Teaching
An increasingly important aspect of my teaching is devoted to theorizing and understanding the impact of digital media and technology on university education. The classes I teach at USC and the programs I have helped design serve as a laboratory for practice-based research on technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
New technologies are an indisputably significant component of learner-centered pedagogy. But a strong technological infrastructure is only as valuable as the programs through which it is implemented, which in turn find value in technology only to the extent that it is integrated organically rather than imposed from above. In recognition of my efforts in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, I was honored to receive one of two Teaching with Technology awards from the USC Provost’s office in spring 2009. This award recognized my own in-class innovations with pedagogical technologies, as well as my years of research, teaching and faculty development at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
In my own teaching, I am convinced that the most effective way to engage with digital media is through the rigorous conjunction of theory and practice. In addition to gaining a solid historical and theoretical foundation, I ask students to develop a mode of critical practice that emerges directly from their engagement with theory, rather than simply exploiting the potentials of the current generation of tools. In their creative work, I strongly encourage students to move beyond the prescribed uses of both hardware and software to defamiliarize their relation to media, bringing questions of form and content into a relationship of productive tension and dialogue.
Courses taught
CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
2008-present
CTIN 548: Preparing the Interactive Thesis Project
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
2008-present
ASIMS: Methods in Multimedia Scholarship
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication
Summer 2009
Co-taught with Sasha Costanza-Chock (Annenberg)
COMM 620: Mobile Phones, On-Line Community, and Social Change
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication
Fall 2008-Spring 2009
A year-long multidisciplinary research seminar co-taught with François Bar (Annenberg) and Murali Annavaram (Viterbi School of Engineering)
CNTV 603: Media Arts and Practice Professionalization Seminar
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
2007-present
CTIN 478: Designing Online Multiplayer Game Environments
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
Fall 2008
CTIN 534: Experiments in Interactivity
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
Fall 2007
CTCS 505: Survey of Interactive Media
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
Fall 2005-present
ASIMS: Methods in Community-Based Multimedia
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication
Summer 2008
Co-taught with Sasha Costanza-Chock (Annenberg)
IML 101: The Languages of New Media
Institute for Multimedia Literacy: Honors in Multimedia Scholarship
2004-2007
CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Spring 2004
CTCS 478: Technologies of Space, Time and the Body
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Fall 2003
CTCS 478: Technologies of History and Memory
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Fall 2002
Film 313: History of the American Sound Film
Loyola Marymount University
2002-2004
FVC 21: Critical Approaches to World Cinema
University of California Riverside
2000
Graduate advising
Ph.D. Dissertation advising
Veronica Paredes (SCA Media Arts and Practice) Chair
Jennifer Stein (SCA Media Arts and Practice)
Brett Service (SCA Critical Studies)
Susana Ruiz (SCA Media Arts and Practice) Chair
Jeff Watson (SCA Media Arts and Practice)
Chris Gilman (College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Slavic Languages and Literature)
completed fall ‘10
Chris Hanson (SCA Critical Studies) completed summer ‘10
Amaranth Borsuk (College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Creative Writing)
completed spring ‘10
Sasha Costanza-Chock (Annenberg School for Communication)
completed spring ‘10
Elizabeth Ramsey (SCA Critical Studies) completed fall ‘09
Daniel Chamberlain (SCA Critical Studies) completed spring ’09
Andrew Syder (SCA Critical Studies) completed fall ’08
Allison de Fren (SCA Critical Studies) completed spring ’08
M.F.A. Thesis advising
Elizabeth Swensen ’11 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
Sean Bouchard ’11 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
William Graner ’11 (SCA Interactive Media)
Daniel Ponce ’11 (SCA Interactive Media)
Sarah Brin ’11 (School of Fine Arts, Public Art Studies)
Peter van Dyke ’10 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
Taiyoung Ryu ’10 (SCA Interactive Media)
Chair
Nahil Sharkasi ’10 (SCA Interactive Media)
Jamie Antonisse ’09 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
Maya Churi ’09 (SCA Interactive Media)
Jorge Mora Fernandez ’08 (SCA Interactive Media)
Chair
Susana Ruiz ’06 (SCA Interactive Media)
Ashley York ’06 (SCA Interactive Media)
Steve Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts & Practice in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is the author of Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth 2011), co-Editor of the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. A scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, culture and technology, his research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.