Diana Bang's ETEC 531 e-portfolio

ETEC 531: Cultural and New Media Studies

Description
New media technologies have intensified and transformed the way we communicate, the way we learn, and the way we teach. They have, we might say, transformed the student and transformed the teacher. But what is the nature of these changes? Cultural and new media studies are specifically oriented toward understanding the ways in which culture, nature and technology are converging to intensify and transform everyday life. This course provides a forum for exploring technocultural issues such as cyborgs and hybridity, digital property, cyberpunk fiction, the posthuman, AI and AEI, information warfare, virtual reality, third nature and religion. The course is organized around nine modules that correspond to the chapters and themes in the text, Culture and Technology.

Objectives
Our intention is to help you develop a framework for understanding the convergences, intensifications and transformations of culture, nature and technology. The overall goal is to provide a forum for “exploring” and “doing” cultural and new media studies. One major effort will be in helping you explore the interrelationships among culture, nature and technology. A second effort is to help you develop a critical interdisciplinary literacy to grapple with controversial issues pertaining to culture, nature and technology. A third effort encourages you to explore provocative challenges to ontology and epistemology as well as class, disability, gender, race and sexuality, offered by new media technologies.

Texts and Readings
Murphie, A. and Potts, J. (2003). Culture and technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The required textbook for the course, Culture and Technology, frames the weekly modules. Each module has a number of supplementary readings in pdf format. As a graduate student, you are expected to complete all of the readings for the week by each Thursday’s live forum (chat). Although we do not expect you to read the entire contents of websites to which you are directed within the modules, we do expect you to browse the sites and familiarize yourself with the content. The weekly live forums and discussion boards are two effective media for you to communicate your feelings, questions, responses and understandings of the readings. Please take advantage of these media, which in turn can be cut and pasted into your eportfolio.

Assignments
1. Digital Module

Design and produce a module that addresses one of the themes or topics in cultural and new media studies. This assignment tests your instructional design skills and challenges you to make cultural and new media studies accessible to high school students. *This is a group project (groups of 3). You will have to assign roles within your group. One of you will be the designer, one the content specialist and the third the resource archivist. Ideally, your digital module will include media from your thematic analyses (described below).

2. Thematic Media Productions

Produce two media productions that respond to one post-test question from the nine modules. This assignment tests your media design skills and challenges you to make experiment with non-print media in cyberspace. Prepare mediated responses that indicate your thoughtful engagement with the content. The media should be thorough and designed to inspire dialogue in the WebCT forums.

Each thematic media response should be either a power point (export ppt file as html) or Java script slide show, a video (use compressed formats such as .avi, .mpg, .qt, .rm, or swf), or an animation (use formats such as .avi, .gif or .swf). Each thematic media show should be about 3- 5 minutes in length (Examples are provided). One approach would be to script an interview of yourself in front of a camera.

3. Digital Community Participation
Contribute on a systematic and regular basis to bulletin boards, email forums and chats within the WebCT structure. There should be evidence of your engagement with the chapters and modules, and especially with the pre-test and post-test questions. Participation will be based on each student’s ability to contribute to WebCT or other forums (chat, email, bulletin boards, web sites, eportfolio, blog or wiki). In many ways, these forums ought to be your sounding boards. Do NOT be afraid to post your thoughts and questions, or to participate in live forums. Often, students and professors find themselves stitching what they have posted into assignments, reports, articles, books or eportfolios. In this course, you are expected to complete the modules and readings to focus your participation for the week. You are expected to maintain an eportfolio site (as part of the Virtual Classroom). This eportfolio will provide access to your media productions. In other words, upon completion of the assignments, we expect you to create a link from your portfolio to your media productions.

Source: UBC MET website- http://met.ubc.ca/met_courses/descriptions/etec531.htm

Trackback URI | Comments RSS