Last year, in my Media Criticism class, I tried adding a theme (AI) to our viewing selections for the first time. Overall, I’m relatively happy with how this process went, and we created an edited collection based on the work. You can find the book, Critiquing AI in Media, by clicking the title or image below:

I chose to do this for a few reasons.

First, there had been rumblings for a while that students were finding it difficult to sit through a feature length film and maintain their focus. I polled my own students and they agreed with this, ultimately voting that they would prefer to watch the films in class than at home. We watched the shorter films in class and the longer we assigned for at home in a trial run my first semester with this model. The Atlantic reported on this attention span challenge recently (gift article link).

For the first run of the class in this format, I selected artificial intelligence as the theme. Each film is paired with two chapters from the book The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice by Michael Kackman and Mary Celeste Kearney (Editors), 2018. There is a new 2026 edition this year. I selected films or shows that I thought would be conductive to the chapters in the book and paired them together, assigning the readings to be done via collaborative annotation in Perusall before class.

In my department, this class also serves a special role as a writing intensive class for the Communications Media major. For that reason, I’ve long had students approach their final paper much the way any professor would write an academic paper. I posted a call for papers, students wrote abstract proposals, received feedback (I accepted them all, some with revisions, of course!), wrote an annotated bibliography, created a first draft, received peer evaluations, and then re-wrote a final draft with a letter explaining what they chose to change based on the feedback they received. When I decided to move to a themed viewing, I realized this would work really well for creating an edited collection.

Here are the films and assigned chapters:

Fortuitously, my university was also in the process of launching it’s own locally hosted Press Books installation for Open Education Resources (OER). With that in place, I was able to post an OER collection of their essays.

The header image above is also used as my syllabus header image. Original image: Ludovic Bertron / CC BY 2.0 / Modified by https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/2018/02/14/media-criticism-in-turbulent-times/#