alex de carvalho

I’ve pub­lished a cur­ricu­lum for social media lit­er­acy at the col­lege and grad­u­ate level.

This is based on my expe­ri­ence teach­ing the sub­ject at the Uni­ver­sity of Miami School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and on the pre­sen­ta­tions and work­shops I’ve given. The course­work and some of the top­ics are also inspired by Howard Rheingold’s class on Vir­tual Worlds / Social Media:

In a few short years, the Web 2.0 has pro­foundly changed the com­mu­ni­ca­tion land­scape. With the advent of new social media tools, more and more peo­ple are par­tic­i­pat­ing and engag­ing in the con­ver­sa­tion online. As for­mer mem­bers of the audi­ence become the cre­ators of con­tent, cor­po­ra­tions and media orga­ni­za­tions lose con­trol of the mes­sage. After an overview of how and why we got here, this course will guide you through what works with social net­works, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, media shar­ing, lifestreams, tag­ging and other social media tools. Since these tools and ser­vices are so new and con­tin­u­ally chang­ing, stu­dents’ degree of knowl­edge about the inter­net is not rel­e­vant. For con­tin­ued effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion, using these tools is not optional, it’s required.

The course will explore the new media land­scape in terms of online expres­sion, social net­work­ing, iden­tity man­age­ment, com­mu­nity build­ing, and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism. How is social media chang­ing the way you work and live? What are the impli­ca­tions for you and for the orga­ni­za­tions you will work with? What oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges do indi­vid­u­als, news orga­ni­za­tions, and busi­nesses face regard­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion, identity/brand man­age­ment, and com­mu­nity build­ing? How do we under­stand, par­tic­i­pate in, and lever­age com­mu­ni­ties in our cur­rent age of many-to-many media?

This course is grounded in prac­tice, and stu­dents will be required to par­tic­i­pate in social net­works, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, folk­sonomies, and vir­tual worlds. Class dis­cus­sions, pre­sen­ta­tions by stu­dents, read­ings, and exam­ples of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and media will bring us greater under­stand­ing of the issues and prac­tice of social media. We will also learn from case stud­ies, invited speak­ers, and our own learn­ing jour­nals, new effec­tive strate­gies and appli­ca­tions of these platforms.

The class is highly par­tic­i­pa­tory both offline and online. Between the weekly sched­uled class meet­ings, this course’s dis­cus­sion con­tin­ues in a vari­ety of online and vir­tual envi­ron­ments. Those who com­plete this course will know how to use blogs, tags, wikis, social net­works, Twit­ter and Flickr pro­duc­tively, and have a frame­work for under­stand­ing and eval­u­at­ing new social media tools and platforms.

The full syl­labus includ­ing the course top­ics and course­work is on the wiki. This syl­labus is dis­trib­uted under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.