Category: Course Profiles

Given current events and student interest, the most recent version of the course (Spring 2017) led students through an exploration of so-called “fake news.” Students gained valuable experience in information literacy by analyzing and writing about the infamous #PizzaGate scandal, concepts such as “digital polarization” and “filter bubbles,” and even important epistemological questions such as “How do we know what we know?” and “Which sources of information can be trusted in the digital age?”

This course is a practical introduction to developing a research project in the humanities that is guided by these questions: how do researchers and scholars create knowledge? And who gets to decide what “counts” as knowledge in a given disciplinary arena?

Since its “invention” in the fifth century BCE, rhetoric—the study and practice of persuasion through language, signs, and symbols—has been a powerful force in public affairs, education, politics, and in the practice of civic life, even though today rhetoric is rarely studied outside of English and communication arts.

What is the “American dream,” exactly? Is it owning your own home? Having a decent job? Choosing your own destiny? Providing a better life for your children? Ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed? Or is the American dream merely the nostalgic residue of an Empire in decline?

"To talk of New Media in the early 21st century seems odd: exhausted and exhausting. Either it seems tinged with that hopelessly naïve utopianism and dystopianism that dominated the end of the 20th century . . . or it just seems hopeless. New media is everywhere and everything; it changes more quickly than we can think. What more can we possibly say about it?” --Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, *New Media/Old Media* (2016)

Technical Editing is perhaps the most practical course I teach on a regular basis at IU Kokomo. Week by week, students learn how to edit technical documents, from proofreading for errors at the surface level to ensuring that documents contain appropriate content, organization, and visuals for their various readers.

ENG-L 202 introduces undergraduates from a variety of majors to the major theoretical movements, thinkers, and concepts of 20th and early-21st century critical and literary theory, with a special focus on how concepts like authorship and originality, textuality/reading, and even identity circulate throughout the diverse tools and practices of literary interpretation.

The Summer Bridge Program is a one-week orientation course designed to help students successfully transition from high school or the workforce to the challenging environment of the 21st-century university.

The contemporary adage that we exist in a fast-moving, increasingly connected (and “connectable”) world is a commonplace of mainstream media. But what precisely are we referring to when we discuss the massive changes wrought by the internet, mobile devices, networks, and by digital culture generally?