First, thanks for all the fuss, everybody. It's very odd to get congrats for doing something you
really enjoy anyway, but don't tell the university that, or they'll cut my salary down to less than a half a living wage.
May I ask in what department your course is offered? My first guess would be English...but it could also be Comm Arts or even Sociology, couldn't it? 
The course is taught through the English dept. and is offered as an alternative to the generic "pop culture" version of freshman comp. that doesn't concentrate on any one topic. This course just concentrates on one element of pop culture for the semester, and, in my case, it really has to do with the intersections and perceived oppositions between popular or fan culture and academic culture. The dept likes it because we're increasingly having to treat the freshman yr of college as the 5th yr of high school, and the course offers an intro to academic culture that encourages interrogation of its practices.
A lot of what we read is drawn from authors with a solid reputation in media and fan studies -- Henry Jenkins, Camille Bacon-Smith, Constance Penley, etc. We also use stuff from psychology and sociology journals.
The class begins by looking at "official" products and fan activities and moves on to "unofficial" fan creations like fanfic, songvids, message boards, web sites, etc. Then we wind up by examining media representations of fans. This semester, we watched
The King of Comedy, a De Niro / Scorsese film, and
Trekkies, which won't be making a return appearance next semester because my students don't even know the difference between
Star Wars and
Star Trek, and it was anticlimactic after having seen raw footage from the DS Festival earlier in the semester.
