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January 6, 2006
Building the Syllabus
I'm putting the finishing touches on my Media and History syllabus (more on that later), and a colleague suggested a few resources that I wanted to keep in mind for future reference (other people might find them useful, too).
First, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media has an excellent resource, a syllabus search that allows you to search 639,752 syllabi at the Center for History and New Media and over 500,000 syllabi via Google using keywords, names, and titles. I think I've mentioned this site in the past bceause of their September 11 archive, which also looks incredibly useful.
Second, a couple of resources that might be useful in teaching students how to read academic writing. Tim Burke's "How to Read in College," which illustrates its suggestions with a reading of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which I was considering teaching. Another good resource for helping students navigate difficult material is Susan Strasser's "How to Read a Book."
More later, but I thought others might find thees resources particularly helpful this time of year.
Update: The one section of my syllabus that seems a little underdeveloped is the unit on photography. I'll likely use sections of Susan Sontag's On Photography and Walter Benjamin's A Short History of Photography, but found lots of other cool ideas while digging around on the Center for History and New Media's syllabus search.
Update 2: This is mostly a bookmarking update, but I have 1-2 open sopts in my syllabus, and I'm thinking about devoting one of those classes to a discussion of early debates about sound recording, including John Philip Sousa's intriguing essay, "The Menace of Mechanical Music." The Phonozoic website also has Barnet Phillips' 1891 essay, "A Record of Monkey Talk" and several other articles reporting on the early history of the phonograph, as well as sound files and other cool stuff.
Update 2.5: The Phonozoic site also has a pointer to a nice collection of Edison sound recordings.
Posted by chuck at January 6, 2006 5:39 PM
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