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In the Winter of 2003 I began updating the curriculum for my interactive media and information design courses. Like most of us who teach new media design and theory, I had many different ways to approach the material, but had no “standard” to fall back on since this area of pedagogy and research is so new and continues to evolve as we work. Like many of us, I have tried most of the popular approaches to teaching online development and writing in the past ten years. When the web first became popular, I taught my new media courses (then called hypertext courses) through the lens of classical rhetoric, focusing on Plato’s conception of the dialectical exchange. As online design also started to become a vital tool of corporate promotion and training, I refocused my courses through the lenses of project management, industrial user-centered design and usability testing.
As online new media technology improved and allowed for the creation of web-based material that functioned like stand-alone software, I refocused my courses around the structure of narrative and how it uses theatrical forms of interaction in the presentation of complex online help and instructional systems. Never quite comfortable with any of these course designs nor with the overall reception of my course material, I have continually reedited my curriculum and project designs. I keep changing course approaches to adapt to changes in the field, and to keep pace with students’ foreknowledge of the technologies we use in the classroom.
What I have essentially been looking for all this time is a poetic conceit, a solid story line, a narrative and theoretical blueprint that I can use to build a pedagogical home for a wide range of theoretical approaches, cultural and technological histories, and student-driven technology development work. Lev Manovich’s recent important work on new media, The Language of New Media, and its focus on new media development as a form of interactive, multicultural cinema, recently provided me with the inspiration for a way to tie all my interests and pedagogical approaches together into a single curriculum.
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