Digitools 411

BLOGGER (BLOGSPOT)

Google’s blogging website Blogger will be used for course blogging. The course blog can be found at http://hiphopliterature.blogspot.com/ or by simply logging into Blogger.com (once you have established your account). It will be helpful to have a Gmail account, though you can become a “contributor” to the blog without one. See details on site for more information about registering. Students will be responsible for two blog posts during the term. Posts are due on off days. One post must be an album review (if it’s newer) or album retrospective (if it’s a classic), basically a close reading of a hip hop album of your choice. The second blogging assignment is an artist profile—an overview of a particular rapper or rap group’s work as a whole and their contribution to hip hop culture: what is their lyrical style? who do they sample most? what are the major topics covered in their music and what arguments do they make about those issues? For all intents and purposes, the blogger site will be used as the class homepage.

RAP GENIUS

Your work on Rap Genius will be a major grade for the term; your cumulative annotations on the site will be graded through your RG “profile” at the end of the term. The first step will be signing up for a RG account with a “hip” user name. Throughout the term, you’ll want to curate a meaningful (deep) and dynamic (images, links, etc.) collection of “explanations,” “suggestions,” and “songs” at your profile page. There are reminder due dates on the syllabus that you should be “explaining” lyrics on the site, and I will be following your activity on the site and making suggestions about how to improve your work. See the full Rap Genius Assignment on the course blog for more detail about the annotation website and its use in our classroom. Note: if you like, you can link your Rap Genius account and your Twitter account—we’ll have to explore together what this entails...

TWITTER

We will be using Twitter throughout the term as well. Twitter activity will be graded as a midrange grade at the end of the term, except for weekly Album Readings, which will be graded as quiz grades and more promptly. What do you Tweet?: commentary on song lyrics, rappers, course readings, relevant articles, maybe even your own rhymes, anything related to hip hop culture!

Album Readings: Once a week (on Friday), instead of traditional English readings, we will “read” classic and contemporary hip hop albums. Students will listen to the album and Tweet their thoughts for a quiz grade. Each album reading requires 5 Tweets. What do you Tweet?: commentary on lyrics, samples, quotes from album reviews (what did people say about the album when it came out?), or information about context (where is the rapper from? what was going on at the time of release?). Useful websites for such research include: Rap Genius and Who Sampled. Note: unless otherwise noted, all these albums can be listened to for free by signing up for a free Spotify account—Spotify also links to Rap Genius so that you can listen to songs as you read and edit lyrics!

We will be tweeting “#hiphoplit” for “Hip Hop Literature.” No need to Tweet “@mr_jdean”, my Twitter handle, though you should follow me—don’t worry, I won’t be following you. I’ll be reading all Tweets for the class by using TweetDeck to follow the hashtag #hiphoplit and I recommend that you use TweetDeck—also free for download—as well in order to aggregate the Tweets from the class.