First off let me say I am slowly going through your portfolios and they
look pretty good so far.  You have all come quite a ways since the beginning
of the semester.  I'm going to try to get them all out to you by tonight but I
may have to take a pizza & beer break, in which case the rest of them will go
out over the weekend.

A couple of questions have been asked about the final project, and I want to
reiterate a couple of things about it:

(1)  I am expecting the equivalent of a scholarly paper here, in some
electronic form.  The most obvious example is the web page.  But I want
everyone to remember that as cool as your web page might be it should in some
way make a scholarly argument about the issues discussed in the course
materials.  It need not (and should not) be organized like a scholarly paper,
but I do expect that the content of your web site will consist at least partly
of your scholarly commentary on a theme related to the course.  A web page of
links to gender and cyberspace issues, for example, would not be enough -- a
significant portion of your site should consist of your own writing (but feel
free to include as many links as you want, of course).  For web sites with
examples of what I mean, try the following:

http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/ 
My "alternative news" web page.  While this site is not related to issues in
the course, it demonstrates one possible way of including scholarly commentary
with hypertext links to other sites.  

http://www.columbia.edu/~ap191/ok.html
 This site illustrates another possible way of including scholarly research
with hypertext.  Like the above, it does not deal with the course material.

http://cmns-web.comm.sfu.ca/cmns353/96-1/zulkarna/
 A long paper about gender and cyberspace.  This is (duh) related to the
course material.

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~mengwong/netsurf/contents.html
 An annotated bibliography-style commentary on society and cyberspace.

http://www.netspace.org/~erica/Mobius/home.html
 A cleverly laid out set of pages about Baudrillard (a theorist relevant to
the class).

I hope these examples help.  Remember that the web offers you the unique
advantage of expanding the possible ways of organizing and presenting
material.  The best projects will be those that fully take advantage of these
possibilities.  

(2)  For those of you that prefer to MOO, the possibilities are endless.  You
can, for example, write a paper that you will take apart using the "cut-up"
technique.  Then you could use the sections of the paper in a "slide show",
you could create objects with descriptions that help illustrate some of your
points, you could even build your arguments right into the descriptions of the
room.  Or you could plant little "notes" all around the room that offer
visitors your insight into the topic or theme.  You might want to explore the
library on the MOO for other possibilities.  There is a URL-room somewhere
near the library (or in it, I don't remember) that collects URLs; you too can
compile a rich array of URLs related to your topic.

(By the way, everyone should know that there is a web browser built into the
MOO.  If you are in MOO and want to read the text of any web site, just type 

@get http://whatever (replacing whatever with the URL of
course)
 

and the MOO will display all the info from that web page.  It's kinda messy
but a good way to quickly retrieve some information without using netscape or
leaving MOO).

(3)  For those who don't want to MOO or web, you can still present your
project online in a creative manner.  One option is a series of posts to
HyperNews.  This can allow you to present a series of links along with a
discussion without much knowledge of HTML.  You can use 
http://lrc.csun.edu/HyperNews/get/ben/454/proj.html
for this purpose (Do Not put your final project on the main hypernews
page!) 

(4)  Take advantage of the cut-up method if you want to make your organization
more creative.  You can do this directly on your computer or you can print out
your work and cut it up physically, rearranging it in front of you.  You'll be
surprised at how effective this method can be, even when you don't have a
clear idea of where and what to cut to begin with.

I hope these comments help.  They will be posted on the web for your
convenience.

See you tomorrow,

Ben