In particular, we are going to tell our stories by working with archival materials to tell media-rich stories of Isla Vista.
With this focus on Isla Vista, we are all going to learn to be multimedia storytellers by telling our own stories, the stories of the land we reside upon, and the tales of the communities that have made Isla Vista the unique place that it is now. This will be our local focus throughout the course. However, we will approach these local narratives by thinking globally about our work as multimedia storytellers.
Scholars of digital media and rhetoric agree that digital media technology is changing the ways that we communicate, connect, share, learn, and discover. However, technology is always changing, thereby creating new affordances and constraints. Additionally, we do not fully understand the ways in which new technologies affect different people, diverse communities, and unique situations. Throughout the course, we will focus on these research questions:
- What is new about the media we use to tell multimedia stories?
- How may the media that we chose shape our stories and shape us as storytellers?
To explore these questions, we are going to combine scholarship on digital media, rhetorical practices in multimedia, and your unique expertise as media users. By the end of the course, you will have both hands-on experience with multimedia writing and also a sophisticated understanding of the ways that the media of a story shapes not only the story but also the storyteller.
Course Outcomes
The course goals center around 5 primary activities:Composing in Digital Media: Learn and practice strategies for composing and refining narratives in multimedia genres.
Analyzing Digital Media: Develop an informed and nuanced understanding of how digital media writing and composing work rhetorically in different contexts.
Adapting Digital Media: Leverage what is ‘new’ about new media in order to create innovative and engaging narratives.
Persuading in Digital Media: Design digital narratives that appeal to specific audiences and develop compelling arguments with primary and secondary research.
Approach to class: Think then Make then Think some more
Think: We will begin by reading and discussing theory and scholarship on digital media. You will have a reading assignment and examples to explore before class. We will discuss the scholarship and analyze examples in class. This will inform our work as we begin to tell our stories in multimedia.Make: We will spend half our time MAKING in multimedia. Half of our class time will be dedicated to working hands-on to produce images, audio, and other forms of digital media. I will introduce you to image editing, audio editing, and building websites with WISWYG platforms. This will just begin to scratch the surface of how to uses these complex programs. Digital media production professionals never work in isolation. In this class, you won’t work in isolation. The projects for this class will be individual, but we will work collaboratively in and out of class to complete these projects.
Think some more: After you start to discover your ‘voice’ in multiple media platforms, we will then reflect on how the different media shape us as storytellers. From this, we will leave this class better more aware of how media tells stories and better capable of using media to tell stories.
