Course Description
New media technologies have intensified and transformed the way we communicate, the way we learn, and the way we teach. They have 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.
Reflection
This course was by far the most invigorating, exciting and difficult course in the program. As it began, we jumped deep into cyberspace, created numerous productions and used a variety of tools to share ideas. This course provided multiple ways of communicating, and allowed us to create meaningful productions that showed our learning (Free Speech in Cyberspace & Open Source Software). The relationship of this course to my metaphor is that it was clearly a procedure in my journey in the MET program. A Scientific Method’s Procedure requires step-by-step description of how you conducted your experiment and these thematic media productions were allowing me to to use the foundational knowledge I had been constructing and apply these new understandings in contexts which asked me to further develop my technical skills. I was inspired by Marshall Mcluhan whose work has made me become much more reflective about my own use of technology in my personal and professional life.
Artefacts