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Course Overview
- Instructor
- Nancy Kaplan, Professor
- School of Information Arts and Technologies
- 102 Charles Royal, 410.837.5319
- nkaplan@ubalt.edu
- iat.ubalt.edu/kaplan
- Office hours: Wednesdays 5:00 - 8:00 and by appointment
- Description and Objectives
- This course surveys important developments, implications, and problems in the development of modern information technologies, emphasizing their relevance to the Internet and other current contexts. Students are expected to become conversant with the technical and intellectual roots of technological development and at the same time to understand important social issues in which that development is implicated. Beginning with the transition from orality to literacy and moving through the emergence of print, the course situates innovation in larger narratives of cultural change and historical process, continuing into the post-Cold-War expansion. Instructors will focus on various relevant themes that may include electronic democracy, the digital divide, globalization and post-nationalism, identity and security issues, and the social implications of "mass" versus "hyper" media.
- By the end of this course, students will have a broad understanding of a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches to the subject of culture in the age of digital communications technologies. They will have applied a research method to one information technology-supported cultural practice and investigated the intersection between human practices and information technologies' affordances.
- Required Texts
- Howard, Phillip N. and Steve Jones, Eds.
Society Online. Sage, 2004.
ISBN: 0761927085
- Jones, Steve, Ed.
Doing Internet Research. Sage, 1999.
ISBN: 0761915958
- McCaughey, Martha and Michael Ayers, Eds.
Cyberactivism. Routledge, 2003.
ISBN: 0415943205
- Watts, Duncan.
Six Degrees. WW Norton, 2003.
ISBN: 0393041425
- Wellman, Barry and Haythornthwaite, Caroline (eds).
The Internet in Everyday Life. Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
ISBN: 0631235086
- Plus handouts and on-line assignments listed on the syllabus.
- Assignments and Grading Scheme
- Additional Policies
- A statement of general academic policies appears on my Web site. That statement is an extension of this document. See
http://iat.ubalt.edu/kaplan/policies.htm.
Please also read the University's policies in the Student Handbook.
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