[Air-L] what should an introductory course cover in such a fast-changing field?

[Tery G]

Hi all,

I asked a while back about acceptable resources for one of my classes. I've
heard offline from a few people who are currently designing courses similar
to mine, and who asked what I covered. We thought that might be an
interesting question to ask on this list.

Background on my course: I teach in a Media Arts department and the class is
called Digital Media Literacy. I designed it years ago, and I could not find
a single model for it, so it would be especially interesting for me to hear
now what people do or would do in this type of course.

The course is designed to introduce our freshmen to both the concepts and
some of the tools we use to create digital media (so it's a 100-level
course). Some of the class is spent on tools, currently Audacity for sound,
Photoshop for images, Quicktime for video, and Keynote for presentations. I
introduce them to at least three browsers, so they stop thinking IE *is* the
web. There are a handful of other utilities that we use: file transfer
programs, SnapZPro, etc. We do a quick history of the internet and of the
web (including the internet gift economy, though it barely exists anymore).
We cover file compression, types of compression, and when and why they need
to compress files.

The more I read about search engines, the more I want them to understand
about these tools that they use to gather the information they use to live
their lives, let alone write their papers. So, we cover search engines in
general, and Google in particular. Then we use the library databases. I'm
still following the controversy about whether and how PowerPoint affects the
way we think, so we read and talk about that. We look at copyright issues
and Creative Commons licensing. We look at net neutrality. I'm probably
forgetting something; I don't have my syllabus in front of me right now.

I've been staying away from things that seem trendy to me, and that I have
not been able to see academic value to, like Twitter and Second Life. I
included each once, but didn't get enough out of it and you can't include
everything . . .

Their final project is a multimedia presentation on a topic of their choice,
as long as it's related to digital media or media arts. They critique each
other's presentations as they build them, so this is a sneaky way of working
in more material while also giving them more practice with the tools we've
covered all semester.

So the question from me, and some others on the list, is -- if you were
designing this type of course, what would you put in?

Best,
Tery Griffin