Rationale

This course includes one compulsory credit of experiential learning. The experiential learning segment includes online and physical-world research, and an interview assignment to complement the work we are completing in class. Remember that you need to pass the experiential learning segment to pass the class.

Why Experiential Learning?
The majority of human's day-to-day experiences of computer mediated interactivity conform to the superficial skim-click-skim-click surfing of the Web.

Maybe we throw a little talk as writing and reading into the mix, via IM, or a chat room, or a forum. Or maybe we slide a little further under the electronic surface with game-playing.

As a writer of multimedia, your imagination should always propel you beyond to the common codes of interaction naturalized by the Web. Your job is to imagine the unimagined and execute it vividly in text.

That requires research. What has been created? What is

Four Steps of Interaction: 1) Observation 2) Exploration 3) Modification 4) Reciprocal Change

already possible? What has no one else done? And it also requires a leap from simple to high-level, and surface to embodied, interaction.

Interaction, both "inside the skull" and "outside the skull," as Mark Stephen Meadows suggests, is the new story.

How It Works
The experiential learning in this class thus directs you into this necessary investigation of complex interaction. You'll explore interaction as:

• a reader/actor (analyzing a stand-alone multimedia production)
  
• a designer within a spatial environment (marrying interactive information to a physical context)
  
• a collaborator in a professional community (interviewing a multimedia creator)