SYLLABI

A look at the courses I have taught at Lehigh University, with sample Syllabi

COMM 100: Media & Society (Syllabus)
Description: The purpose of this course is to understand the origins and history of different forms of media, the evolution of media, and the role media plays in free democratic society.  This course is in some sense an introduction to mass communication, with a focus on media literacy, history, and evolution.

JOUR 198: Multimedia Reporting (Syllabus)
Description: The purpose of this course is to take skills you already have and apply them to new contexts.  In this case, the skills are your ability to gather information and report and the new contexts will be the all of the multimedia tools available to you on the Web. This class is experimental in nature because it still is a new offering here at Lehigh. Flexibility on the schedule is going to be key, so please pay attention to all announcements about schedule changes in class. Generally you’ll see activities and due dates on the Course Site main page several weeks in advance. You will be responsible for changes, but I will be completely clear about it beforehand.

JOUR 325: New Media & Social Change (Syllabus)
Description: Before the dawn of the mass Internet in the 1990s, most organizations and people groups trying to change society had to do it the old fashioned way: through person-to-person contact, and often using traditional institutions such as banks to do key management tasks such as finances. The era of the interactive Web, though, has changed this. Not only is the Web a tool for organizing in new ways, but it also lets us solve the problems of organizations in new ways, and this comes at the expense of traditional institutions that have always gained sustainability from the difficulty in self-organizing. In this course we’ll look at three components of the new kind of change: the Web, the way ideas spread, and the new ways people are doing things at the expense of traditional institutions. This course is theory and practice of these movements, and you’ll get some small-scale experience on what it means to find and engage new types of communities in the quest for social change.