Creating Technology for Social Change

Civic media courses for Spring 2012!

One feature of the Center that we love to, well, feature is our completely unique set of courses. This semester we have three of them — two taught by professor and Center co-principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock and the other, in his MIT class debut, by our director Ethan Zuckerman. Registration is still open:

CMS.362 Civic Media Collaborative Design Studio
S. Costanza-Chock
Project-based studio focusing on collaborative design of civic media provides a service-learning opportunity for students interested in working with community organizations. Multidisciplinary teams create civic media projects based on real-world community needs. Covers co-design methods and best practices to include the user community in iterative stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 16.

CMS.361 Networked Social Movements: Media and Mobilization
S. Costanza-Chock
Provides an overview of social movement studies as a body of theoretical and empirical work, with an emphasis on understanding the relationship between social movements and the media. Explores multiple methods of social movement investigation, including textual and media analysis, surveys, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and co-research. Covers recent innovations in social movement theory, as well as new data sources and tools for research and analysis. Includes short papers, a literature review, and a final research project. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 16.

MAS.S61 – News and Participatory Media
E. Zuckerman
Rather than exploring the history of journalism and challenges to existing models of news production, this class will consider the news as an engineering challenge. How do we discover what events are taking place in different parts of the world? How do we explain the importance of these events to readers or viewers? What can readers of a story do to respond to events? We’ll explore the systems journalists and others have used to report and share the news, but we’ll focus on developing our own tools and methods to address these challenges. [More…]

Register today before they fill up.