Writing for Digital Media

Want to build a website? Create a podcast series? Make videos around a specific career goal or social project? Develop a webcomic?  Learn how to use Generative AI tools to help you do such things?  Take 407!

English 407 is designed to help you become more productive and critical at reading and writing in digital spaces. (Of course, “reading” and “writing” might be more accurately termed “producing” and “consuming” to account for the multimodal texts that now comprise most online discourse, such as video assemblages, podcasts, and digital compositions hosted on various platforms.)

This course examines digital rhetorics in online popular culture. Students will enhance their understandings by reading and discussing critical theories of new media and contemporary rhetoric, and by analyzing and making digital media, with a particular emphasis on collaboration and group work.  The course will investigate and experiment with a range of generative AI tools for developing digital media, all of which will be free or “freemium” and thus accessible. 

The course is intended for technophobes as well as technophiles, newbies as well as seasoned experts.  In the past, this course has been very popular among majors in English, education, CIS, journalism, and business.

Assignments:

Students in the course will learn its content by engaging in a mix of individual work and a sustained team project–one in which teams develop working digital content around a specific theme and within a context decided upon collectively.  More specifically, students will be evaluated on (1) a series of short written responses to the readings in the course; (2) a collaborative digital project; (3) individual contributions to their own team’s project; and (4) contributions to another team’s project. (Students will have the option to be anonymous in all such contributions.)

Required Texts:

No texts to purchase. Readings will be made available in PDF.