All students of Mass Communications in Tipperary Institute need to be able to accomplish porfolio-building tasks to a high standard. At the start of the 2007-08 academic year, we set down several specific deliverables for our third level students.
1. Maintain a personal microcontent presence with a LinkedIn profile, a Jaiku microblog, a Flickr photoset, a collection of social bookmarks on del.icio.us and a Facebook newsfeed that includes rich media elements. The microcontent presence will be assessed for academic credit at the end of October 2007 and at the end of March 2008. You must announce your presence in each of the microcontent streams on the college channel of Jaiku no later than the end of September 2007. At least 10 of your Flickr photos must suitable for high-resolution printing, tagged for aggregation (x_ref125mc08 tippinst slackershot), and released under the Creative Commons License. This deliverable is worth 10% of continuous assessment credit.
2. In a team of two, produce an OpenCoffee or CollegeLife segment that references cultural values from another part of the world. The senior multimedia lecturer must approve the focus of the segment by commenting on it in the skunkworks channel on Jaiku no later than fifteen working days prior to start of production. The segment must describe a graphic or photograph stored and tagged on Flickr (x_ref125mc08 opencoffee collegelife) that is suitable for high-resolution printing. Easily searchable terms of reference must be evident in the body of the script along with URLs to the company, theme or cultural event being produced. This deliverable is worth 20% of continuous assessment marks for those who earn a production credit on the public product which must air no later than 19 April 2008.
3. Write a 5000-word essay that contrasts Bebo or MySpace to LinkedIn or Facebook. The non-plagiarised essay must reference cultural values, linguistic nuances, collective intelligence, communication technologies, social norms, and draw upon your first-person experience in this virtual environment. You should inform your judgment by analysing facets of genre, representation, gender and linguistic cues that you have observed first hand in these virtual environments. The focus of the essay must be pre-approved by a member of the multimedia lecturing team in the skunkworks channel on Jaiku no later 24 January 2008 and the essay must be submitted in hard copy with a minimum of seven bibliographic references no later than 24 April 2008. This deliverable is worth 60% of continuous assessment marks.
4. Contribute to the Mass Communications studio sessions with personal observations relevant to the course objectives. Contributions to these sessions should be tagged (x_ref125mc08 resources) on del.icio.us and include text, photos, videos, and audio files that have a bearing on the study of mass communications and culture. Resources cited should be suitable for use by students and academic researchers as they examine the evolution of communications in our culture. At least one contribution to the resources must be suitable for use in revising for the final examination. This deliverable is worth 10% of the continuous assessment marks which will be awarded no later than 24 April 2008 in the Mass Communications and Culture module.
