New Media and Swish

There is this very interesting article on Kairos by Madeleine Sorapure about a course she taught called "Writing in New Media." In the course, the students worked in Photoshop and Flash, and also looked at Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media wherein they wrote on the theoretical work in that book. It sounds like a fantastic class. I want to teach it. What is so absolutely cool about this class is it incorporates the practical of these programs that students would like to learn with the theoretical of new media. I think I could sell a class like this to the majors in professional writing here. S says I should wait and teach Rhetoric 105 for a year, but I would like to propose a course like this. We'll see.

I went to another FSI workshop yesterday, this on a program called Swish, which is like Flash, and makes Flash compatible objects (meaning if you have a Flash plug-in, you can view it), and is far easier to use and cheaper. It's great. My only concern is if this program is not the industry standard, do I want to teach it to business writing students? They might be better served by having Flash on their resumes.