sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

As long as I'm recapping all of my papers, I might as well recap my courses too. So here are my general reactions to the three courses I took last fall.

Intro to CCT
This is the only explicitly required course in the CCT program. At the time, I found the class incredibly frustrating but, looking back, I appreciate it at the very least for bringing all of the new students into one room and building a sense of community and connectedness, as well as a common vocabulary and reading list.

For my Intro to CCT midterm last semester, I wrote a paper titled "Podcasting and the Public Interest: Children's Programming on the Internet," which was a very feable attempt to discuss podcasting in terms of the historical debate over broadcast television and the public interest. It was possibly the worst paper I've ever written, so I wasn't horribly surprised that I was asked to rewrite it.

The final project for my "Intro to CCT" class was basically a glorified vocabulary test. We were encouraged to be innovative and creative in our approach to the project, even to have a little fun, but there was a great deal of grumbling outside of class. I was probably among the loudest grumblers.

However, once I came up with a topic, I completely nailed it, and the end result may be the coolest academic products I've produced.

The very first paper I wrote in graduate school was really just a writing test. It was assigned in the required introductory course for the CCT program, and was really just a hook for the faculty to identify which students might need to be referred to campus writing resources. Anyway, the assignment was just to discuss, in one page, a potential problem in contemporary media systems.