How the hit show became a full-credit class at Tufts

	There are more reason to watch LOST than Evangeline Lilly. Just ask the Tufts students taking a class based on the hit television show. Steve Granitz/WireImage

By Chadwick Martin

In the middle of April, I sat around a wobbly Tufts University conference table with 20 of my peers, staring at a triangular plastic speaker. On the other side of a fiber optic connection were the two men who breathe creative life into the most innovative franchise on television. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the Executive Producers of Lost, were talking to 20 students via speakerphone about the show they created. I, along with a friend, just happened to be teaching the course that brought them to the table.

My co-teacher, Ed Kalafarski, and I recently finished a 13-week educational journey (check out the class syllabus here) through the evolving intersection of old and new media. But instead of sitting in uncomfortable desks and scribbling notes, we were the "professors" responsible for teaching students.

Our subject matter: Lost.

It was a show we both admired as fans and rudimentary media scholars, but had never thought we could turn our hobby into a fully accredited course. The idea nestled its way into my head back in January 2006, as I was reading Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You. The book describes the absurd-sounding idea that pop culture may actually be healthier than the general populace thinks it is by citing academic studies and empirical evidence. It suggests popular culture is getting more complex and that we, the pop culture consumers, are getting better at keeping track of all that complexity -- both within the media sphere and in our daily lives.

As I was reading, I couldn't help but think how Lost exhibited all of the characteristics of the complex media that Johnson refers to. The following summer, ABC decided to move the show beyond the television set and tell a separate story via the Internet. This type of "transmedia storytelling" sealed the deal for me, and I knew that Lost was doing something very, very unheard of within primetime television: innovating. Its marketing strategy, storytelling media, and philosophical content were so fresh that I realized that somebody ought to teach a course on it; that somebody ended up being me.

Ed and I put together a syllabus and proposal and pleaded our case to the Experimental College, the only department on campus that lets students teach other students. After making it through all stages of the selection process, I received a call welcoming me to the temporary faculty ranks at Tufts. From there on out, we were on our own, left to the educational wilderness with nothing but a syllabus and grand plans.

The class was organized around three central concepts, each using Lost as a window into how new media and more sophisticated technology were changing what we know as "entertainment." We studied the economic impact of iTunes, TiVo, and Apple TV. We delved into the cultural ramifications of Internet-created communities and what it means to befriend people you meet in digital locales. We investigated the philosophical and literary allusions in Lost and the affect wikis and google had on the way literary allusions were researched in the 21st century.

We taught by relying heavily on seminar-style discussions, which we thought were best due to our student-teacher status. We consistently wrestled with the reality that the class could spiral into a glorified book club where we sit around and gossip about each week's episode. Instead of going down that route, we chose to extrapolate every theme, character arc, and storytelling device to the television world at large.

After talking about those larger issues for 10 weeks, we got together to receive a long distance call from Los Angeles. The opportunity to talk to the producers really found its way to us. At some point in the beginning of the semester the course started attracting the attention of various media outlets (both digital and traditional). Ed and I agreed to almost all of the media requests with the ridiculous thought that maybe, just maybe, we could get the producers to notice us and then we could get them to come to class.

A month or two into the semester, the producers mentioned us in their podcast. And then a month or two after that, I got an email from Cuse. A week or two later, we were sitting at a conference room table, talking to two of the men that made our class possible. Throughout the interview, we didn't ask them if Kate was pregnant, if the others were part of the Dharma Initiative, or if Juliet could be trusted.

Instead, we began the interview off with the question: "Is Lost making us smarter?"