Syllabus | dtc101

Catalog Description:

101 [ARTS] Introduction to Digital Technology & Culture 3 Inquiry into digital media, including origins, theories, forms, applications, and impact with a focus on authoring and critiquing multimodal texts.

Course Overview:

This course is an introduction to digital technology and culture that integrates interdisciplinary knowledge from literary studies, rhetoric and composition, art and design, business, and sociology to prepare students for the technical and cultural challenges of the 21st century. While this class is committed to introducing students to the history and culture of digital technology, it will also ask students to use a number of digital tools in deliberate and critical ways in the context of their major inquiry projects. Throughout the semester students will work both individually and in groups in order to delve into questions about what makes something digital, how we conceptualize our lives beyond the digital, and what it means to compile, organize, and deliver content in various textual and visual media.

Conceptual Goals:

Critical and Creative Thinking:

Understand how one thinks, reasons, and makes value judgments, including ethical and aesthetic judgments.
Think, react, and work in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking.

Information Literacy:

Access information effectively and efficiently from multiple sources.
Access and use information ethically and legally.

Communication:

Recognize how circumstances, background, values, interests and needs shape communication sent and received.
Choose appropriate communication medium and technology.

Diversity:

Critically assess their own core values, cultural assumptions and biases in relation to those held by other individuals, cultures, and societies.
Recognize how events and patterns in the present and past structure and affect human societies and world ecologies.

Course Outcomes:

Students will make deliberate and critical rhetorical and design choices when they compose in different textual and visual media.
Students will be able to remediate their academic projects while being sensitive to the unique expectations and demands of different platforms and media.
Students will approach prospective research projects with an eye towards integrating primary and secondary sources as well as local and underused university resources, particularly digital archives, special collections, and various organizations across campus.
Students will thoughtfully compose and disseminate academic projects that cast a wide net in terms of audience and end-users.

Digital Tools/Platforms Requirements:

Students will be expected to sign up for and maintain the following digital tools/platforms:

Twitter Account (for responding to course readings)
Google Account (for turning in larger assignments and major inquiry projects on Google Drive; and for conducting one-on-one conferences on Google Hangouts)

Reading List:

Arola, Kristin. Composing (media)=Composing (embodiment). “Introduction.”
Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. “Chapter 2: Oakland, The Word, and The Divide: How We All Missed The Moment.”
Brandt, Deborah. "The Sponsors of Literacy."
Christen, Kim. “Does Information Really Want to be Free?: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Open Access.”
de Souza e Silva, Adriana. "Mobile Narratives: Reading and Writing Urban Space with Location-Based Technologies."
Edwards, Charlie. “The Digital Humanities and Its Users.”
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "The Humanities Done Digitally."
Kill, Melanie. "Wikipedia, Collaboration, and the Politics of Free Knowledge."
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term."
Liu, Alan. “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”
McPherson, Tara. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation."
Monroe, Barbara. Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom. Chapter 1: "Reconsidering the Terms of the Divide."
Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter A. Chow-White. Race After the Internet. “Chapter 1: The History of Race and Information.”
Reed, T. V. Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era. “Chapter 1: How Do We Make Sense of Digitizing Cultures?: Some Ways of Thinking through the Culture- Technology Matrix” & “Chapter 2: How is the Digital World Made?: The Dreamers/Workers/Users Production Cycle.”
Slatin, John. "The Imagination Gap: Making Web-based Instructional Resources Accessible to Students and Colleagues with Disabilities."
Spiro, Lisa. "'This Is Why We Fight': Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities."
Yagelski, Robert P. Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self. "Chapter 1: "Abby Lament: Does Literacy Matter?"

Understand how one thinks, reasons, and makes value judgments, including ethical and aesthetic judgments.

Think, react, and work in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking.

Information Literacy:

Access information effectively and efficiently from multiple sources.

Recognize how circumstances, background, values, interests and needs shape communication sent and received.

Critically assess their own core values, cultural assumptions and biases in relation to those held by other individuals, cultures, and societies.

Students will make deliberate and critical rhetorical and design choices when they compose in different textual and visual media.

Students will be able to remediate their academic projects while being sensitive to the unique expectations and demands of different platforms and media.

Students will approach prospective research projects with an eye towards integrating primary and secondary sources as well as local and underused university resources, particularly digital archives, special collections, and various organizations across campus.