Timeline

The four weeks leading up to this course unit act as a survey of media and technology. Movies, video games, and internet spaces will be the major topics. At the end of Week 4 students will take an exam to ensure they are familiar with the terms and vocabulary necessary for the rest of the course. This schedule picks up right after that.

Week/Day	Class topics & activities	Homework
Week 5 Day 1	Review exam Film as memory	Read: Lopez, The American Geographies
Day 2	How do we experience place? A look at America in film and video games.	Read: Degan & Rose, Making Memory, Making Landscapes Blog post: Think of how Degan & Rose relates to the work of Bazin: How do we experience place? Is technology closing the gap between reality and media?
Week 6 Day 3	Media as cultural memory--how place is represented in media. Difference between space and place. How does technology further this distinction?	Read: Cresswell, Place: Encountering Geography as Philosophy Read assignment sheet for Mobility Project Part I
Day 4	Projective spaces-relating Gee’s triparte identity to space Questions about assignment	Look at The Wilderness Downtown, Welcome to Pinepoint and Test tube.
Week 7 Day 5	Projective spaces cont’d- How does technology shape our experiences?	Read: Farman, Locative Life
Day 6	Mobility within spaces- How do we move in physical space? Is physical space shaped by mental spaces?	Navigate around my rhetorical study of public libraries website Begin reading Cline’s Ready Player One
Week 8 Day 7	Share findings on mobility	Blog post: TBA
Day 8	System disruption- Designing media that subverts existing systems. Easter eggs, marks of auteurism, trackable geocaches.	Mobility Project Part I due by 11:59 pm on Saturday Read Mobility Project Part II assignment sheet
Week 9 Day 9	Looking critically at the systems we live inside. How are the systems represented in the mental and physical spaces? Criteria for MPII proposals.	Draft a group proposal for your geocache and have it submitted to me by the start of next class.
Day 10		Finish reading Ready Player One by Tuesday!
Week 10 Day 11	Discuss Ready Player One, specifically issues of space/place, triparte identity, and game systems.	Blog post: TBA
Day 12	Group presentations on proposals for geocaches	Read: Neustadler et al, “Creating scalable location-based games”
Week 11 Day 13	Is geocaching a game? Looking at Foursquare, Google Earth, and location-based technologies.	Contribute to crowdsourced study guide in Google docs
Day 14	Exam on space/place and Ready Player One.	Relax. Oh, and work on your geocache projects.
Week 12 Day 15	Review exam. Updates on your media.	Read: McGonicgal, Reality is Broken (Ch. 11)
Day 16	Enacting social change- Are projective spaces helpful?	Read: Cresswell, Towards a Politics of Mobility Blog post: Are we moving toward mobility? What are the politics involved in mobility? Is what you found coinciding with Cresswell's claims? Explain in 350 words.
Week 13 Day 17	Showcase of MPII