New Course Designs I have Developed and Taught

Davis Foulger

One of the true joys of teaching is discovering new subject matters and developing courses that bring those subject matters to students. This paper briefly describes several such courses. I would look forward to teaching any of them again, given the opportunity to do so. Two of these courses are specifically oriented to one of my primary research areas, computer-mediated communication. The third, Communication Relationships and Communities, explores a subject matter that is often overlooked in our mass media age, the importance of interpersonal communication and relationships to the formation and maintenance of communities (including online communities). Note that I have designed, but have not yet had the opportunity to teach, several other new courses within a sequence on Organizational Media Design that I have proposed as a new curricular direction within the field. I have not, as yet, had an opportunity to teach any of them, but I remain hopeful that I will be able to do so in the future.

Computer-Mediated Communication Systems

I have taught this course twice, once as a graduate-level (Ph.D.) seminar (Visiting Professor) at the University of Utah and a second time as an upper division course (Adjunct Professor) at Marist College. Taught as a broad overview of computer mediated communication systems and their use. At Utah my material was drawn entirely from my research at IBM. Teaching that material challenged it in significant was and forced me to solve problems I had not yet confronted. It also set up research collaborations with two graduate students at the University of Utah. The widely cited paper, Effects of Pictographs and Quoting on Flaming in Computer Media, resulted from a collaboration with Phillip A. Thompsen which continued for several years after I left Utah. My work in Communication Ethics is the result of a continuing research collaboration with Elaine Englehart. The course Mediated Interpersonal Communication (see below) is a more focused (on Computer-Mediated Interpersonal Communication Systems) version of this course.

Communication Relationships and Communities

Developed as a new intermediate level course in the Interpersonal Communication sequence at SUNY Oswego, replacing a course which the previous instructor had not been able to shepherd through the University course approval process. The course was entirely reconceptualized as an examination of the role of interpersonal communication in the formation and maintenance of our relationships and communities. Designed to extend one of the two primary themes that emerge as interest areas for students in the Introductory Interpersonal Communication course (the other is nonverbal communication, which was a focus in my variation on the Advanced Interpersonal Communication course. Student assignments in this course reflect the general theme of building and maintaining relationships and communities through interpersonal communication. A group project looked at the ways in which people communicate in a group (generally a workplace) context interpersonally. An individual research paper examined a community and the interpersonal communication systems which supported it. I am currently working on a paper on the role that media play in community formation and maintenance that directly extends work done in and for this course.

Mediated Interpersonal Communication

One of the first instances of a new kind of course that looks at at mediated communication systems exclusively from an Interpersonal Communication perspective. I was particularly interested, in this course, to have students look at the patterns of interaction in different mediated interpersonal systems. I asked them, in a series of different assignments, to look for patterns of language use and message structure in media that the observed using an informal methodology that sits somewhere between ethnography and conversation analysis (different assignments were closer to different ends of that scale). I've made extensive use of ethnography and archival data analysis in my research on computer conferencing, and more recently have been doing quasi-conversation analysis of interaction on Instant Messenger and Wiki Collaborative composition. This work was a starting point for their research. The paper Time in Interpersonal Media is the direct result of work done in developing this course. My paper Practical Telepresence and the Online Office describes strategies interpersonal media strategies I have used, especially in this course, to reach out more effectively to students.