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Course info

Winter 2024 // TR 3:15-4:45pm

The course website is a living document. It will change regularly to reflect the needs of the course.

Contact#

Mackenzie Brooks // Associate Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian // (she/her/hers)

brooksm@wlu.edu // 540-458-8659 // Leyburn 218

Office hours: Wednesdays 10am-12pm, Thursdays 2-3pm, or by appointment. Please don't hesitate to schedule a meeting with me! I have a lot of meetings in my work life and can't always honor office hours. I'm usually on campus five days a week and happy to meet outside of office hours (but still between 9am-5pm.)

Course description#

What does it mean to be a citizen of a digital world? How do you think critically about the ways that technology shapes our society? How do you learn new digital skills when platforms are constantly changing? How do you find and use information effectively without being overwhelmed or mislead?

Through hands-on activities and project-based learning, this course serves as an introduction to the study of digital culture and information. Students will develop the critical capacity and technological fluency necessary to understand, analyze, critique, and create in a world dominated by digital media, software algorithms, and information overload.

Course objectives#

Students will:

  • Develop awareness of themselves as citizens of a digital world with accompanying rights and responsibilities.
  • Build the technical skills necessary for academic, professional, and personal success.
  • Communicate effectively and ethically with digital media to academic and general audiences.
  • Create a digital project in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative environment.

DCI Learning Outcomes#

  • Develop critical capacities for analyzing the role of technology and digital media in contemporary culture, and apply those capacities to a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiries.
  • Develop the technical skills necessary for academic and professional success, with an emphasis on online communication and information.
  • Demonstrate the ability to communicate across different media and to both academic and general audiences.
  • Engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary, project-based learning.
  • Develop digital projects that contribute to the scholarly conversation in the student's field of study and demonstrate an awareness of the technological and critical needs of the discipline.
  • Develop an online professional identity and a portfolio of work in the minor.

Learn more about the DCI minor on our website.

Required texts#

All readings are available freely online or through Leyburn Library’s subscriptions.

You will be provided with a domain from Reclaim Hosting in the format http://username.wludci.info. You can purchase a custom domain, such as http://www.myname.com for $15 a year. If you are interested in keeping your domain after graduation, the W&L library can transfer ownership to you.

License#

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.