as professionals yourselves. Groups that collaborate or communicate poorly will find their projects suffering, not only in quality, but also in the grade. You will save all communication from the entire semester, from informal discussion boards to formal sets of documents created. Your final grade will be the cumulation of this body of work, a professional portfolio.

I like to start every semester with a grand experiment, to try something new and fresh, and possibly cutting edge. This semester we will rely primarily on an electronic textbook, an e-book that was written for the screen, not for the page. We will supplement this text with a quicksearchable electronic writing handbook and numerous World Wide Web resources. In a sense, the Internet will become our Textbook. You will leave this class so familiar with Internet-based tools and writing products that you will be able to list the skill on your résumé.

I also want to emphasize that this is a class in TECHNICAL writing based in specific fields and disciplines. You are expected at this stage in your university career to have some detailed familiarity with the language and culture of your major, an asset that your teams will do well to draw upon with real world or service learning projects. But as we study the language of our fields, please remember this is not a class in writing surface-skimming, fluffy marketing pieces. You will engage your topics in close detail, with attention to audience and clarity with difficult material. The electronic textbook I've chosen does a good job of keeping us focused on this task.

Course Syllabus: The Rhetoric of Web Publishing

Fall 1999 Syllabus

Instructor: Dr. Christine Boese
Meetings:4:00 pm to 6:30 pm Weds. in 413 Daniel
Bulletin Board: WebPub
Class Web: Ginger
E-mail: cboese@clemson.edu
Phone: 656-5416
Office:605 Strode Tower Office Hours2-4 pm Weds., Tues., Thurs.
Department: English
ProgramMasters of Arts in Professional Communication
Institution: Clemson University

Table of Contents

• Required Texts
• Course Description 
• Grading 
• Required Projects 
• Tentative Class Schedule 
• How to Subscribe to the World Wide Web Artists' Coalition listserv

Required Texts:

Available in the off-campus Student Bookstore, corner of College and Sloan, and at www.bigwords.com, access code B-UBR9. This is a new service, so if they give you any trouble, there is always AMAZON. You might also look into a new online college bookstore, www.varsitybooks.com, which is giving away $10 gift certificates to new users.

Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third Generation Site Design. 2nd ed. David Siegel. Hayden Books, 1997. See also http://www.killersites.com.

The Secrets of Successful Web Sites: Project Management on the World Wide Web. David Siegel. Hayden Books, 1997. See also http://www.secretsites.com.

Other Readings provided on Electronic Reserve and in a box in the MATRF Lab.

Optional texts recommended but not required:

Deconstructing Web Graphics 2: Web Design Case Studies and Tutorials. Lynda Weinman, Jon Warren Lentz, 1998.

Snow Crash. Neal Stephenson. Bantam paperback.1993.

You will also be REQUIRED to subscribe to the World Wide Web Artists Coalition (WWWAC) listserv during the time that you are enrolled in this class. It is part of the weekly assigned course readings. I recommend you subscribe in digest form, and refrain from posting to the list itself. This is a very active professional listserv based in New York City, and its members work in the heart of Silicon Alley. Naive newbies are often flamed if they say the wrong thing. Instead, if you want to discuss topics from the WWWAC list, lets take them to our class listserv, WebPub, instead, where we don't have to worry about sophisticated web professionals flaming us.

back to top

Course Description

This course is a graduate seminar in the theory and practice of communicating effectively on the World Wide Web.

Prerequisites: Visual Communication Seminar 860.

Objectives: This course examines the evolving cultures of the World Wide Web in a proactive fashion, taking a rhetorical approach to interactivity and hypertextual structuring. Students will also study methods of professional conduct in the burgeoning field of new media, preparing them to enter a workplace where their skills are in high demand. Students will learn to plan, produce, and launch comprehensive "third generation" Web sites with a high degree of sophistication. They will also develop (on their own) personal project sites that will serve as their online portfolios to show future employers and freelance clients. By using a rhetorical framework and considering the effects on online audiences and cultures, students will be able to apply what they have learned to other situations as new media evolve online.

We will be using the collaborative electronic learning forum on the CLE. I will also introduce you to other leading edge forms of electronic communication, as we explore what it may mean to communicate effectively in the future. The most important goal for me is that the computers do not obstruct human interactions, but rather, that they become a tool for accessing people, images, and ideas, and thinking and writing about them.

This course will take both a theoretical and hands-on approach to web publishing and will include topics such as "real" and "pseudo" interactivity, hypertext theory, privacy and ethics, the rhetorics of online social movements, as well as issues in technology and social theory. This course will help you improve your ability to adapt to fast-changing web cultures and design trends, as well as to critically examine the social effects of those trends. It will not be organized around creating a list of "RULES" for web design, because the web is in a constant state of flux. Rather, we will learn to ride the chaos as the fragmented and socially constructed subjects we are. My goal is to give you critical tools to grow and thrive with the web as it continues to evolve as a significant force in our culture.

Four types of activities will take place in this class, and you are expected to actively participate in all of them.

We will have active discussions of assigned scholarly and professional readings (both paper and electronic texts). You are expected to come to class prepared to contribute to the seminar discussions at a graduate level.

We will also have public viewing of our case study presentations and projects, called "Crit Sessions" or "Crits," in which everyone will contribute positive and constructive comments, articulating the principles we have developed and learned. As part of this activity, you are expected to collaboratively author a class "textbook" for the course, as we creatively archive our collective knowledge-making in a class web site, called "Ginger" (named for the movie star in Gilligan's Island).

We will have minimal lecture and instruction in various software packages, as needed. You are expected to follow along in any tutorials, and to come to the aid of any nearby classmates who might be struggling. This class operates under the principle that learning is a collaborative experience. We will cover a lot of ground very quickly. You will have to stay sharp and help each other in order to keep up. If we all work together, we will be able to move past html fundamentals in order to have sophisticated discussions and third generation projects by the end of the semester.

Finally, a good portion of this class will involve hands-on workshop time, as you work on your projects and get help in process. Even with this in-class workshop time, you are expected to put in considerable hours outside of class on your projects.

Academic honesty is expected. Due to the interactive nature of the class, there will be many opportunities for collaboration on projects. However, it is not acceptable to turn in pieces professionally designed by someone else as your own work. I will enforce this rule most strictly. 

Back to top

Course Syllabus: Visual Communication Grad Seminar

Clemson University:

English 853 Visual Communication

Spring 1999 Syllabus

Important Information

Instructor:   Dr. Christine Boese
Meeting Times:  6:30 pm to 9 pm Tuesdays in 409 Daniel
Class Bulletin Board           VisCom                              
Class Web                        Ginger                              
E-mail                              cboese@clemson.edu                              
Phone                              656-5416                              
Office                              605 Strode Tower                              
Office Hours                     2:00-4:00 Monday and Weds, 4:30-6:30 Tuesday
Department                       English Department                              
Institution                         Clemson University            

Table of Contents

• Required Texts
• Course Description
• Grading
• Practice Exercises
• Required Projects
• Tentative Class Schedule

Required Texts:

(Available in the off-campus Student Bookstore, corner of College and Sloan)   

The Graphics of Communication: Methods, Media, and Technology. 6th ed. Russell N. Baird, Duncan McDonald, Ronald H. Pittman, and Arthur Turnbull. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.

Stop Stealing Sheep (& find out how type works). Erik Spiekermann, E. M. Ginger. Adobe Press, 1993.    

Interactivity by Design: Creating and Communicating with New Media. Ray Kristof, Amy Satran, Adobe Press, 1995.

Other Readings provided on Reserve and in a box in the MATRF Lab.   

Course Description

This seminar provides students with a thorough overview of the theory and practice of visual communication for both pre-press and electronic media. It is designed to help writers and information designers integrate both verbal and visual elements into effective communication artifacts. Students will learn principles of layout and typography, study the use of color and electronic image editing, practice desktop publishing skills, create video graphics, and explore interface design for interactivity. There will be two major projects, one print-based, and one electronic, plus reading response papers and a research paper.

We will be using the collaborative electronic learning forum on the CLE. I will also introduce you to other leading edge forms of electronic communication, as we explore what it may mean to communicate effectively in the future. Some assignments will proceed in a more traditional fashion, while others will integrate the equipment in our classroom. The most important goal for me is that the computers do not obstruct human interactions, but rather, that they become a tool for accessing people, images, and ideas, and thinking and writing about them.

This course will take a theoretical and hands-on approach to visual communication and will include topics such as visual perception, design theory, and creative design processes. This course will help you improve your ability to see and interpret visual information. My goal is to give you a basic understanding of the importance of design in the communication process.

Four types of activities will take place in this class, and you are expected to actively participate in all of them.

We will have active discussions of assigned scholarly and professional readings. You are expected to come to class prepared to contribute to the seminar discussions at a graduate level.

We will also have public viewing of our weekly exercises and projects, called "Crit Sessions" or "Crits," in which everyone will contribute positive and constructive comments applying design principles we have learned, thus becoming steeped in the vocabulary of visual communication.

We will have lecture and instruction in various software packages, as needed. You are expected to follow along in any tutorials, and to come to the aid of any nearby classmates who might be struggling. This class operates under the principle that learning is a collaborative experience. We will cover a lot of ground very quickly. You will have to stay sharp and help each other in order to keep up. If we all work together, we will be able to move past design fundamentals in order to move toward quite sophisticated discussions and design projects by the end of the semester.

Finally, a good portion of this class will involve hands-on workshop time, as you work on your projects   and get help in process. Even with this in-class workshop time, you are expected to put in considerable hours outside of class on your projects.    

Academic honesty is expected. Due to the interactive nature of the class, there will be many opportunities for collaboration on projects. However, it is not acceptable to turn in pieces     professionally designed by someone else as your own work.