About The Class

If you are in this class, I assume you are or plan to be some kind of content creator and that you want to work as a creator in some specific industry.

The goal of this class is to help you prepare for professional life post-graduation. You need to be thinking about an industry and how to get your first job in it. The assignments are designed to help you think about, design, and build a portfolio of your creative work to share with prospective employers. Because an effective portfolio is aimed at a specific audience and designed to make clear statements about your relevance and effectiveness, you need to research your intended industry and entry level jobs within it, and then you need to tailor your creative work or at least how you present it to meet those expectations.

Why is this class called digital writing and publishing if it's all about creating a job-seeking portfolio? Good question. When this class was first created, like 20 years ago, not all writing was digital and learning how to move from using a computer as though it were an old fashioned typewriter to using truly digital techniques for writing was a big new deal. Learning how to edit images and record audio and make movies (and gifs, do you remember those?) was a useful experience. These days, every form of recorded communication is already digital and unless you are over 30, you have only ever known digital ways of communicating. Even the content read off paper is written and designed in a digital environment. Nowadays, all writing and publishing is already digital.

And yet, in the last two years something happened that will profoundly change the way content creators work.

AI Text generators play a central role in the learning experiences of this class because they are changing what it means to be creative. They are also changing what it means to be a technical/professional writer or even just someone who communicates regularly on behalf of a brand or a corporation or a not-for-profit or a government office or an NGO. Learning how to use AI to accelerate and augment your creative workflows will likely have a hugely positive impact on your career opportunities. So you are going to use AI to learn about your intended industry and to inform your design of the portfolio you present as your final project in this class.