F. Sorin A. Matei’s teaching sites and syllabi

Data Storytelling Program

The program is open to learners worldwide through Purdue Online. The program includes the free Data Storytelling 101 course, which is available immediately to any learner, anywhere. A way to assess the content of the program is by browsing the playlist of all the animated tutorials used in the course.

 

The Program uses a new way to define and use storytelling, which sees stories as arguments that violate expectations, propose new causal explanations and teach the audience new things. Storytelling is, in effect, seen as an informal type of education. A foundational paper, Data Storytelling is not Storytelling with Data published for open and free access in the journal The Information Society, provides the necessary introduction to this new way to think about storytelling.

The program also uses a novel competency-based content delivery method. Each module-mini-course is divided into learning objectives driven by specific competencies (story identification, causal story building, story visual design, etc.). The learning process is scaffolded by the RRPA method: read, reflect, practice, assess. All assessments are in the form of practical problems with variable, learner-driven solutions. The assessments are evaluated by learning moderators.

A free course is available to any learner, anywhere in the world: Data Storytelling 101. Three other courses, with automatic enrollment, Building Causal Stories, Narrative Visualization, and Data Storytelling as an Ethical Choice are also available. They all utilize the same competency-based / RRPA learning process. If a learner takes all four courses, he or she can transfer the credit to a selected number of Purdue Online Graduate Programs.

The courses can also be offered to Purdue students, faculty, and staff for just-in-time professional development. They can also be inserted in existing courses as modules. For details, please contact dr Matei.

Digital Media Analytics

Social media generates an abundant amount of data and is an asset to you and your company. This data represents an opportunity to spot emerging trends and to transform social and digital media analytics into business intelligence and actionable insights. Purdue’s Digital Media Analytics program provides an introduction to digital and social media analytics and then examines social media research, owned media, earned media, paid media, and using “listening data.”

You will learn how to identify and use social media as a source of business intelligence and behavioral analytics, how to quantify human behavior, how to engage in simple social media data mining, and how to interpret the findings into data-driven recommendations for an organization. Once the program is completed, you will be a knowledgeable data analytics consumer and an informed teammate and leader of cross-functional teams making data-driven decisions. ?

 

Engaged Science Communication

Created in collaboration with the Purdue Discovery Park and derived from the Data Storytelling program, this short just-in-time course can be used as quick and efficient method to teach some of the competencies mentioned above. This learning experience is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It is currently administered as a professional development course for Discovery Park graduate students, as a free offering. It is connected with the Shark Tank Science Communication Competition, which was organized twice (2018, 2019). The Course and the Competition represent a collaboration between the Birck Center of Nanotechnology (Ali Shakouri and Neil Dilley) and the Purdue Polytechnic Institute (Abrar Hammoud and Andrew Buchannan). 

Ethical Reasoning and Responsible Conduct for Liberal Arts Researchers

The course provdies essential traning to social scientists and humanities scholars in basic ethical reasoning in data collection, analysis, and dissemination. The course satisfies the College of Liberal Arts requirement that all researchers should be trained in field specific research ethical reasoning and practice.

From Mass to Social Media

The course is rooted in mass communication research, with side trips to sociological and social-psychological research. The goal is to offer a survey of the literature and to help the student acquire specific theoretical and practical toolkits for understanding and researching emerging forms of media and mediated communication.    A secondary goal is to demonstrate that media processes and institutions can also be surprisingly resilient. The class will strive to integrate all these issues into a critical conversation about the meaning of “media” as a concept and practice and of contemporary mass media theory as an inquiry lens. To achieve these goals the class looks both back and forward. It re-evaluates the accumulated wisdom of past scholarship and to map out the immediate to medium future of media scholarship. The first and most substantial module of the class will discuss the manner in which older social scientific approaches to mass communication research (agenda setting, media dependency, social cognitive theory, uses and gratifications, etc.) are still relevant today and what newer trends have emerged in the last few decades. We will continue with a couple of learning modules dedicated to media convergence and new media audience theories.

Emerging Communication Technologies

The purpose of this course is to help you understand the implications of the communication revolution taking shape around us; however, the class will be concerned not only with present or future technological developments. Our conversation will be broader than that, including social, legal, moral, and intellectual concerns. In order to get you to think about the role of the professional communicator in the new digital world we will first familiarize ourselves with several basic technological principles. The second and most substantial part of the semester will be dedicated to exploring some of the most important technologies that promise to change the way we do business, learn, or play.