The following is a list of some of the technologies I either researched or tried out. I hope that these either help others connect to the TV they’re missing or inspire readers to post their own experiences with or suggestions for getting TV while away from home. A side note: some of the technologies listed below require negotiating ethics and legalities, others less so, although none would likely be greeted with enthusiasm by American television executives.

Bit Torrent—Invented in 2001, this is, by internet standards, an ancient file-sharing service that most readers are probably familiar with. Its advantages are being well tested, having lots of users, and often providing the quickest turnover from airdate to streaming on your computer. The downsides are that relying on file-sharing isn’t the safest thing for your computer, and in May 2011, 23,000 BitTorrent users were, according to Wired magazine, the subject of the biggest file-sharing lawsuit to date in the US. Despite the problems, BitTorrent is the best known and most-used of the semi-standard pirating—er… sharing—sites or services.

Streaming Services—Various streaming services from Netflix to iTunes or Amazon have the advantage of being perfectly legal. The downsides are pretty much everything else. iTunes is hugely expensive at $2.99 an episode for current half-hour or hour-long network shows (Modern Family and The Good Wife, for example) or $49.99 for an HD season pass, $38.99 for an SD season pass. Programs from premium channels are only available for past seasons, and there’s no guarantee of finding your show if it’s more obscure. Amazon.co.uk doesn’t offer the streaming services available in the US, and Amazon.com blocks streaming outside the US. Netflix in the UK and Ireland, while having racked up an impressive million users in the short time since its launch in early 2012, has a very limited catalog.

Slingbox—This requires you to have a friend in your home country willing to connect the sling box to his/her TV set. Basically, Slingbox gives you access to your home DVR on your computer or any other device connected to the internet. It works extremely well, and while it’s a US company, you could probably connect it to a TV in any country. The boxes cost between $179.99 and $300, and the newest box, while top-of-the-line, mostly looks hard to stack with all the other black boxes that are probably connected to your TV.

AmericanTV2Go—This service essentially charges you a monthly fee for access to a centrally hosted Slingbox. I used the free trial and it was great, but ranging from $49.99-$99.99 a month, too expensive to continue regularly, especially on top of a local cable subscription.

VPN Clients—This is what I’ve settled on as the best for me. Most U.S. colleges and universities have a virtual private network that you can set up so that you can still log in to your school’s server and access your virtual learning environments, shared files and library subscriptions on days you work from home. If you’re abroad temporarily, you can use your home university’s vpn and connect to the internet in your home country, giving you access to any streaming content available there. If that’s not an option, for $7/month, companies like Strong VPN will let you log in to a vpn in another country. Strong only has networks available in the US and the UK right now, but for a bit more per month, PC-Streaming offers networks in Canada, Australia, and several European countries; you could likely find similar services connecting you to wherever your home country is.

The assignment’s goals were to have students present historical research into a specific genre and analyze how contemporary iterations of their genre interact with one another. Ideally, it would also link learning with social technologies students are already using, and spur students to consume social media more critically. As with all experiments there was some success and some failure.

In the success column, the most invested students have demonstrated that not only have they researched their genre’s history, current status including critical reception and ratings, and identified common themes or preoccupations in the genre, but also that they are capable of applying and synthesizing their research into cogent, creative output. Additionally, students who are scornful of the word “fan” readily admit to seeking out transmedia content from games to webisodes, fan videos, and general web-based snarkery, so this assignment has lead them to reevaluate their ideas of fans and fannish practices as well.

In the failure column, the interaction among students works best when I plant questions or suggest areas of overlap they might discuss with their fellow genres. Because the assignment is cumulative for the semester, it’s also easy for less eager students to check out when there is no threat of imminent grading. And much like Miranda Banks warned me when, based on her own experience, she counseled me not to do this assignment, it is enormously time consuming to read, participate in, and grade—and I only have 17 students.

In the end, the question is, would I assign this project again? Yes, absolutely. Despite the hours it takes, grading Google+ is enjoyable. The students report enjoying it too. In addition to research and analysis, it requires creativity, humor, collaboration, and peer response. When it works, students return to it throughout the semester, building their profiles and interactions based on new information from class materials and discussions.  It does not sacrifice the all-important practice of writing, but allows for practice in less formal modes of writing and in distinguishing between platforms and audiences, which is a skill many of my students struggle with.

In response to this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece decrying the possibility of new, non-monograph formats for scholarly work in the humanities, Mark Sample blogged about the idea of serial concentration. Both of these pieces are about scholarly rather than student work, but Sample’s argument applies here as well. He describes series of shorter pieces working as a process to build ideas and receive continuous peer feedback (very unlike the monograph or traditional research essay mode), which is exactly what happens when a social media assignment works well. All research and writing assignments would ideally involve drafting and feedback from peers and instructors before arriving at a final product. But most courses have content to get through, so writing by necessity becomes a method of evaluation rather than a pedagogical process. This kind of serialized thinking, writing, and creating builds that process into the assignment itself, ideally making this a learning project in addition to a reporting project.

This is the first in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the goals, challenges, successes, failures, and student responses to a social media based assignment. While I am by no means the first to assign students to create social media personae or tweet about media theory, I hope that sharing my experiences will garner some brilliant tips and suggestions, spur a conversation about the values and pitfalls of this kind of digital pedagogy, and perhaps even inspire someone to try out something similar. In light of last weekend’s New York Times piece “Blogs vs. Term Papers” and the response from Cathy Davidson, a Duke University English professor and co-founder of the Digital Humanities community HASTAC, the concept of the Google+ assignment seems especially timely.

The class is Contemporary TV Genres, and at our first meeting, each student selected a genre for which they would create a Google+ profile. During the semester, they must write an About page defining their genre and its history. They must post pictures and links illustrating past and present iterations of the genre, complete with comments and captions analyzing their significance to the genre’s evolution over time. They must shoot or edit at least one video, and they must interact with each other via wall posts, relationship statuses, +1s (Likes in Facebook parlance), sub-circles (Google+’s organizing principle is the Circle, rather than Facebook’s List), and comments on classmates’ posts. The tasks cover all levels of thinking from recall to evaluation and application, and require students to practice writing, research, and analysis skills. In short, it encompasses all of the course’s learning goals, and if it works, we’ll create a community of characters/genres that is fully interactive and has the bonuses of being fun and of linking classroom content to lived social experience.

In speaking to others who have experimented with similar assignments, the number one problem cited was assessment. How do you assign a grade for a student impersonating the procedural genre changing their relationship status to “Married to Melodrama?” We all know grading is subjective, but how to create a rubric for something like this? I’ve scheduled four checkpoints during the semester, at which time each student will receive a letter grade and written feedback. Each item on the Google+ page is assigned a point value. 1 point possible for including a hometown, 25 possible points for writing the historical About page, for example. One advantage of this type of assignment is the ease with which students can revise, change, rewrite, etc. in response to feedback. The four checkpoint grades will be averaged for a final grade at the end of the semester.

Besides the practicalities of assessment, of course the biggest question is why. Why do this instead of response papers or individualized research or analysis essays. In fact students will also have to write 3 short analysis papers representing different aspects of or stakeholders in TV genres. But the Google+ assignment aims to link learning with social technologies students are already using, spurring students to use the tools and consume the social media more critically, and making the classroom material relevant to and even part of their daily activities…We’ll see how it goes!