Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

All, I enjoyed our last class meeting today, but as usual, sensed there was more to talk about than time allowed. Use this thread to share further thoughts and discussion about any aspect of the class. Thanks again for your hard work this semester, and remember that your final papers will be available for pickup outside my office (LPAC 204) next Wednesday.

I’ve taken the feedback you gave me during the first week of class — questions and areas of interest for the study of fandom — and turned them into a new page, accessible from the “Questions” tab above. In transcribing your responses, I made a few small adjustments for clarity, and arranged everything in clusters of shared themes. I invite you to edit the page and adjust these categories as you see fit, adding new ones and focusing others; in addition, you can always modify the questions themselves. My hope is that the class’s questions will provide a framework for our ongoing discussions, especially as we get more deeply into the semester and trends start to emerge.

So, this is the most absurd fannish thing I’ve seen on YouTube lately…

Yes, that hobo does go "zzz...b-ball...zzz".

For the record, the way I embedded the video was to click "media" under the "code" tab when writing the post and input the URL.

Thanks to quick responses from Ariel and Liz Evans, we’ve already identified and (in theory) resolved some of the confusion around your ability to modify this blog. Every FMST 85 student should now be now able to create and edit pages, add links to the blogroll, create new categories, etc. — all the features available to a site administrator.

I expect you to use these powers for good and not for evil. A few ground rules:

• Never change or delete a post or comment that someone else has written; if you have questions, reactions, or corrections to make, do it by adding your own comments.
• For Pages, which stand alone and are communally authored, modify or edit with care and respect. Better to add to a definition than rewrite what’s there; if there’s a dispute, e.g. you disagree with how someone has defined a term in the Lexicon, express your POV in some way that doesn’t simply overwrite what’s there — a parenthetical addition, like [This term is also defined by some as meaning ...]

In the hopes of heading off big controversies (and in the spirit of open conversation), I’m adding a Discussion page which we can use as a kind of scratchpad for bringing up questions and issues about the blog. You can consider this the space where we collectively work out the “Canon” of the Fan Culture course generally, and the blog specifically. I’ve already posted something there for you to add your thoughts to … check it out.

Another thing: it’s been pointed out to me that Page creation and editing are a little tricky in WordPress. Here’s how it works: in the Dashboard, go to Write. As I showed you in class, you have two options there for creating new content, Write Post and Write Page. But to modify an existing page, go to Manage, then underneath that select Pages. You’ll see a list of existing pages, and can select any of them to Edit. (One more ground rule: do not Delete any pages!)

Finally, remember that you can explore the mysteries of WordPress to your heart’s content by consulting the documentation.

That site I mentioned in class, www.superdickery.com, is hilarious — but, be forewarned, NWS.

Also, for context’s sake, Boing Boing.

Aaaaand the problematic nature of my dashboard page at the moment — is this how everyone else’s looks? Note how I don’t have links to edit the blogroll or pages, etc.

fanculturedashboard.JPG (<– click)