As of 6 p.m., Saturday, March 24, I have finished marking exams and averaging your peer feedback on the Wiki Notes assignment, and I’ve updated the online gradebook so that it now shows your grades for all of the work you’ve completed in CMST/WMST 414 for Winter 2012. It also shows your course grade as I’ve entered it in EagleNET  (yes, I have rounded up where ever possible).

But my weekend is just getting started — I still have to grade exams and a few late assignments for WMST/CMST 419 and CMST 413!

Here is the study guide [pdf] we made together in class this morning. Remember, you can take the exam on Monday, during our regularly scheduled class time, OR during our scheduled final exam time, which is Thursday, March 22, at 9:00 a.m.

And thanks for a great quarter — you’ve been a fantastic group!

As I said in class, I’m very pleased with the quality of your XtraNormal video animations, and I would like your permission to share them with others. The primary use I have for them is to show them to future classes as samples; you’ve made such a success of this assignment that I will be asking students in my Cultural Studies class in the fall to do something similar.

I’m also thinking of making a presentation about teaching with technology in Women’s Studies classes for a Gender and Communication conference this fall, where XtraNormal videos would be one of several types of assignments.

If it is OK with you if I use your work in these ways, please send me an email message granting me permission. Let me know also if you would prefer I withhold or share your name, and any other limitations on how I use your video.

Also, make sure you save a copy for yourself that you can include in an electronic portfolio of your work — let me know if you need help doing this. I’m happy to put your video on a disc for you.

One more thing — Kali raised the excellent suggestion of submitting videos to the annual EWU Student Research and Creative Works Symposium; by coincidence, I received an email notice today announcing the call for submissions. Abstracts are due by Friday, April 13, and must be submitted through the Symposium website.

Note that you’ll be required to submit a brief abstract, rather than your actual video, so you’ll need to summarize the video. Think in terms of what argument your video makes about gender and communication — and consider giving your video a snazzier title. I’ll be glad to help anyone who is interested in doing this.

Travis Beets - Stereotypes in Media

Eric Brazington & Kali Green - Mansplaining at the Museum

Alicia Crumpton - Gender Stereotypes of Women in the Media

Shannon Giusti - Gendered Language

Danielle Glover-Cloutier - Mansplaining

Isaac James – Standpoint Theory

Dayna Juchmes & Ellissa Abbott - Gendered Speech Communities (Rapport Talk)

Brian Hume - Gender Performance

Aleisha Larsen & Kaylynn Garrison - Themes of Femininity

Leslie Larson - The Maternal Wall

Brittany Miller - Pink-Collar Work

Sam Nemri - Gender Stereotypes on Television

Kahla Noel – Media Saturation

Amanda Oster - Stereotypes in the Workplace

Marissa Pamatigan - LGBT Stereotypes in Media

Danielle Price - Single-Sex Education

Christine Silver - Media Saturation

Resa Stephanson & Chelsea Hollingsworth - Stereotyping in the Media

Jamie Turney - Stereotypes in the Workplace

Acacia Wilkins - Gender Bias in the Military

Jacob Wizner - Workplace Stereotypes

Ashley Wright - Mansplaining with Tiger Woods

Krista Zappone - Gender Performance

On Saturday, March 10, I received an email notice from the company where all of my class websites are hosted that the server will undergo a major software upgrade within the next 48 hours. This means greater performance and reliability for my sites in the long term, but in the short term it means that class sites may be intermittently inaccessible during the next two days, AND at some point the sites will be off line completely, while “we temporarily take the server offline in the early morning hours. Barring any extenuating circumstances this outage should only last about 2 hours.”

Please keep this in mind as you update the wiki notes over the next several days — save your work frequently — and I’ll keep it in mind as well in terms of your deadlines.

March 8 is International Women’s Day, celebrated around the world to celebrate and honor women and acknowledge the struggle for gender equity. Thousands of events occur not just on this day but throughout March to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women. You can learn more at the International Women’s Day website.

One of the events on many college campuses is Feminist Pride Day. Make it happen at EWU by talking about your feminism and your support for gender equality.

In our brief class discussions of institutions, we did not spend much time talking about  the institution of politics. On today’s edition (Saturday, March 3) of Melissa Harris-Perry’s television show, she presented this breakdown of how many women are currently serving in legislative positions in Congress, and what this suggests for gender equality.

Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders

Franchesca Ramsey, creator of the “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls” video (the original satire of the Shit Girls Say video), has a new video making the rounds, in which she satirizes popular “Top Girl” and “Social Girl” iPhone games for girls. This one is called High School Hottie. Since I am 92 years old, you’ll have to let me know whether it is on point or not.