Course overview
This wholly online course explores why digital media is being seen as creatively, socially, and politically transformative. What is 'collective intelligence' and how is it empowered by digital tools? How are 'amateur' media makers impacting on mainstream media practices? This course explores the important questions being asked about new digital technologies and encourages critical, reflexive thinking about social media sites. It addresses the links between earlier communication forms and media institutions, and contemporary digital and mobile technologies. For students outside the media programs, this course introduces students to forms of media interactivity and methods of media analysis, as well as selected theories and debates about media's historical role in shaping social, cultural, economic, and political relations. Designed to allow students to proceed through the weekly content at their own pace and in their own time, this course allows students to develop key literacies in media studies through online learning.
Course learning outcomes
- Demonstrate understanding of critical, theoretical and conceptual frameworks in media and communication studies
- Read and interpret media and communication studies scholarly research
- Illustrate the significance of concepts such as convergence, remediation and ideology to media and communication
- Analyse media case studies or examples using conceptual and theoretical frameworks
- Construct a critical argument about the contemporary media environment