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Welcome to Class

Welcome to the CIS 3750: Social Media in Organizations, and welcome to the course blog.

NOTE: Your homework for both Tuesday the 3rd and Thursday the 5th can be found at the end of this post.

In this class we will primarily be looking at social media software.  I’m not just talking about Facebook and Twitter.  We’re going to be less interested in calculating the number of followers Ashton Kutcher has this week; more interested in how networked social spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and other online infrastructures are created.  While the social aspect of digital media will be a cornerstone of class lecture and discussion, just as much (if not more) time will be spent learning how to create digital media that can then be distributed over networks. Whether you are interested in digital videos, animated gifs, HTML websites, album torrents, tweets, wikis, or blog posts…  There is no social media without actual digital media being shared.  Social media is no longer just about blurbs of text, but instead can now encapsulate media deliverables as advanced as enormous interactive virtual worlds.  What I’m trying to get at here is that there are a lot of opportunities for creating media in relation to social media as a course topic.  Much of your grade in this class will be project based.

 

The full course syllabus will be posted on the blog by this weekend, and we will go over it together on Tuesday.

 

Prior experience with HTML is not required for this class, but a familiarity with HTML and CSS will allow for more customized midterm proposals and final projects.  In both this course and the social media course I teach, I see HTML as a necessary foundation for exploration into digital media creation and deployment.  HTML allows us to consider rudimentary rules of computer programming, digital publishing, video production/post-production, graphic design, and game design.  You will be given a lot of opportunities in this class to customize your learning experience in relation to your goals, but there are specific techniques that will be necessary no matter what your goals are, and you will be expected to learn them.  If you are expecting a class where you are given a text to read, and then hear a lecture about it… you will be disappointed.  In this class, whether or not you choose to bring a computer, we will focus on creating new media using free and open source software.

 

If you don’t have much experience beyond, perhaps, MS Word or Excel… that is no reason to be anxious.  There is a good chance I’ll be asking you to try some things you’ve not tried to do on your (or the college’s) computer before, but I will give you all the tools you need to accomplish that task.

 

 

WARNING: If you use MS Word to submit homework in this class it will not be accepted.  All work in this class will be done in a text editor.  If you do not want to download the suggested text editor (Atom), please use the default text editor on your computer (Windows: Notepad / Mac: TextEdit).

 

 

Suggested Software [This software is available cross platform — OS X, Windows, and Linux]

* Gimp (Open Source Image Editor):  http://www.gimp.org/

* Atom (Open Source Text Editor): https://atom.io/

* Blender (Open Source 3D Modelling, 3D Animation, Game Engine, Video Editing Suite): http://www.blender.org/

And for the very adventurous –>

* Unity (Free Version works on Windows and Mac): http://unity3d.com/unity/download

 

HW :

For Tuesday the 3rd:

READ

* What is New Media – 8 Propositions

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Manovich-NewMedia.pdf

* The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9pz8d25x#page-1

 

 For Thursday the 5th:

Please use the template found HERE to properly format and submit the answer to the question.  What question?  You have to click the link.

https://github.com/EliCash82/course_markup/blob/master/template.html