infobong.com

While I'm wasting time blogging, I'll comment on the "Pranks: Culture Jamming" course noted on bOINGbOING the other day. My first reaction to reading the story in the Contra Costa Times, was "I wish I could take a class like that!" One of my grad school profs has written about pranks, and another has certainly conducted her own. I suppose I wouldn't need this class, since I played pranks as an undergrad with no instruction, and I've helped students do pranks as a class project when I TA'ed for Sandy Stone. Perhaps students at Saint Mary's College of California need the germ of an idea or the prodding to play pranks.

Last fall, in the required "Supervised Teaching in Communication" course, the instructor assigned us to design and write a syllabus for our "dream class." "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism" seems like Ray Beldner's dream class, but I couldn't find the syllabus online. My dream class was "Making Alternative Media," which would be a class for activists and media producers combining no-budget production with studies of the history of alternative media. We'd start by making a class 'zine and end by doing guerilla documentary production. When I taught the department's "Intro to Digital Media" course last semester, I spent a good amount of time on alternative media online, but it would be nice to someday teach a class solely about alternative media.