Information Course Schedule Summer 2012

Surveying history through the lens of information and information through the lens of history, this course looks across time to consider what might distinguish ours as “the information age” and what that description implies about the role of “information technology” across time. We will select moments in societies’ development of information production, circulation, consumption, and storage from the earliest writing and numbering systems to the world of Social Media. In every instance, we’ll be concerned with what and when, but also with how and why. Throughout we will keep returning to questions about how information-technological developments affect society and vice versa?

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: No prior New Media production experience required.  Introduction to interdisciplinary study and design of New Media. Survey of theoretical and practical foundations of New Media including theory and history; analysis and reception; computational foundations; social implications; interaction, visual, physical, and narrative design. Instruction combines lectures and project-based learning using case studies from everyday technology (e.g., telephone, camera, web).

Two hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week. Prerequisites: Introductory programming experience. This course focuses on understanding the Web as an information system, and how to use it for information management for personal and shared information. The Web is an open and constantly evolving system which can make it hard to understand how the different parts of the landscape fit together. This course provides students with an overview of the Web as a whole, and how the individual parts it together. It provides students with the understanding and skills to better navigate and use the landscape of Web information.

Three hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week.  An introduction to high-level computer programming languages with emphasis on strings, modules, functions and objects; sequential and event-based programming. Uses the PYTHON language.

Three hours of lecture per week. This course will encourage students to think broadly about the interplay between technological systems, social processes, economic activities, and political contingencies in efforts to alleviate poverty. Students will come to understand poverty not only in terms of high-level indicators, but from a ground-level perspective as 'the poor' experience and describe it for themselves. The role played by individuals and societies of the developing world as active agents in processes of technology adoption and use will be a central theme.