Welcome to the Course Website for CEP 956 Fall 2021: Mind, Media & Learning!
In this course, we will be drawing on an interdisciplinary and emerging base of research and our own experiences to take a critical and informed approach to evaluating contemporary media and social media practices found outside of classrooms in the everyday lives of students, as well as those used in classrooms. We will explore the psychology and sociology of new media; media effects and learning with media; issues of identity, literacy, culture, and pedagogy in technologically mediated environments. We will pay particular attention to synthesizing themes in the research on learning (formal- and informal-) and teaching within social media-enabled environments (and beyond). We will seek to understand the social and technical affordances and challenges of particular spaces for teaching and learning, as well as common themes across them, and generate an agenda for future research. Moreover, we will examine the latest theory and research on how new media are shaping scholars’ contemporary work practices with what advantages and disadvantages for our work. The course will also cover stages of the academic publishing process as students learn how to select a journal outlet for their manuscripts, how to craft an article, and more.
This website will serve as our hub for our collective exploration. We are still updating pages and tweaking formats here and there, but this is where you will find links to the course syllabi, master schedule and weekly schedule, links to the readings, online discussion forum, Twitter feed in the side-bar and much of what you will need for this course. In addition, you will be able to access and check in on your progress in an online gradebook in D2Learn (forthcoming). Of course, an important part of our course will be your experiences within and reflections on your use of social media as future scholars, teachers, activists, and policy makers.
Again, welcome to the course!