This course is designed to give you an opportunity to gain valuable experience in the areas of instructional design and multimedia authoring. Computers are refiguring ideas of text, writing, reading, and the instructional process. These changes can be felt at all levels of society, from the way the entertainment industry is growing, to new arenas of business, to the way education is conceived. Reading is no longer about sitting down with an object known as a book and paging through the content.
Writing is no longer about letters that form words being printed on a paper page.
Computer technology allows us to add graphics, color, video, and sound to our words, increasing the ways we might communicate a message to an audience. We will look at rhetorical theory generally and how hypertext makes us rethink historical ideas about communication. We will also examine the strengths and weaknesses of different media as communication tools. More is not always better in the world of multimedia, and we will look at why this is the case. By the end of the semester you will have an understanding of which technologies facilitate particular kinds of communication and how you might go about making such decisions for the new media that emerges throughout your lifetime.