Instructor: Dr. Mark Dressman, mdressma@illiois.eduTime: Wednesday, 4:00-6:50Credit: 3 undergrad / 4 grad hoursLocation: TBACRN: 63210
In Illinois and across the world, people are using an extraordinary range of social media—platforms and apps that create opportunities for communication with others—for an extraordinary range of purposes: to meet, to organize, to share information quickly, and to connect with loved ones or with strangers who may or may not share each other’s cultural, ethnic, political, linguistic, religious, or sexual orientations or preferences. In this course, we will focus on how these new media not only help to shape people’s identit(ies) but also on how these media create new opportunities for learning and for teaching, and to experiment with the creation of new platforms for connecting with others educationally.The first part of the course will focus on exploring how each of us learns and teaches through engagement in social media, with an emphasis on how language and different forms of multimedia, including music, video, images, and their design, convey information to us on a variety of levels. In the second half of the semester, we’ll work in groups to design platforms of our own that use critical features of social media to connect and learn from and with others.
About the Instructor: Mark Dressman is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. His current research focuses on theories of multimodality and their application in the development of curriculum for adolescents and young adults. He is a Fulbright Senior Scholar studying the ways that students in Morocco and Korea learn English via digital technology and classroom instruction.
