On the Language of Internet Memes

The burgeoning notion of open courseware has been finding a niche not only in the offerings of Open Education Endeavors (like Peer to Peer University) but also within time-honored institutions like MIT; however, can the 7 principles for good practice in undergraduate education be implemented while simply offering reading materials and assignments asynchronously?

Furthermore, are said principles even relevant to an art education research project like this one, which is inherently centered around the idea of Learning Objects modeled after cultural nuggets that are traditionally disseminated in a horizontal, rhyzomatic, anonymous fashion like internet memes? How can contact between students and faculty be encouraged when there is no faculty to speak of?

I am not sure, however I am interested in the potential for this material to be re-contextualized in the form of Learning Objects; for example, could we take the syllabus for the class Writing and Reading Poems offered in 2006 and change it so that students’ responses took the form of Internet Memes (e.g. animated GIFs) instead of essays and poetry? An interesting proposition particularly since the language of poetry and of internet memes might have much more in common than otherwise expected.