Courses

This course is open only by special permission in unique cases for MI students. May be 3 or 6 credits; credits do not count towards the MI degree.

Librarians and teachers are often called upon to select and recommend websites, CD-ROMs, and other electronic information resources for young people, a task that can be very difficult without an understanding of what aspects of these resources appeal to and repel young users. This course is intended to facilitate that evaluation and recommendation process by helping you to understand how young people interact with and evaluate digital information.  This is largely a reading course, requiring you to read the foundational works and core research in youth electronic information behaviors and preferences, including works from library science, information science, and gender studies.  Major assignments will include a related research project and a Web-based annotated bibliography of recommended websites for young people.

In Search of Cupid and Psyche uses the celebrated story of love and sacrifice as the starting point for examining the function of myth in creating and enhancing meaning in children's and young adult literature. In this course you will learn to analyze children's books that borrow heavily from myths and archaic legend, and to recognize and describe mythological elements within a broad range of books for children and young adults.  You will learn to recognize mythic elements in text and illustrations, discover commonalities among culturally diverse literatures, and explore how contemporary myths operate in specific literary works.

From picture books to teen novels, from history to folktale, this course will examine the voices of women and girls as they tell their own stories and as stories are told about them. We will work from a list of titles, most published within the past five years, and will read and discuss some of them together and some of them as individual projects. The emphasis in the course will be on reading widely and on intense engagement with the texts. Students will have the opportunity to create book lists, booktalks, and/or Web pages to explore their interpretations of this literature.

This course will study the development of children's book illustration in the work of three masters of the twentieth century.  You will explore the picture books of Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Peter Sis, considering issues such as the use of history made by each illustrator and his concern for social context, the relationship of image to text and of illustration to a linear narrative, and repeating motifs and symbols that join individual publications into an organic whole. Students in the course will be divided into groups which will explore the three illustrators; this exploration will include a look at work by other important 20th century contemporaries such as Hillary Knight, Mitsumasa Anno, and Quentin Blake. The final weeks of the semester will be a conference period during which the groups will share some of the papers they have written and together discover how different perceptions, research, and group dynamics led to alternate hypotheses about these three masters.

This course is designed to assist teachers and librarians in selecting, evaluating, and encouraging the informed enjoyment of poetry written for children and young adults in the twentieth century. The semester will cover a variety of poetic forms, including ballads, haiku, and lyrics, a comparison of anthologies published in the past three decades, African-American poetry, the children's poetry by noted poets such as Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarell, Theodore Roethke and Robert Graves, among other aspects of poetry.  Assignments will include readings, developing lesson plans and/or web pages to support poetry in the curriculum, illustrating a poem and significant participation in a web-based discussion. While the coursework will not privilege any specific ideological/critical methodology, it will teach and require familiarity with a broad vocabulary of basic terms and poetic devices.

Biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and personal narratives are all ways of telling the narrative of a life. In this course, we will examine how writers take a life lived and turn it into a story. We will read picture books, chapter books, collective biographies, autobiographies, and biographical narratives for young people of all ages. Most titles will be recent (within the past five years). The focus will be on reading widely, and on intense engagement with the texts. Students will have the opportunity to create book lists, booktalks, and/or Web pages to explore their interpretations of biography materials for young people.

Students will develop an understanding and appreciation of the processes of the creation of the visual aspects of children's books, including the development process from preliminary sketches and/or storyboard to the published book; relationships to verbal texts; format and layout; various media and techniques; case studies of individual artists and works.

This course examines the interpretive structures of American children's movies that are based on children's literature with a focus on how themes, storytelling, and characters are translated from one medium to another. Discussions will center on a variety of contemporary issues, including how literal fidelity relates to creative license (i.e., adaptation versus translation); how the technical differences between film and literature impose directorial choices; how evolving understandings of race, gender, ethnicity and age affect filmic interpretation and presentation; and whether a book's theme or core narrative can be divided from the vast body of cultural, ideological and political influences that constitute its identity. While the primary focus of the course will fall on the process of inter-media translation, significant attention will be paid to questions of intra-generic translation as well: To what extent do the conventions of the children's film dictate a director's interpretive decisions? How do successful children's films of the past, whether recent hits or old classics, impose upon the presentation of new works?  What, if any, are the generic paradigms to which new movies must conform? Finally, Children's Literature Goes To The Movies will ask students to decide whether knowledge of the original book enriches the experience of going to the movies (and if the movie enriches one's understanding of the original book), or whether movie and book are essentially separate, and knowledge of one does not meaningfully translate into a deeper knowledge or a richer experience of the other. Films we will study will include: The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, Aladdin, Pinocchio, I Am the Cheese, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Matilda, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Fellowship of the Ring, and several versions of Little Women. Genres that we will consider in relationship to these films will include: the bildungsroman, the fairy tale, enchanted realism, and the quest.

In this seminar you will read works by and about six children's authors, paying special attention to the authors' own statements about the creative process. The authors and illustrators will change semester to semester; in previous years we considered the works of Eric Carle, Leo Lionni, Katherine Paterson, Jane Kurtz, Julius Lester, Philip Pullman, Jane Yolen, to name some. During the semester, three of the authors studied will enter the online discussion with the class for one week each.   

An examination of children's picture books from a feminist standpoint and various cultural perspectives. Emphasis on the identification of books that use powerful verbal and visual images to promote self esteem and cultural awareness.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, communication professionals need to write persuasively while maintaining accuracy and knowledge of their multiple audiences. Once the content is produced, communication professionals need to understand and utilize various media and marketing tools to distribute their messages. This course is ideal for the Public Relations or Marketing Communication professional with some practical writing experience who wants to focus and hone those skills to bring them to the next level.

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To be a leader you need at least one follower. This also means the quality of the followers has a direct bearing on the success of the leader and his/her team. Since we play different roles at different times, we will explore and identify different Leadership and Followership communication styles.

The more specifically a Public Relations (PR) or Marketing and Communication (MarCom) professional identifies their target audience(s) by demographic or other means, and where they can be found, the easier it will be to find communication strategies and tactics that will reach those targets. This course is designed to give the PR or MarCom professional these tools and awareness. This course is ideal for the PR and MarCom professional looking to learn to better define a target audience and how to expose hot buttons for copy content and style, SEO/SEM keywords, hook development, and more.

The purpose of the “Building a Brand” course is to develop students’ fundamental understanding of the importance of brand equity as well as how to build, measure and manage brand equity. Topics will include understanding the role of Public Relations in building brand equity, keys to successful brand management campaigns, and measuring brand equity.

Much of workplace communication takes place in writing–your image as a professional is often formed by what someone is reading on a screen. This interactive and feedback-driven writing course addresses common challenges such as facing writer’s block, presenting clear messages quickly, formatting documents for readability, and using a positive tone.

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A multi-channel, multi-platform world continues to increase demand for digital assets, and organizations that manage high volumes of content rely on creative operations as the cross-functional glue for marketing and communications, agency relationships, packaging, branding, publishing (digital and print), as well as other related aspects of digital assets within a business.

The practice of creative operations is an emerging discipline and is applicable across many industries (media, consumer, federal, or arts and culture). Well-defined processes, clarity around people's roles, optimized technology, and data are the key to effective digital asset management in action. Creative operations work to provide cohesion in how an organization represents itself to the public through its digital content, as well as improves the performance of the teams who are creating and disseminating it. This course explores how DAM, creative operations, and workflows within an organization come together to streamline business processes.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Define the concept and purpose of Creative Operations and Workflows.
2. Describe the relationship between DAM and the everyday workflows of creative teams.
3. Explain the concept of the Content Supply Chain and identify the building blocks of the Content Supply Chain in relationship to DAM.
4. Summarize the importance of well-defined workflow processes as it pertains to maintaining a healthy and sustainable DAM system.
   1. Prepare examples that justify the need for well-defined workflow processes that support DAM.
   2. Explain the risk of poorly defined workflow processes in relationship to DAM.
5. Design a plan for continuous improvement in Creative Operations and DAM.
   1. Explain how Creative Operations practices and DAM work together to advance business goals.

This course offers participants with an interest in organizational communications, public relations, or journalism the opportunity to gain insight into the practice of crisis communications. The primary goal of the course is to expose participants to the realities and demands associated with managing organizational communications across a range of crisis situations. The course will review case studies, best practices in the field, common methods, and call upon participants to execute the strategies learned.

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One hopes that a crisis never occurs within their organization, but the reality is that crisis planning and crisis communication are essential skills for a leader. This course will give participants the tools needed to effectively manage a workplace crisis.

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Your gallery, library, archives, or museum (GLAM) organization is great at managing collections of physical objects, artworks, books, and ancient manuscripts. But now you've been asked to share your collections digitally or give your patrons, visitors, and audiences an incredible digital experience. Where do you start?

Start with organizing your digital assets (images, digital surrogates, videos, marketing and event graphics, educational materials, conservation records and any other digital file and the metadata that describes these assets) by building and improving your Digital Asset Management (DAM) practice.

We'll go in-depth with DAM as well as case studies from within and outside of GLAM to guide you on success for your DAM practice. Whether you already have a DAM practice in place, or your GLAM organization is starting to explore "what is DAM?" or "how can we manage our collections and operations digitally", this is the right course for you. This course provides an understanding of the fundamental concepts, components, and elements necessary for the success of a DAM practice within your gallery, library, archives, or museum organization.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Apply and illustrate the fundamentals of DAM.
2. Identify the core building blocks of what makes a DAM system and the importance of these elements within the GLAM context.
3. Summarize the importance of DAM in GLAM organizations.
4. Articulate and differentiate a DAM system from other databases and technologies
5. Break down and prioritize DAM use cases and workflows common in cultural heritage organizations.
6. Summarize the importance of metadata and taxonomy orchestration across databases in the GLAM organization.
7. Predict potential risks and opportunities relating to data management.
8. Discover and illustrate at least three ways to identify and manage relationships with DAM stakeholders.

Design a plan for DAM governance, strategy, growth and capability assessment for an effective DAM practice.

Digital assets are a form of “data.” In this course, we cover how to manage Digital Asset Management (DAM) as a “data creator” from many perspectives, with the core understanding that all data needs to be governed. In DAM, data governance is an important component for managing and mitigating risk and ensures ongoing alignment with the overall business or organizational roles. We’ll cover master data management (MDM) as a cornerstone in understanding data facets and DAM’s role in archives, retention and records management, rights and intellectual property issues, and how to create and measure effective DAM governance through continuous improvement.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Define the concepts of Governance as they relate to Data and Digital Asset Management (DAM).
2. Summarize the importance of defining a collaborative vision and set of goals to ensure ongoing alignment with overall business and organizational strategy.
3. Articulate how data governance is an important DAM program component for enabling business outcomes and protecting and mitigating risk.
4. Explain the DAM Maturity Model Competency Levels and parent categories of People, Information, Process and Systems. Understand how they can be the basis of a DAM Governance assessment effort.
5. Map activities of Discovery, Execution, Standardization, and Metrics to the four parent categories of the maturity model.
6. Create a sample Governance planning artifact that delineate goals and activities.

This course recognizes the advances in globalization and diversity and analyzes cultural variability and its impact on workplace communications. You will examine diversity and how it impacts successful cross cultural interactions, applying specific tools, knowledge, and skills needed to be an effective cross cultural communicator.

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