Professors

Lisa Brundage (lisa.brundage@mhc.cuny.edu)
Luke Waltzer (lwaltzer@gc.cuny.edu)

Course Description

The second core course serves as the “content course” for the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate. This course makes it possible for participating students to build on the theoretical insights gleaned in the first core course by beginning to conceive of and develop an interactive technology project within their own disciplines and areas of interest.

This course will survey interactive technology in educational spaces. We will discuss project planning and execution; hypertext and narrative; visualization and design; modes of learning and the structures that impact them within and outside of the classroom; software development and deployment in educational contexts; the conceptualization and production of educational media products; historical and emerging questions about digital literacy and learning data and the role of educators in its development; and the labor politics of all of the above. We will employ an interdisciplinary perspective on the application of digital media to classroom teaching and scholarly research and presentations, drawing upon the experiences of the faculty members and all the students in the course.

Labs attached to the course and available throughout the Graduate Center community will also support hands-on introductions to key educational uses of new media applications, including online writing and composition tools, electronic archives, experimentation in virtual spaces, and other approaches. Students will learn skills, concepts, and contexts and then will design and prepare a proposal for a multimedia-based project in their discipline, for their final grade. We will emphasize collaboration and minimal viable product as a means to avoid the scope creep endemic to first-time-makers’ projects. Students will be expected to use labs and other support opportunities at the Graduate Center to gain enough competency in an area of technical expertise such that they can develop a proof of concept in their term project, a proposal for a multimedia-based project.

Course Requirements

All students should be members of the CUNY Academic Commons, and should be familiar with Zotero. You will write public blog posts in this course, though if you choose to do so under an alias, that’s fine. One benefit of writing publicly under your real name is that you can begin to establish a public academic identity and to network with others in your field. However, keep in mind that search engines have extended the life of online work; if you are not sure that you want your work for this course to be part of your permanently searchable identity trail on the web, you should strongly consider creating an alias. Whether you engage social media under your real name or whether you construct a new online identity, please consider the ways in which social media can affect your career in both positive and negative ways.