Digital Technology and Culture

A blog for students and friends of Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture Program

Update on Program

Harrison, John and I met on Tuesday, December 12, for a full day retreat to work on updating program goals. A few plates of homemade oatmeal cookies and several cups of latte later, we came up with these 10 Learning Goals, which we aligned with current course offerings. Here is what we believe students graduating with a BA in DTC should be able to do and the DTC courses in which we believe students should gain these skills and abilities:

1. Demonstrate competency with computers for designing and distributing digital works in various mediums. [DTC 355]

2. Synthesize media forms for multimedia contexts. [DTC 355, DTC 477, FA 434, FA 435]

3. Employ the principles of visual form for sophisticated image manipulation. [DTC 336, FA 332, FA 335, FA 363, FA 433]

4. Understand the production and assessment of media objects. [DTC 478, DTC 336]

5. Know the basics of information architecture and the ways digital information can be structured for different audiences. [DTC 356]

6. Question the way digital media functions in multiple cultural contexts. [DTC 475]

7. Recognize various forms of language processing and their implications for media authoring. [DTC 336, DTC 375]

8. Appreciate the history of technological development, from local to global perspectives, and its implications for a variety of mediums. [DTC 375, DTC 476, FA 331, FA 380]

9. Utilize an interdisciplinary perspective in order to understand the basics of social, economic, and education changes brought about by digital media. [DTC 475]

10. Be practiced and capable writers in all mediums. [DTC 475, DTC 375]


We also spent some time considering the focus of "culture" in the program name. "What do we mean by culture when we say we are "Digital Technology and Culture?" was the problem we sought to solve. After much deliberation and debate, we arrived at a simple answer (actually John arrived at it first)anchored in the name's grammatical construction: "Digital" functions as an adjective for both nouns, Technology *and* Culture (those of you who write know that repeating "digital" in a title twice is a redundancy good writers try to avoid). So, it is essentially Digital Technology and [Digital] Culture. Thus, the DTC is not a cultural studies program but rather a program that studies the digital nature of culture, or what some of us think of as "cyberculture."

It was a fruitful day since much was accomplished. We are a step closer to the ultimate goal: articulating a five-year plan for the DTC. Stay tuned for that news.

posted by: grigar at 00:35 | link | comments |

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