Hi FILM260 Students.
The first week of the course went by really quickly and we saw an amazing amount of commenting, connecting, and creative work produced in just a few days. Extremely impressive, thank you. We have a really great group here. I’m almost finished assessing the Personal Profiles + Statements, and will post those grades in Moodle ASAP this week. They were excellent. The photoquotes were too. I’ve pinned some of them here and I noticed that Queen’s University pinned some here. Nicely done! Photoquotes are assessed as a set of 3 at the end of the course.
This Week
The topic for week 2 in FILM260 is social friendship. We began thinking about that subject with the very last article posted on Week 1′s reading list, by Sherry Turkle. This week we’ll look further into the nature of online friending and e-romance, privacy, personal disclosure and sharing online, and the ways we are constructing and maintaining interpersonal relationships through BBM, photosharing, skype, and status updates. Some of the readings celebrate “virtual” friendship and others round-up studies that show the damage of too much Facebooking and not enough face-to-face connectivity. Of special interest to the marketing-minded students in the course, the reading list connects the dots between social friendship and social advertising, with emphasis on how important it is for brands and organizations to reach online “influencers”.
Assignments
If you have not already done so, please complete and submit the participation agreement by Monday.
This week you have one assignment due. Your first blog post must be published by Friday at 11:59pm (Kingston time). To create a good post, you’ll want to do some or all of the weekly readings and find a few good quotes to integrate, then find some original research to cite and link. You’ll also need another excellent Creative Commons image from Flickr to illustrate your work. In the online space, having fantastic illustrations as part of your work makes a big difference — but you already knew that.
Word of Advice: Think Different.
When blogging, the importance of finding an original take on the weekly topic cannot be over-emphasized. Imagine seeing 300 blog posts all called “social friendship” posted in a single week — the cumulative effect would be super redundant. Let’s not do that. If we do, the first 25 posts will get many comments and much P2P feedback, and then next 275 likely will not, because it will feel like “it’s all been said already.”
Be more creative. Read the readings and look for your angle. Think outside the box about the various topics that are loosely linked here under the “social friendship” banner. Come up with a good question about one of them, your own question or one posed by one of the authors on the list, then formulate an interesting thesis, gather your evidence, and craft an argument to prove it. A blog post is like a mini position paper. Give readers something to think about, agree or disagree with, and comment on. Think about audience while you write, keep your tone academic but reader-friendly, and you will see more engagement with your work, trust me. To that end, on a fast-moving blog like ours, titles matter and keywords do too — be discoverable.
Also helpful: for all the details on how blog posts are assessed, revisit the course outline. Tip: Be sure to live link your sources in the body of the post instead of putting them at the end of the blog post.
Connecting
Questions? You can ask the teaching assistant Hayley Fuller, and she’s a very connected girl, but do not expect an immediate reply — she’s paid to be online 4 days a week max and not after business hours. Or send an email to me — that’s the fastest way to get my attention, it goes straight my phone(s!), or you can use Facebook messaging via the course page too, I check in several times a day. I aim to respond to inquiries within 24 hours, 7 days a week.
I look forward to reading your work — see you online.
