Teaching

The introductory course in the Interactive Media curriculum, this lecture-based course covers the history of computing and the Internet as well as the cultural, social, ethical, historical, and legal challenges of new and emerging media. Students also complete a unit in interactive media career exploration, including a required out-of-class participation experience resulting in a reflection post.

Topics include anonymity, digital divides, regulatory challenges, convergence, memes and remix culture, device addiction, data and algorithms, virtual worlds, and generative AI.

An introduction to the fundamental principles of writing for interactive spaces including websites and mobile apps (among others), completion of this course results in a fully functional, professional portfolio website.

Topics include web writing techniques, audience and persona development, writing voice and tone, UX writing including microcopy, accessibility, basic HTML, information architecture and SEO considerations, writing for social media, and narrative storytelling.

One of the core components of the Interactive Media curriculum, this course covers the basics of audience research and analysis. Students learn how to conduct research ethically, then set out to create their own content “initiatives” throughout the course of the semester. Secondary research, surveying, interviewing, and conducting focus groups are all a part of this process. Other topics covered include competitor and comparative analysis, mass communication theories, and persuasive messaging techniques.

In addition to discussing the rapidly evolving landscape of social media including legal and ethical challenges, students in this course complete two large projects.

The first is a personal social media audit and professional branding project in which students focus on one to two social media platforms to polish for professional purposes as well as create a media kit for distribution with their resumes.

The second is a semester-long project in conjunction with a small business or nonprofit, creating social media strategic plans. For a number of semesters, the students partnered with Corner to Corner Academy alumni businesses, completing detailed social media audits, comparative and competitive research, audience and SWOT analyses, prior to providing the small business owners with a thorough list of strategies and tactics for their social media presences moving forward.

This course focuses on challenging yet important topics in the realm of interactive and emerging media. While the specific topics vary by semester, a combination of peer-reviewed research papers, documentary films, blog posts, guest speakers, and mass market books are reviewed and discussed in class.

Previous topics have included include self-representation and identity formation, anonymity, teens and social media, the rise of the content creator, and decision making strategies for emerging media trends.

Students in this course have the opportunity to create a final project of their choosing, ranging from creation of multimedia assets to in-depth research papers.

This special seminar course has been offered twice: Spring 2015 and Spring 2019. In Spring 2015, the students explored the idea of creating a college basketball-focused blog website using WordPress and created live content for the site as well as for Facebook and Twitter for every game of the Men’s NCAA College Basketball Tournament. In Spring 2019, students took a more visual approach and live-streamed themselves watching the games of the Men’s NCAA College Basketball Tournament, resulting in more than 70 hours of live-streaming on Twitch. During the national championship game, the stream was in the top 1% of all streams on the Twitch platform.