 Greetings and welcome. This is the what is popular culture project video. So in this video I'm going to walk through this particular assignment and kind of hopefully clarify its complexity. But again you know this is kind of an intro. You really should be definitely looking at the guidelines or looking at the guidelines as you're going through this video. So this project is worth 400 points in your final grade. It is 2,000 words long or it will be when you're done with it. There's seven parts to this project. You will be forming it throughout the semester. So looking at that 2,000 words don't think like oh my gosh I've got to write this 2,000 word paper. It's done in smaller chunks so therefore it makes it much more manageable. And the cool thing about this project is it really allows you to integrate different content experiences and writings that you're doing throughout the course. So this project you know the title of it is what is popular culture. Maybe that's not the best name for the assignment but it's really just trying to get the student to think about what they've learned throughout this course and applying a lot of what they've learned to this question of popular culture and its relevance. But some of the questions that this paper should address should be the following. What is popular culture? What is meant by popular? What makes it culture? What values does popular culture offer society? How does popular culture reflect society? And how does society reflect popular culture? What meanings does popular culture provide or create within the culture? How does one study popular culture? Why does one study popular culture and what values lie or what value lies in studying popular culture? What is the purpose of theories and analytical frames in studying popular culture? How does one apply these theories and frameworks within popular culture? And note you know your paper shouldn't just straightforwardly answer these but really your essay should integrate these you know some of the answers to these into the paper. You don't want it to just be this is what popular culture is and this is what offers society but you really want to think about how you can kind of blend everything you've done into this semester into a coherent discussion about popular culture. So let's take a look at part one. You deal with this pretty early in the semester. It's usually do the second week of the course and it's only 250 words so that's about a double-spaced page and you're really working with defining what is popular culture. So what you want to do here is sum up in a good critical thoughtful way what did you learn in the first two modules about popular culture? And realize you're gonna submit this but you want to constantly coming back to revise it and revisit it, rethink it because this thought should be changing as we move through the semester. So parts two to four are a little bit interesting. I call these the adding component parts and what you'll have is within this you end up with two steps for part two, part three, part four. The first part is to submit your option for review. So parts two through four you're gonna have five options that you can choose from and you're gonna want to first submit what option you're doing it and what you're doing it on and then the second subject would be the second part will be actually doing it. So in that submission you want to identify different subjects you want to move beyond the class material and what I mean by that is merely that as you're doing as you're going through these parts you really want to be doing not only different assignments but focusing on different things. You shouldn't be doing say football for part two, part three, part four. It should be something like say you do football for one, you do you know pop concerts for another and you do race cars for a third. So you want to vary up the subjects and you want to move beyond the class materials. You want to really do things that aren't covered by the course. And then step two is just writing the paper or doing the assignment because some of these require different ways of doing the work than others. So what are those options? One is observing popular culture and this is a fun one often that students do so this would entail kind of being thinking of yourself as a anthropologist in going to a concert and observing kind of how people interact what's going on there, what's the culture being enacted or going to a parade or going to a major sporting event going to some place where there's a large amount of people participating in some form of popular culture and then writing an essay about what that was like and how it relates to what we're doing in the course. Another would be critiquing popular culture so a particular area of popular culture providing a very interesting critique and review of what it is, how people engage in it, why people engage in it that kind of thing. Interview with somebody with either a you know either a pop culture person meaning somebody who is you know celebrity or well known within certain areas it could mean interviewing somebody that's involved in popular culture so maybe it's somebody who helps to run anime Boston or it's somebody who writes for a very well known popular culture magazine or publication. Evaluate academic content on popular culture so this would be kind of like the article analysis just a much smaller version and then analyze an artifact of popular culture from before 1960 so you want to think of this if you've taken a history course this is kind of like a primary primary source analysis you're going to take some artifact it could be an episode it could be a advertisement a newspaper article a movie etc you want to write a you know you want to analyze it through some of the lenses that we've used within this course so those are your five options so what you have to think about is this is parts two through four so that's three parts and you're going to have to do at least three of these for parts through two through four part five is going to be synthesis so you're going to take you know what you did for part one part two part three part four and you're going to also if you want pull in stuff from the blog and make it into one coherent piece that coherent piece should have an introduction it should have clear connection and discussion of course ideas and themes clear use of the components explored in parts two through four and any relevant blog posts that you write that feel help add to your discussion or make your discussion more coherent clear connections and transitions among the different elements discussed so this is a lot of students or not a lot sometimes students will take their five pieces four pieces and just throw them into their paper and call it a day they really have to work together they really have to blend together otherwise it's not really an essay it's not really a coherent or synthesized piece and then of course you should have a conclusion so that's what you want to be thinking about for part five is just pulling it all together and what to think about is by that point you'll have written almost all 1500 words if not more and so now you're looking at refining cleaning up tweaking editing so that's really cool you know you're not writing straight out 1500 words but you've already built that material and of course you'll want a work cited and please make sure as you go through every part in this in this project you're going to get continual feedback from me i'm going to give you a lot of good feedback on what to cheat you know what what needs some work what's really good about your work in where you might want to look further or dive deeper part six is the peer draft so you actually are going to pair be paired up and do drafts or do review drafts with one another and again there's two parts of this there is posting your revised draft by thursday of of a given module i believe it's 14 and you're gonna have to revise and update it based on your the feedback you receive on part five so at part five you'll get more feedback from me and then between part five and part six you'll want to get up to two thousand words if you're not there already and really make sure it says as refined as can be and then you'll want to post it to um the the appropriate discussion board and then you're going to have somebody that you're paired up with who you're going to review and critique that classmates paper by sunday so the idea is that you're getting your paper critiqued and you're critiquing somebody else's so that it in truth that usually helps students with their own writing so you'd be giving evaluative feedback based on rubric critical feedback based on your own understanding of the content and relevant feedback based upon your own learned lessons on writing in this course so by this time you'll have gotten a lot of good feedback in different ways from me and you want to leverage that you want to think about what were the things that you found with your writing that need to work and also see if other students need help with that or just what you've learned about this course and how that makes you read or perceive the students paper and then finally part seven is the final draft and this is where what you should be passing in is a well polished you know well written clear essay that addresses the major questions it really should at that point take in all the feedback from peers and instructors you should have revised it revised it revised it i'm going to say that a lot throughout this course all good writing goes through revisions goes through editing so you want to make sure that you're doing that for your writing i know it sounds tedious i know it can sound like a waste of time but this is a really good process not just for my course but all of your writing all of your communications you're going to be going out into the water you know the world at large and this is a key tool to have and then you submit a well polished essay so that's the bare bones of it you really do need to check out the guidelines of course and if you have questions for the questions about this please post them to the questions form so that's all i have thank you very much