Here you will find information about graduate courses KMDI is offering this year, as well as a list of Affiliate Courses offered by collaborating units. These courses can count as electives for KMD Collaborative Program students.
The Collaborative Program Administrator works part-time and has office hours in the KMD CP Office (Room 310, 45 Willcocks). Please call 416.946.8515 or email program@kmdi.utoronto.ca if you would like to arrange an appointment.
Current KMDI Courses
We offer several courses in Knowledge Media Design, from fundamental concepts to practices in a variety of contexts. You can see an archive of previous course sessions with full course descriptions here.
Some of these KMD courses are co-listed with another collaborating unit. Students can enrol in either section of a co-listed course.
Current Course Offering: 2011/2012
- KMD1001 Fall 2011 (Sept-Dec)
- KMD1002 Winter 2012 (Jan-Apr)
- KMD2001 Fall 2011 (Sept-Dec)
- KMD2002 Winter 2012 (Jan-Apr)
- KMD2003 Winter 2012 (Jan-Apr)
- KMD2004 Summer 2011 (July - Aug)
KMD1001H F
Knowledge Media Design: Fundamental Concepts
2011 Course Description and Syllabus [PDF]
Knowledge media are systems incorporating computer and communications technology that enhance human thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, and learning. Examples include the Web, email, instant messaging, blogging systems, knowledge management systems, digital libraries, collaborative virtual environments, video conferencing environments, and webcasting systems. This course reviews the emerging field of knowledge media design, and the use of digital media for communication, collaboration, and learning. The course includes topics in human-centred design; knowledge media technologies; social implications of knowledge media; examples and applications of knowledge media; and the future of knowledge media, and is organized via themes of design, media, and knowledge.
KMD 1002H S
KMD1002H F Knowledge Media Design: Contexts and Practice
Instructor-of-Record: Peter Pennefather
Instructor: Karen Smith
Time: Tuesdays 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Start date: 10 January 2012
End Date: 10 April 2012
Location: Galbraith Building, Room 303
2012 Syllabus [PDF]
This course is a theme-based Pro-seminar course for KMD Collaborative Program students combining lectures, public seminars, and participation in online discussions. Students who successfully complete the course will receive a Credit on their transcript rather than a specific grade. If students outside of the KMD Collaborative Program would like to take the course, they require special permission from the course Instructor.
What are knowledge communities and how are their practices shifting in response to new media practices? This course addresses the past and current understanding of “persistent knowledge” that is defined by formal communities like school boards or graduate seminar courses, to less informal communities like fantasy sports or local folk music societies. We will consider the representations of such knowledge, its role within communities, and how it may be translated into new knowledge within and across community boundaries.
2009 course description
Visual Thinking was the theme for the 2009 Summer pilot course. This course complemented the survey begun in KMD1001H by considering Visual Thinking as a specific context for KMD. The importance of visual artifacts and methods as a means to support communication and reasoning is growing. Examples of Visual Thinking included: visual thinking in art and design; visual perception (e.g., in psychology and cognitive science); illustration and visual communication (e.g., biomedical illustration); information visualization (e.g., a computer science perspective); financial analysis and design (e.g., visual analytics for the financial sector); the phenomenology of perception (e.g., in philosophy); and visual language research (e.g., comic book theory and linguistics).
Participating students attended all public lectures and seminars, identified questions for guest lecturers, and helped to define specific areas of interest pertaining to Visual Thinking. Throughout the course, students reflected critically on Visual Thinking as a use of knowledge media and knowledge media technologies used for Visual Thinking.
KMD 2001H / INF 2169H
Human-centred Design
2011 Course Description:
An approach to design grounded in understanding the real-world practices of users and communities. The course draws most heavily from the 'participatory design' school, in which the prospective users play a vital collaborative role throughout all stages of the development process. Students work in teams with a 'real' user group developing a prototype knowledge media application.
The purpose of this course is to provide students with both theoretical foundations and practical experience in developing information systems that are driven by the needs and active participation of users. It will prepare students for collaborating with users in a variety of settings to develop their own systems. In contrast to conventional rationalistic approaches to information systems development, in this course information systems will be regarded as fundamentally social processes that can be supported by information technologies. It views systems design as an on-going, multi-faceted process involving the balancing of conflicting social and technical opportunities and constraints requiring experience within the actual use context.
The main focus will be upon the development of relatively small scale information systems and knowledge media applications with relatively well-defined and accessible user communities using networked personal computers and popular software packages. This is currently the scene of rapid growth, largely without the benefit of appropriately user-oriented development techniques.
KMD 2002H
Technologies for Knowledge Media
Instructor-of-Record: Mark Chignell
Instructor: Katherine Sellen
Time: Fridays 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Start Date: 13 January 2012
End Date: 13 April 2012
Please note that Friday April 6 is a holiday.
Location: Sandford Fleming, Room 3202
2010 Syllabus [PDF]
Our goal in this course is to gain experience in different approaches and tools for designing knowledge media. The focus will be on learning different techniques and tools for requirements analysis, prototyping, and evaluation. The course will cover understanding the context in which knowledge media is introduced, understanding the team, group or work setting for designing collaborative knowledge media. We will also explore different techniques for understanding and designing for the individual who uses or engages with knowledge media. Techniques and tools will be drawn from a range of design perspectives including traditional user centered design, participatory design, engineering, and industrial design. The appropriateness of each technique and tool for different design problems and settings will be discussed. We will also explore the development of new techniques and tools for new design challenges. The course will be a combination of hands on use of techniques and tools as well as case studies in communication, collaboration, and information access. We will make site visits to labs that specialize in particularly challenging knowledge media design problems such as the design of assistive technologies and design and evaluation in medical settings.
Knowledge Media & Learning /TPS1447H Technology in Education: Philosophical Issues
Session: Winter term, 2011-12
Time: Thursdays 5-8 pm
Location: OISE room 5-260
Instructor: Dr. Megan Boler
2012 Syllabus [PDF]
2012 Course Overview
How are social media practices reshaping landscapes of education, politics, policy-making, and public engagement? There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (77% of the world population). More than 250 million people access Facebook through their
mobile devices. Facebook’s 750 million users would constitute the world’s 3rd largest country. YouTube has 490 million unique users each month. Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors, and Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles. And 50% of the world’s population is under 30.
Against this backdrop, this course offers an overview of three areas of media, knowledge design, and technologies: (a) media education and media literacy, (b) median and democracy, and (c) philosophies of technology. The seminar engages scholarly
debates surrounding the following points of investigation:
• How does the exponential rise of access to information and communication
technologies require scholars across disciplines to redefine conceptions of
democracy and the role of ‘new’ and ‘old’ media?
• How do we rethink pedagogy and curricula--across disciplines--to accommodate
radically changing practices of knowledge design, and what modes of media
education and literacy are best suited to information saturation?
• What are the implications of corporate control ranging from design and
surveillance of media platforms to agenda-setting, within governments and news
industry?
• How and when do ‘counterpublic’ social media practices reconfigure the
distribution of power and dominant frames of policy and public interests?
To reconsider traditional conceptions of democracy, citizenship and publics, we will examine social sites of news media, education, and youth media practices. Students will be familiarized with: key theorists of media and technology (ranging from McLuhan to Baudrillard, and DeBord to Innis); the changing practices of media education and challenges faced in K-12 contexts for media education in a digital age; and historical and contemporary debates about the relationship of diverse news media to democratic aims. We will engage contemporary cross-disciplinary texts to articulate the new philosophies
of knowledge media and design suited to an era of digital culture. We will consider how and when practices of citizen journalism, blogging, and/or social media increase civic engagement and support global social movements. Course texts will include: Media Studies: A Reader (ed. Thornham et al); Digital Media and Democracy, ed Boler (MIT 2008); Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, ed Lyman et al (MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2009). Primary coursework includes conducting research on a selected topic through ongoing analysis in a weblog format, and a final project in the form of a 5 minute video, a collective wiki project, or a podcast series.
2009 Course Overview
This class works as a knowledge community to investigate various themes relating to particular knowledge media. We investigate the implications for learning and instruction in the classroom, on the playground, in the museum, online, or anywhere else that learning may happen. We try to make connections to the theoretical foundations from the learning sciences and other disciplines - What is known about how people learn? How can technology expedite learning or knowledge construction?
Each week, we explore a new theme, building on course content left from previous years. In exploring these themes, the class tries to take on the actual media practices that characterize various knowledge media - from wikis to social tagging, to immersive environments, to technology-enhanced learning environments. We then meet and try out some of these practices during class, and discuss the range of issues and opportunities:
- What will emerge as the "culture of classrooms" in the 21st century, and how will technology make an impact? What will the role of the teacher be? How can "smart" educational content and classrooms enable formative assessment and scaffold students in challenging pedagogical designs?
- How much information about my health care practices should be available to my smart home?
- How can we learn with others in multi-user virtual environments?
- How can podcasts and streaming video add to my experience in the grocery store, cafe, city streets or classrooms?
- What kinds of applications can we imagine for layered information systems (aka "mash-ups") like Google Earth?
Finally, students work in teams to define a "Design idea" that applies one of the powerful media that we have investigated.
KMD 2004H
Knowledge Media, Culture & Society
2011 Course Description and Draft Syllabus [PDF]
The development and widespread implementation of new technologies is frequently disruptive and controversial, at least in their early days. This is especially so for the most prominent information and communications technologies and related knowledge media, as they inevitably interact with established power relations and communication patterns.
This course examines contemporary controversial technologies in context. Explicitly resisting the conventional but overly simplistic notion of ‘social impacts of technology’, it treats technological development as a complex socio-technical phenomenon with multiple stakeholders vying with each other to shape trajectories of development and to define ‘success’ and ‘failure’.
