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.

However, I still find the actual course materials pretty disappointing. The main problem, in my opinion, is that the course revolves around three modules (Production, Distribution, and Consumption), but the weekly lectures don't necessarily fit well into those modules. To some degree it's because the modules are somewhat forced, but it's also because only one of the three professors was really committed to the structure. The other two professors gave lectures that the students could, if they really worked at it, tie to the three modules, but the lectures didn't seem to be focused on the modules at all. The result is that the class as a whole was very disjointed, and there was very little continuity from week to week.

It was also frustrating to be in such a large class... discussions in class were a joke, and in our breakout sessions we spent a lot of time complaining about the course. On the other hand, I am going to apply to be a TA for the class next fall... fingers crossed. This class also used a wiki for knowledge sharing, which I think was moderately successful.

Media & Political Engagement
This class was great. A little heavy on the powerpoint slides and undergrad-style lecturing, but the material was interesting and the professor is a fantastic person. She seems incredibly flexible and willing to be a mentor to all of her students. Her grading style is not particularly demanding, but she does a great job of integrating process-learning into her assignments. I fell behind this semester on everything, and this class took the brunt of it, and I was pretty disappointed because it was definitely my favorite class.

Discourses of Culture, Media & Technology
This was one of those classes that looked great on paper but was disappointing in practice. In fact, I was very disillusioned about the CCT program as a whole after this class, as were several of my peers (one even considered leaving CCT). The main issue was that the professor had very little interest in teaching... he generally let the students run the class, with very little guidance. In some settings, this can be great, but in our class nearly everybody was struggling with the readings, and the student-run sections were very dry and impersonal. There wasn't much peer interaction at all, and there was little attempt to connect one week's session to other weeks.

This course also used a wiki, although I found it to be largely unsuccessful. I've heard, however, that both the wiki and the professor's courses have improved dramatically this semester.