This year's course (2008)

This blog is here primarily as an aid to my students, so that they can have access to examples of science related websites, videos, podcasts, and other texts. (I'm using "text" here to refer to any example of an entire piece of communication in some medium. We've got get to used to the media studies lingo.)

So what's going on in this year's class? This year I'm doing MIT 2403F starting this September. This is a second year essay course that will be open to all students.

This course is not a science course, so you don't have to know too much about science to take the course. If you do know something about science in general or about science , this course can be very interesting, as it may give you a deeper insight into the way that people think about science.

MIT stands for Media, Information and Technoculture, so this course has the potential for a little more than simply media studies. This course also has a brief look at the media that scientists use within the community of scientists and how this shapes their culture and information in science. I will also try to tie the ideas in this section of the course into instruction on essay writing, so that it will help teach both the content of the course and essay writing skills.

As far as textbooks for the course go, the course will use a coursepack available at InPrint. This should keep costs down. The coursepack has a few articles from the philosophy of science but mostly we will look at articles specifically about media and the way that science is portrayed in fiction and in news media. A few supplementary articles will be placed on course reserve in the library or be made available over the internet. In class, and in the students' own time, we will look at particular examples of movies, newspaper and magazine articles, and other texts that present science in some way. This blog will help with that.

That's about it. I only want to add that I hope to do a fair bit of essay instruction and guidelines within the course, which I hope will help students in this class and in future classes.