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(Graduate students register for COMM 260.) The role of mass media and other channels of communication in political and electoral processes.

This course examines the theory and practice of American campaigns and elections. First, we will attempt to explain the behavior of the key players -- candidates, parties, journalists, and voters -- in terms of the institutional arrangements and political incentives that confront them. Second, we will use current and recent election campaigns as "laboratories" for testing generalizations about campaign strategy and voter behavior. Third, we examine selections from the academic literature dealing with the origins of partisan identity, electoral design, and the immediate effects of campaigns on public opinion, voter turnout, and voter choice. As well, we'll explore issues of electoral reform and their more long-term consequences for governance and the political process.

Focus is on how politicians and government learn what Americans want and how the public's preferences shape government action; how surveys measure beliefs, preferences, and experiences; how poll results are criticized and interpreted; how conflict between polls is viewed by the public; how accurate surveys are and when they are accurate; how to conduct survey research to produce accurate measurements; designing questionnaires that people can understand and use comfortably; how question wording can manipulate poll results; corruption in survey research.

(Graduate students register for COMM 266.) The concept of virtual people or digital human representations; methods of constructing and using virtual people; methodological approaches to interactions with and among virtual people; and current applications. Viewpoints including popular culture, literature, film, engineering, behavioral science, computer science, and communication.

Project-based course involves small (3-4) person teams going through all parts of the experimental process: question generation, experiment design, running, and data analysis. Each team creates an original, publishable project that represents a contribution to the research and practicum literatures. All experiments involve interaction between people and technology, including cars, mobile phones, websites, etc. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

(Graduate students register for COMM 272.) The literature related to psychological processing and the effects of media. Topics: unconscious processing; picture perception; attention and memory; emotion; the physiology of processing media; person perception; pornography; consumer behavior; advanced film and television systems; and differences among reading, watching, and listening.

(Graduate students register for COMM 282.) Students will take away from this course a set of conceptual tools, a vocabulary, and an analytical framework with which to recognize, understand, and more effectively manage new social practices online, together with a familiarity with the literature regarding social media and identity, community, collective action, public sphere, social capital, networks, and social networks. Students will also develop skills at using online forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis for research, collaboration, and communication. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: instructor consent. Go to http://comm.stanford.edu/faculty/rheingold/ for application instructions.

Today's personal, social, political, economic worlds are all affected by digital media and networked publics. Viral videos, uprisings from Tahrir to #OWS, free search engines, abundant inaccuracy and sophisticated disinformation online, indelible and searchable digital footprints, laptops in lecture halls and BlackBerries at the dinner table, twenty-something social media billionaires, massive online university courses -- it's hard to find an aspect of daily life around the world that is not being transformed by the tweets, blogs, wikis, apps, movements, likes and plusses, tags, text messages, and comments two billion Internet users and six billion mobile phone users emit. New individual and collaborative skills are emerging. This course introduces students to both the literature about and direct experience of these new literacies: research foundations and practical methods to control attention, attitudes and tools necessary for critical consumption of information, best practices of individual digital participation and collective participatory culture, the use of collaborative media and methodologies, and the application of network know-how to life online. Contrasting perspectives are offered in the readings and explored through classroom and online discussion. In each three hour class, the instructor will lecture for approximately one half hour, student project teams will present and facilitate discussion about mindmaps and the lexicon for approximately one half hour, students will engage in group activities for about an hour, and instructor will facilitate full class discussion for about an hour. Students actively collaborate and cooperate in their learning during and between classes through small group discussions and face to face exercises, forums, blogs, mindmaps and wikis. Prerequisite: Instructor consent. Go to http://socialmedialiteracies.com and contact howard@rheingold.com for admission

Key moments in German history through documents: personal accounts, political speeches and texts, and literary works. The course begins with the Prussian monarchy and proceeds to the crisis years of the French Revolution. Documents from the 1848 revolution and the age of Bismarck and German unification follow. World War I and its impact on Germany, including the rise of Hitler, as well as the aftermath, divided Germany in the Cold War through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Taught in German.