5. New Capstone: Social media and disinformation

This course makes extensive use of interactive media, hands on learning and project based assignments to help students build practical experience and skills. It will always be helpful to bring your laptop to class so that we can get work done.

Learning Objectives

Through this class, I hope that all of us can:

• Understand the ways that social media shapes our world and contritbutes to social change

• Develop our sociological imagination by asking questions about the intersection of social media, social networks and social change

• Use insights from above to help ourselves and others

  • make our own lives better

  • make lives of others better

  • influence the course of our future education

• Learn these things through

  • collaborative learning systems

  • sharing digital learning resources

  • hands-on projects

  • data collection and analysis

• Cultivate our digital literacy

  • collecting, curating, and commenting

Learning Outcomes

All learners (faculty and students) will be able to explain what social media, networks and change are, how they interrelate and connect these understandings to concrete examples in everyday life.

The understanding of social media, networks and change will be based on readings introduced in this class as well as the capacity to further investigate these topics through review of academic research, direct research, and social media exploration.

Assignments

There are three types of assignments:

1. Slides and other discussion materials = 150

2. Participation and written reflections = 150

3. Collaborative white paper = 200

Participation/attendance: quality of contribution to in class discussion, online discussion, and to online teaching materials are all part of your class participation.

Seminar deliverables:

Every week that we have new content students will generate slides or other discussion materials prior to the in-class discussion. During class, students will participate in the discussion and at the end of Wednesday's session they will write a two paragraph reflection on what we discussed. Individual students will typically be responsible to report to the group about insights from specific readings. All students are expected to contribute to the quality of the seminar discussion through their attention to, and involvement in all readings and materials from the current seminar topics.

These are graded according to the following scale:

meh (check minus) - hopefully very rare

fine (check) - most common

great (check plus) - unusual

Criteria for evaluation of written assignments

This is a senior level seminar and therefore, mere completion of an assignment is the minimum expectation.

• Relevance of contribution to core questions of the course

• Quality of writing

• Clarity of argument

• Professionalism of editing

• Sociological insight

Readings and resources