Hey all,

My spring graduate seminar is finally on the books, and I thought I
might send everyone a brief blurb, in case you know of any students or
are on any departmental lists that might be interested.  I hope to
have posters up around campus sometime in the next week, but figured
AIMS folks should get the blurb first!  Please feel free to send my
way any interested graduate students you might come across (it is
graduate-only, not cross-listed with a 400-level course).  Thanks!

--sean

....

EHS/EDT/EDL662: New Literacies and Social Media
Professor Sean C. Duncan - [log in to unmask]
Meets Tuesdays, 7pm-9:30pm in 216 McGuffey Hall

In this new, 3-credit course, we will investigate so-called "social
media" (Facebook, Twitter, online communities) and their implications
for helping us understand how notions of literacy are changing. We
will view these media not necessarily as a threat to literacy but as
an “accelerator” of change, both positive and negative, and attempt to
come to terms with what the term "literacy" should mean in the 21st
century. Toward this end, we will investigate research from the New
Literacy Studies (New London Group, 1996; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006)
movement, utilizing concepts toward an understanding of social media.
This seminar will emphasize a hands-on approach (though no expertise
with social media is assumed), with students engaging in a
semester-long social media practicum, using and creating social media
content. A particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the
impact of multimodal, interactive texts such as digital videogames,
social networking sites, internet memes, and the rise of new, mobile
technologies (smartphones, the Kindle, and the iPad).


Sean C. Duncan
   Armstrong Professor of Interactive Media Studies
   Assistant Professor, School of Education, Health, and Society &
   Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies
   Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056
   [log in to unmask] / se4n.org