Want to learn something well? Make media to advance knowledge and gain new ideas. You don’t have to be a communication professional to create to learn. Today, with free and low-cost digital tools, everyone can compose videos, blogs and websites, remixes, podcasts, screencasts, infographics, animation, remixes and more. By creating to learn, people internalize ideas and express information creatively in ways that may inspire others. Create to Learn is a ground-breaking book that helps learners create multimedia texts as they develop both critical thinking and communication skills. Written by Renee Hobbs, one of the foremost experts in media literacy, this book introduces a wide range of conceptual principles at the heart of multimedia composition and digital pedagogy. Its approach is useful for anyone who sees the profound educational value of creating multimedia projects in an increasingly digital and connected world. Students will become skilled multimedia communicators by learning how to gather information, generate ideas, and develop media projects using contemporary digital tools and platforms. Illustrative examples from a variety of student-produced multimedia projects along with helpful online materials offer support and boost confidence. Create to Learn will help anyone make informed and strategic communication decisions as they create media for any academic, personal or professional project.

Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition. An introductory computer literacy text for nurses and other healthcare students, Introduction to Computers for Healthcare Professionals explains hardware, popular software programs, operating systems, and computer assisted communication. The Fifth Edition of this best-selling text has been revised and now includes content on on online storage, communication and online learning including info on PDA's, iPhones, IM, and other media formats, and another chapter on distance learning including video conferencing and streaming video.

How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts. The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analogy and argues that it can be an apt rhetorical frame. The theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts. Viewing programming from the perspective of literacy and literacy from the perspective of programming, she argues, shifts our understandings of both. Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious. Vee examines the ways that programming is linked with literacy in coding literacy campaigns, considering the ideologies that accompany this coupling, and she looks at how both writing and programming encode and distribute information. She explores historical parallels between writing and programming, using the evolution of mass textual literacy to shed light on the trajectory of code from military and government infrastructure to large-scale businesses to personal use. Writing and coding were institutionalized, domesticated, and then established as a basis for literacy. Just as societies demonstrated a “literate mentality” regardless of the literate status of individuals, Vee argues, a “computational mentality” is now emerging even though coding is still a specialized skill.

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age addresses the complex and diverse experiences of learners in a world embedded with digital technologies. The text combines first-hand accounts from learners with extensive research and analysis, including a developmental model for effective e-learning, and a wide range of strategies that digitally-connected learners are using to fit learning into their lives. A companion to Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (2007), this book focuses on how learners’ experiences of learning are changing and raises important challenges to the educational status quo. Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: moves beyond stereotypes of the "net generation" to explore the diversity of e-learning experiences today analyses learners' experiences holistically, across the many technologies and learning opportunities they encounter reveals digital-age learners as creative actors and networkers in their own right, who make strategic choices about their use of digital applications and learning approaches. Today’s learners are active participants in their learning experiences and are shaping their own educational environments. Professors, learning practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers will find Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age invaluable for understanding the learning experience, and shaping their own responses.

This document contains lecture notes, primarily my PowerPoint presentations, and supplementary readings for the class CIS 205 Computer Literacy at the College of Alameda in Alameda, California. They are designed as an aid to students who attend the lectures.Here is the catalog description of the course: Introduction to computers and information technology for people with no background in or knowledge of computers. This course meets the computer literacy requirement for graduation. It is an overview of the field of computers, providing the student with an introduction to computers and software applications.