DIGITAL TOOLKIT: COMMUNICATION DESIGN PRACTICUM in Spring 2025 (CM1500A)

In this digital tools training course, students will learn skills, gain hands-on experience, and think critically and ethically about a range of contemporary digital tools for research, creative, and practical purposes in the fields of Communications, Media, and Cultural Studies. Students will acquire facility with and conceptual understanding of online publishing, search engines, privacy protecting tools, digital storytelling, and tools for data management, cleaning, and visualization, among others. As researchers, we will learn about finding quality information online, the ethics of gathering and protecting research data, and the fair and legal use of online content. Readings and lectures will interrogate the different ways in which digitization and datafication affect us as networked users, creators, citizens, and consumers, focusing on unequal access to information retrieval and creation, biases in Machine Learning, surveillance and tracking through datafication, algorithmic culture, and AI. The course prepares students to work with digital tools while critically and responsibly engaging with them. This change updates a woefully outdated description which no longer matches course content and has led to students feeling deceived.