COM
597A (Special Topics): Selling the Message: The Business of
User Generated Digital Content (5
credits). Thursdays, 6-10 p.m., Sept. 27-Dec
5.
Inexpensive technology and powerful distribution networks
mean nearly anyone can transmit their digital
creations. This flood of amateur content provides a
glimpse at new ways to reach an increasingly fragmented
audience. Students will study the success stories and
discuss how their popular messaging can be used in
advertising, campaigning, storytelling and
entertainment. What's driving the explosion of this
form of digital content? Is there a "recipe for
success" for the material that reaches a large
audience? What lessons can people, companies, and
organizations that typically use and generate professional
content draw from the amateurs? Can any of it be
monetized? And where is all of this heading? At the
end of the course, students will be able to design, pitch
and critically evaluate a proposal to use amateur content
schemes.
Course site
COM
597E (Special Topics): Multimedia
Storytelling (5
credits). Thursdays, 6-10 p.m., January 10 - March
13/20.
Since the advent
of human communication, storytelling has been a key factor
in our survival and development.
Over the last century, storytelling to an audience beyond
our immediate social circle has largely been the preserve
of industrialized, mass media. But now, with digital media,
we can not only listen to new voices, we can be those new
voices – leading some to conclude that we have entered into
a new “Storytelling Age.” Despite our newfound access to
these tools of creation and distribution, effective
communication still requires the timeless basics of
effective storytelling – perhaps even more so given the
exponential increase in new content competing for our
limited attention.
In this hand-on, skills-oriented course, we'll explore what
it takes to conceive, develop, create and distribute a
compelling multimedia story. Together, this class will
produce a single, collaborative project that we will
distribute through social networks, user-generated content
sites, and film festivals. We'll employ consumer-level
technology (including cellphone cameras and off-the-shelf
editing systems) to build a groundbreaking, engaging
narrative that can potentially reach a worldwide audience.
Course site
Course blog.
COM 529: Research
Strategies and Methodologies in Digital Media
(5 credits). Thursdays, 6-10
p.m., April 10 - June 5.
This is one of the three core
courses in the Master of Communication in Digital Media
program.
It seeks to enhance your critical and analytical skills,
along with your ability to express yourself, so you can
better understand the production, exploitation and
consumption of digital media.
Specifically, you will learn how to:
1. Develop a story concept, marketing plan or business idea
related to digital media in communication.
2. Research that concept, plan or idea.
3. Leverage digital media resources to enhance your
research.
4. Express this research through a proposal – in writing
and through multimedia.
5. Pitch and present/distribute the idea.
We will accomplish this by focusing on how to research a
single “problem” for the entire class: how can institutions
(business, non-profit or governmental) internally adopt the
use of social media?
Course site.
Course blog.