Apply to TA in Summer 2024
The Berkeley Center for New Media invites Teaching Assistant applications for Summer 2024!
BCNM is seeking six TAs this summer. Please apply below!
NWMEDIA 191 | Session E | 3 units
Introduction to Digital Infrastructure
M-R | 1-3:30 PM | Valley LSB 2040
M-R | 3:30-5 PM | Wurster 102 (101), Dwinelle 205 (102), Dwinelle 247 (103), Dwinelle 250 (104)
The digital “cloud” is a real place. It is a patchwork of subsea fiber optic cables (the highways of the internet), internet exchanges (the transit hubs of the internet), and data centers (the interconnection points and storage centers of the internet). Although almost all global digital communications transit these infrastructures, they remain largely invisible—even to businesses, governments, and publics that rely on them. The challenge of this course will be not only to learn about these infrastructures, but to develop innovative representations of them, based on your own original research into the internet’s “plumbing.” Central questions of the course include: How does the internet really work? Who builds it? What challenges do they face? How do we capture and represent this invisible system?
Apply here!
NWMEDIA 151AC | Session C | 4 units
Transforming Tech
Online (asynchronous)
In this course, we will study major tech industry controversies and heavily criticized tech products, policies, and effects, including technologies used at the U.S.-Mexico border, social media platforms’ spread of disinformation and fake news, racial bias in algorithms, and internet trolling and harassment. We will also examine tech companies’ long-running tendency to exclude women and non-Asian minorities, and how tech workers have occasionally come under fire for the industry’s harms. Students will be required to brainstorm and design their own interventions into the workings of the tech sector to make it more inclusive, equitable, and diverse.
Apply here!