This class is designed to teach students a basic suite of multimedia production skills to be used for communicating ideas, research, and other forms of student scholarship. Like a class in Public Speaking, which aims to help students develop a skill set and is informed by the study of rhetoric, students in this course will learn multimedia production with the ultimate aim
of having students apply those skills towards engaging in forms of multimedia-enhanced discourse. Towards this end, students will learn: basic principles of videography & photography, video editing, photo editing, and audio production.  After learning basic skills, students will choose one form of multimedia communication to focus on, culminating in the production of a capstone project. The goal of the capstone project is for students to use multimedia to communicate a piece of their own scholarship, research, or other scholarly endeavors in a creative way. This could be a video essay, a mini-documentary, a podcast, a multimedia-enhanced research publication, an animated ‘explainer video’, a narrated photo essay, or a range of other potential projects. This class does not require (or expect) any prior experience with media production. Students should be willing and eager to learn, as the class will cover a lot of ground quickly in establishing the basics of production. Students who have experience with digital video, photography, video editing, or any kind of multimedia production are strongly encouraged to enroll; the class has a flexible structure to enable those students with already developed skills to work on advancing their knowledge towards mastery.

From K-pop to Pokémon, from Cyber-politics to comic book, this course introduces you to the media and popular cultural scene in one of the most dynamic regions of the world economy today. It gives you the theoretical tool to understand and analyze these media and cultural phenomena. While acknowledging some common defining characteristics of East Asian societies, we will pay attention to the internal diversity, differences and transcultural flow within the region as well as East Asian nations’ connection to the world. The class is divided into three big sections with each focusing one East Asian region: Greater China, Japan, and Korea. In each section, we will start with a brief introduction to the modern history of the region. Then we will examine case studies selected from the region’s media and pop culture realm. Some of the topics include cyber culture and e-commerce in China; Japan’s anime culture and cat café; and Korean popular music and its global fans. By the end of the semester, you should be able to have a basic understanding of East Asian societies and cultures, critically analyze cultural trends and media events using the theories learnt in this class, and be able to engage in productive conversations with people from these societies.