Response from Mike Wesch

Told you all I would contact Mike Wesch. Here's what he sent us! Links to what is essentially their syllabus. It was a radical departure from most classes: "a student-guided, student-motivated, student-graded collaborative project." Let's replicate and begin to develop our research question together over the next week.

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Mike Wesch wrote: You should be able to find most of what we have done on our wiki at ksudigg.wetpaint.com. For example, here are some YouTube statistics http://ksudigg.wetpaint.com/page/YouTube+Statistics. At the bottom you can download the actual data set as an Excel file. I'll ask one of my former students if they would like to consult with your class. I'm sure one of them will.

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Professor G wrote: > That does help and amazingly because it suits my teaching process. The
> syllabus is to collaborate on designing a research question and build a
> research schedule that is continually updated. Would you mind sharing what
> data you all have been collecting? Share, remix and reuse is our motto and
> we want to remix so to speak for a hip-hop research question but having a
> model works. Perhaps you could offer one of our "grads" from a previous
> course to work as a sort of consultant to our class. One of your resident
> experts on your class. In any case, your swift response is invaluable!
> Thanks so much, Kyra
>
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Mike Wesch wrote:
>>
>> Hi Kyra,
>> Nice to hear from you again. Here are some answers to your questions, though >>they may not be the answers you were expecting or hoping for!
>> Syllabus: We never use a syllabus. We brainstorm a research
>> question and then the class works together to decide what we would
>> need to know to answer that question. We collaboratively build a
>> schedule of research which is then continously revised as the project
>> continues.
>> Data Analysis: We use a Zoho form (free to create at
>> creator.zoho.com) and then import the data into a Google spreadsheet
>> (also free) where we can collaboratively analyze the data.
>> Skype? I *really* wish I could say yes, but I feel like every hour
>> of my life is already scheduled from now until Summer 2009!
>> Hope this helps. Good luck!
>> ~ Mike
>>