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ARCHIVES FOR RICHCOURSES.COM

EXTERNAL ORGANIZATIONAL 
COMMUNICATION [EOC]
(6 COURSES)

Focus: Theory and practice of communicative relationships with companion animals (pets)

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Sample Isssues:

  • Cultural foundations of pet care

  • Functions of pets in/out of families

  • Pets and shelters

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Teaching Innovation(s): Teams apply learned material to work with actual organizations in pet adoption sector.

EOC: COMPETITIVE CHEERLEADING

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Focus: Competitive cheerleading examined as complex system of types of eoc.

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Sample issues:

  • Title IX provisions for female athletics.

  • Cheerleading injuries.

  • Cultural stereotypes about cheerleaders.

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Teaching innovation(s): Simulation of scandal involving cheerleading team, coaches, and university administrators. 

EOC: MEDIA AND TERROR

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Focus: Delves into the arguably co-dependent relation between terrorism and media.

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Sample issues:

  • Terrorism and media agenda setting.

  • Audience as vital aspect of media coverage of terrorism.

  • Psychology of terrorism and violence.

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Teaching innovation(s): Simulation of media coverage of a planned terrorist attack that is known about in advance.

EOC: FEATURE FILM FINANCING

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Focus: Role of organizations in financing feature films.

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Sample issues:

  • Film in domestic vs. international markets.

  • Film and new media.

  • Product placement.

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Teaching innovation(s): Simulation of three entities during awards season for controversial film (dealing with black identity). â€‹

EOC: FANTASY FOOTBALL

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Focus: Introduces the massive cultural and financial impact of fantasy football.

Sample issues:
Legal status of fantasy football.
Psychological qualities of fantasy football fans.

Teaching Innovation(s): Student teams are placed in a futuristic world where betting is done on contests resembling the video game "Painkiller," but populated by players from the "Hunger GAmes" films. 

EXTERNAL ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

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Focus: Familiarize students with the various ways people practice external organizational communication (EOC), or how organizations organizations represent themselves outside its boundaries. 

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Sample issues:

  • "Classic" EOC types: advertising, marketing, public relations, and sales.

  • New kids on EOC block: crisis management, government relations/lobbying, media relations.

  • Beyond theory: creativity in practice of EOC.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Performance of scripted crisis scenes from episodes of tv dramas, first as presented on television, then as altered by applying learning material from readings and lectures. 

COMS, THEORY AND PRACTICE

(7 COURSES)

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION THEORY

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Focus: Familiarize students with the field of organizational communication (OC) studies, concentrating on organizational commmunication studies, overall, as a culture. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • Illustrated dystopian novels (comics) as source for applying organizational communication knowledge.

  • Taking on the worst aspects of society, instead of focusing on the best. 

  • Combining "utopian" with "dystopian" in thinking about organizations.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Get teams of students to script video game episodes applying conventional knowledge of organizational communication in dystopian futures, against villains from selected comics (Judge Dredd, Dr. Manhattan, Spider Jerusalem, Anarchist V, Joker). 

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Focus: Acquaint students with theory and practice of various schools of communication scholarship that inform effective business and professional communication.

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Sample Issues: 

  • Establish weakness of generic "do" and "don't" lists.

  • Draw on communication specialties to compose training program for organization's members.

  • How organizational identity is manufactured and maintained.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Teams create imaginary avatars and organizations for them to function in. 

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Focus: Examination of sound principles, and mistakes to avoid, in conducting interviews in a variety of contexts.

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Sample Issues: 

  • Modern media as driver of the interview society.

  • Interview as "conversating," or speaking with a purpose.

  • interview types: health/counseling, investigative, job, research.

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Teaching Innovation(s): (1) student-created workshop for training people to interviewed and be interviewed; (2) pairing interviewers/interviewees to simulate interviews combining course knowledge with personal experience. 

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Focus: Examines various attempts to explain human communication through formal theory.

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Sample Issues: 

  • What makes a good COMS theory. 

  • How a theory gets constructed, developed and disseminated.

  • How theories combine and clash with each other.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Complex, multistage, dynamic simulation depicting five traditions of communication theory as a struggle for dominance among collectives, or "tribes."

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Focus: Monitor and evaluate job experience in environment related to students' field of study.

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Sample Issues:

  • Techniques of effective interaction episode (e.g., interviews).

  • working under and with direct supervisor on the job.

  • Designing/presenting audiovisual self-examination on job performance.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Perspective-taking exercises as key to performance.

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Focus: Introduces students to the vast field of communication studies.

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Sample issues:

  • Knowledge of field as a culture.

  • Destroying the "laundry list" approaches.

  • Perfecting a master generative metaphor.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Development of master generative metaphor (world of Batman) as structure for inspiring creative approaches to COMS study. 

METHODS (2 COURSES)

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 [IN DEVELOPMENT] 

PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS

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national convention, national collegiate honors council (november 9, 2018)

SIMULATIONS (13 COURSES)

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Focus: Apprehension and trial of virtual anarchist Saavedro (a character in the video game, Myst III: Exile) for what seems to be a campaign of vengeance against a sorcerer, Atrus, master of an obscure art whereby one could write books that, when touched, transported the user to a different space and time.

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Sample issues:

  • Manipulation of parameters of time and space.

  • Acts of justice, as against acts of vigilantism.

  • Role of "pure" improvisation versus pre-planning in simulation performance.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Application of lecture material to a courtroom simulation, half the class (of ten) as prosecutors and half as the defense team.  

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Focus: In the year 2023, there is a secret, hidden 10-level undersea city (Crihloth) off the coast of Iceland that has for decades housed a population combining humans and humanoid visitors from another planet, which erupts over the assassination of a beloved alien ambassador. 

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  • Sample Issues:

  • Role of crowding and cultural conflict on social evolution.

  • Image management for groups strictly hidden from the outside world.

  • Consideration of as-yet-unrealized communication modes (e.g., remote viewing and telepathy).

 

Teaching Innovation(s): Encouraging "real life" responses in an entirely imaginary world.  

Focus: At a time in the not-too-distant future, in Montreal, Canada, a blind girl, Auriane St. Cyr, faces an eye operation that could either restore her sight or kill her, Her father, the fabulously wealthy capitalist robber barron, Victor St. Cyr, is to appear the next day before a Senate committee to answer numerous charges of child labor exploitation and industrial pollution. On the night before her operation, a woman who cared for her years before reveals that some radical nuns believed Auriane to a be a child prophesied to lead a worldwide revolution. That night, she falls into a deep sleep during which she dreams three dreams, her subconscious mind adding up the clues to saving her father and breaking free of the curse of the prophecy. 

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Sample Issues:

  • Role of the spirit and metaphysics in images of organizations.

  • Video games and the handicapped. 

  • Dreams as "set designs" for creative organizational communication.

 

Teaching Innovation(s): Melding of material and non-material in the design and maintenance of organizational images and their effects on individuals in organizations.  

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Focus: In 2023, in the aftermath of a limited nuclear war between the U.S. and Mexico over immigration and a raging pandemic, two warring factions, the Scattered and the Federales fight a protracted battle over the nuclear-scarred wasteland of the southwestern United States. On the eve of a final confrontation, an information package certain to turn the tide against the Federales has to be delivered by hand to a stronghold still held by the Scattered.

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But the driver, Ricardo Vengador, is either the ghost of a man rumored to have been killed in a fiery truck crash ten years previous, or a live renegade responsible for most of the of the setbacks to the Federales. La Pinche Madre, Ricardo's nemesis, has sworn to take him down: she knows he's on a closed road under a full moon with a precise target and known starting point and a known destination. What mortal man would risk such a perilous journey? 

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But you see, that's the problem...whether Ricardo Vengador is a "mortal man"? That's kind of an open question...

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Sample Issues: 

  • Strategy and execution in electronic warfare.

  • The role of myth and legend in external organizational communication. 

  • Connections among politics, culture, and the military.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Getting students to invent a post-apocalyptic world populated by warring factions battling each, both with information management weapons known today, and futuristic weapons to be development in the future.   

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Focus: Explores the life and death of heavyweight champion charles L. ("sonny") Liston and his influence on external organizational communicaiton (EOC) processes that have tried to appropriate his image. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • The role of boxing promotion in United States political and legal processes. 

  • The East coast--West Coast rap wars, primarily in the 1990s.

  • Black Nationalist movements and their cultural impact.

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Teaching Innovation(s): Only simulation to be performed in different time periods (1960s, 1970s/80s, 1990s), summarized at semester's end in a "true crime" documentary. Teams in each period were allowed to use only the communication tools available at that time. 

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Focus: Stasja Shevchenko, a 20-something modern-day psychobilly rocker in Kiev, Ukraine, works under a burden: contrary to her wild and wicked ways, she is the descendant of Ukraine's most beloved figure, Taras Shevchenko. As if that weren't enough notoriety, she and her Lesbian bandmate and partner have become finalists on Europe's hottest game show, Geo-cash, where contestants follow clues to acquire specific objects in a hunt for treasure.  Meanwhile, the Russian government has become convinced that there is more to their being in the game than meets the eye, and at least some of their activities involve rare treasures from the writings of Taras Shevchenko. Putin's regime wants these and will imprison or kill Stasja and her partner to acquire them. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • The power of revered historical figures in fashioning organizational and individual images. 

  • The impact of pop culture contests (such as game shows) on organizational and political image. 

  • The clash of traditional and modern views of revolutionary behavior. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): Posing the question of unorthodox or revolutionary ideology, and what, even if in one form, sanctified by the passage of time, promoting upheaval in the modern world would look like. 

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Focus: In 2005, Faced with the potential of a second landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans turns in desperation to a super-secret Federal cabal (M.I.S.T.), rumored to have the capability of transporting agents from one time and space to another. They locate and transport principal protagonists from the previous simulations in this series (Saavedro, Mer'Gab'Shall, Auriane St. Cyr, Ricardo Vengador, Sonny Liston, and Stasja Shevchenko) to help the city deal with the unavoidable upcoming disaster.

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Sample Issues: 

  • Those who do corporate image management, and how they recover from tragedy.

  • Relying on rich local culture to crisis-manage disasters. 

  • Navigating through multiple levels of Federal, state, and local agencies. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): Tying together several simulation narratives, protagonists, and ages into one simulation. 

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Focus: Exploring the alleged underlying story of "Waltzing Matilda," Australia's most famous song. On its surface, the song tells the simple story of a hobo (swagman) who steals a sheep and then, to avoid capture, drowns himself in a shallow pool.

 

However, there's another tradition which holds that the song is an allegory about a labor uprising of malcontent sheep shearers who find themselves in a pitched gun battle and then, cornered by the police, their leader, Frenchy Hoffmeister, shot himself. Supported by two of Australia's most famous figures, composer/author A. J. ("Banjo") Paterson (author of "Matilda"'s lyrics and "The Man from Snowy River"), and military martyr Harry ("Breaker") Morant, who work together to enlist the aid of Outback Aboriginals and their song-lines, coming to a true account of Hoffmeister's murder and its aftermath. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • Origins of the labor movement and its effect on the management of organizational image.

  • The "real time" secrets hidden in native practices (such as Aboriginal song-lines).

  • Role of popular practices (such as well-known songs) in formulating and maintaining organizational images. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): Bringing together the culturally influential aspects of life by examining their fictional versus real effects on development.  

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Focus: It is 1955 in Harlan, KY, and the best driver of illegal moonshine in that male-dominated world is not a guy, but a 15-year-old girl, Jennifer Dandy. To be able to drive, Jennifer has to pretend to be a boy (James). Jennifer's father is the business rival of the queen of mountain moonshiners, Madge Beauchamp. Madge has decided that Jennifer's dad is cutting too much into her profits and has to be eliminated, but she doesn't count the respect "James" has garnered among Harlan's coterie of champion stock car drivers.

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Sample Issues: 

  • Image management for illegal activities and organizations. 

  • Origins and development of illegal brewing, nascar, and their historical interconnection. 

  • The wide-ranging, yet nearly unknown, influence of the "Dixie Mafia."

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Teaching Innovation(s): Introducing the idea of sexual/cultural identity into the devising of organizational image strategies.

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Focus: On the eve of an invasion of Fallujah in 2005, two marines (children of the protagonists of the previous simulation, "My Family's Always been in Whiskey") try to absorb the tragic news of the ambush assassination of their friends by insurrectionists. Both soldiers are attached to the cryptographic wing of their unit, and they know that the ambush was made possible by the fact that all their codes had been broken, and then supplied to the enemy, by one of their own, a man whose father they inadvertently killed back in Harlan during their final duel with Queen Madge. They fall back on the visual code they used in evading Federal traps while running moonshine.

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Sample Issues: 

  • The role of secret communication in image management. 

  • How long-dormant forms of communication can be revitalized in certain circumstances (e.g., the American Indian code-talkers of WWII).

  • The value of knowledge passed down through generations. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): First time two simulations have been tied closely together. 

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Focus: In harlem, NY, 1923, at the height of the period known as the "Harlem Renaissance," a cabal of evil businessmen have for years preyed on loose codes and under-the-table payoffs to flood Harlem's downtown area with shoddy structures. The only thing in their way is an autistic day laborer named Jonathan Tiberius Henry. Henry's autism is of the "savant" category, meaning that while deficient in many cognitive functions, he has one ultra-skilled ability, in this case the ability to intuitively sense flaws in building structures: literally, he can imagine where these flaws exist by "seeing" them in the building materials. 

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What very few know is that Jonathan Henry is the direct descendant of John Henry, the legendary railroad steel driver who, back in the 1800s, won a contest with an automated steam driver, but perished due to exhaustion as a result. In addition to his savant ability, Jonathan has awesome physical strength. When the businessmen try to bury him in a basement explosion, they fail to account for his companions: the two sixteen-pound sledgehammers that he calls "Dexter" and "Sinister," the only ones who never let him down. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • The role of the "Harlem Renaissance" in shaping black culture.

  • How unique abilities serve to fashion and sustain the creation of organizational image. 

  • The place of historically antecedent figures in organizational communication. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): Placing students in historically significant places and times and letting them portray figures from the Harlem Renaissance (e.g., Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, and so on). 

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Focus: In 2017 Salinas, CA, america's youngest (and arguably best) labor organizer, 15-year-old Mirelia Chavez (descendant of the legendary Cesar Chavez) faces a potentially lethal situation involving an upcoming strike against two ruthless, well-connected lettuce farmers.

 

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump the previous year, the resources Mirelia has relied on to keep in check the bosses, the unions, and the warring gangs in Salinas, have vanished in the wake of crackdowns on immigration that have crippled the farm-workers of California, the vast majority of whom are undocumented. 

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On the eve of what may prove to be one of the nation's deadliest strikes, and at her wit's end, Mirelia searches her family's library and comes upon a most remarkable old document: a letter written by Joe Hill, the Wobbly labor martyr who, in 1915, was shot by firing squad for a crime nearly everyone says he could not have committed.

 

The letter tells of a midnight visit on the eve of his execution: an elderly Latina, an initiate of Santeria, conspires to make of the living Joe Hill an ancestor (not by blood but by thought) for all labor activists to follow. Returning home, Mirelia falls into a deep sleep, and follows Joe Hill through various dreamscapes to awaken, aware of what she needs to do. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • The role of the labor movement in old and modern cultures. 

  • The power of dreams to shape reality. 

  • Modern labor and the changes in political culture that shape it even today. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): Allowing students to merge physical reality with mentally constructed reality to produce alternative action trajectories. 

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Focus: In the closing days of World War II, faced with certain defeat, the Nazi high command desperately places its hopes for Aryan domination on a breakaway faction of scientists who have perfected a means of transporting agents from one time and space to another. Working under the theory that pop culture is more powerful than politics in actualizing ideologies, they scheme to place agents into situations with future influential minority performers, to arrange their deaths as a means of fomenting unrest and violence. Among their targets are Johnny Ace, Selena Quintanilla, Biggie Smalls, and Tupac Shakur. 

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Ben Axeltiel, master of disguise and the first of his group ("Ratcatchers") to declare as a non-binary, hijacks the Nazi technology and then recruits a group of misfits to travel back in time to try to undo the deaths before they have chance to come to fruition. 

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Sample Issues: 

  • The power of pop culture in shaping organizational image.

  • Paradoxes of sequence in time travel. 

  • Historical circumstances and the generation of alternative historical trajectories. 

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Teaching Innovation(s): Placing students at culturally important junctures of history and asking them to generate historical alternatives and their probable consequences.  

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