Writing for Emergent Media
Course Description:
How do we craft messages using new and emerging digital technologies for global audiences? With both oral and written communication, writers and communicators have limited audiences and they mainly communicate through written and spoken word. However, with emergent media, people use text, video, images, and audio to craft messages for global audiences. Thus, people must learn to communicate using those different mediums, and, with such vast audiences, people must consider how their content can be taken out of context or misunderstood. This class addresses these challenges in two ways; first, through readings and reflections, students learn to think critically about audiences and mediums. Second, students put these readings into practice through three practical assignments. Using free website builders, students create informative websites about a topic of their choosing. Next, students create videos about the same topic. Third, students craft messages and graphics for social media. The course culminates in a representative portfolio with a reflective cover letter that allows students to showcase their writing and design skills.
Course outcomes:
By the end of this course, students will:
- Define and describe key challenges for writing for new media and the Internet, especially considering global audiences.
- Compare and contrast how the affordances of new media affect how people can communicate information online.
- Compose and craft messages through various mediums (websites, videos, and social media) that respond to the demands of a global audience.
- Assemble a representative portfolio to showcase writing and design skills.
Introduction to Digital Studies: Lower-Division Course
Course Description:
Digital technologies permeate most aspects of our everyday lives. We use digital technologies in education, economics, communication, and leisure. While many academic disciplines position digital technologies as an add-on, this interdisciplinary course positions “the digital” as central. Specifically, this course answers: What is digital studies, and what kinds of questions and work can we do in digital studies? Students learn the history of digital studies, and they learn crucial frameworks for exploring digital technologies. For the first project, students write a report about the history of a digital technology and how it has evolved. The second paper uses a framework of the student’s choice to analyze a digital technology. For the final project, students create a digital project that demonstrates one of the key digital studies themes that we explored during the semester. The project is accompanied by a memo explaining how the project exemplifies a key theme in digital studies.
Course outcomes:
By the end of this course, students will:
- Define “digital studies” and articulate questions that are crucial to “digital studies” work.
- Summarize the history of digital studies and discuss the history of a particular digital technology.
- Analyze and explain a particular piece of digital content or a digital technology by applying a digital studies framework.
- Produce and develop a digital project that puts some of the principles of digital studies into practice and explain how their project exemplifies digital studies principles.
Digital Cultural Studies: Upper Division Course
Course Description:
Culture has always been an integral part of the human experience. Increasingly, digital technologies play a crucial role in how culture is both communicated and developed. Thus, this course examines digital cultures, including platform cultures, game cultures, fan cultures, and identity-based technocultures, as well as their various practices. In the beginning of the course, students define “culture,” “digital,” and “digital culture.” Next, students examine a digital culture of which they are a part through three interrelated projects. First, students conduct close readings of a technology or platform through which their digital culture interacts to uncover what norms the technology supports. Next, students add autoethnographic reflection and/or close readings of blogs or other public-facing practitioner’s accounts to analyze how their digital culture reciprocally shapes, and is shaped by, digital technologies. In the final project, students create a piece of digital cultural content and explain how the digital content reflects and reinforces their digital culture.
Course outcomes:
By the end of this course, students will:
- Define “digital,” “culture,” and “digital culture” (and the various ways that these terms can be defined).
- Understand and apply digital cultural studies frameworks and research approaches.
- Analyze a digital culture of which they are a part by focusing on both the cultural practices and the technology through which these cultures interact, and articulate how these aspects intersect.
- Create a piece of digital cultural content and articulate how their creation reflects their digital culture.
Corinne Jones 