Critical Technology and Digital Media for Learning Certificate

In this course, we will engage in critical discourse about the historical roots, present-day manifestations, and speculative futures of technological innovations. We will explore and be in conversation with scholarly texts and media that provide a critical lens on the values, ideologies and social structures encoded in technological systems. Based on this foundation, we will interrogate applications of technology in our everyday lives and education spaces, and pursue lines of inquiry about the implications of these technologies on society. Our scholarship will build on the wealth of research conducted by women and people of color to analyze the implications of everyday technologies across race, gender, class, ability and other intersections of identity. We will explore a broad range of topics, including algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), digital surveillance and science fiction. Our goals will be to follow our questions to find new questions, play with ideas, think deeply, and create scholarly artifacts that grapple with technology in the context of our collective humanity.

This course will examine the relationship between digital literacies, schooling, and identity in relation to an evolving digital media landscape. We will consider what it means to read and write, the world and the word, in a digitally constructed reality. We will collaboratively explore the deictic, participatory, networked, global, and multimodal nature of digital literacies and the implications for classrooms and other educational contexts. To do so, we will critically examine how literacies are situated and how these socio-cultural understandings illuminate issues of power and privilege. This course will be grounded in critical praxis, and therefore you will learn to compose and deconstruct a range of digital artifacts (e.g. digital stories, games, podcasts), engage in critical analysis of digital artifacts, and think about how to design digital experiences to nurture learning and literacy.

This course provides opportunities for graduate learners to explore, examine, reflect, and discuss critical learning theories that inform how we select and use digital media and technology. The course includes discussion and reflections on different digital integration models. We will examine the digital media application and equity, accessibility, and criticality. You will have the opportunity to disseminate your strategies for and experiences using digital media and technology. You will create content using select digital media and technology, receive feedback from instructors and colleagues, and reflect on how you could revise your creations.