This course will provide an overview of a new vision for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in which people are surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in the everyday objects around them. It will focus on understanding enabling technologies and studying applications and experiments, and, to a lesser extent, it will address the socio-cultural impact. Students will read and discuss the most relevant articles in related areas: smart environments, smart networked objects, augmented and mixed realities, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, tangible computing, intelligent interfaces and wearable computing. Finally, they will be asked to come up with new ideas and start innovative projects in this area.

In the spring of 1918, the United States was embroiled in World War I, fighting alongside the English, French, and Russians against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. In total, 70 million men were at war on multiple fronts across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. The tide was finally turning for the Allies after a crushing offensive by German forces mere weeks earlier. Then, a fierce enemy intervened—an outbreak of influenza that would decimate entire regiments and towns, kill civilians and soldiers alike by the millions, and rapidly become a global pandemic. This disease weakened forces on both sides, changing not only the course of the war but also the economies and population stability of every affected nation. In the long term, this particular outbreak would inspire research on an unprecedented scale and lead to advances in science and medicine, forever altering our understanding of epidemiology. From the spring of 1918 to early 1919, no aspect of life remained untouched by the pandemic for Americans at home and on the front. This exhibition explores the pandemic’s impact on American life.  This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA’s Digital Curation Program by the following students as part of Dr. Joan E. Beaudoin's course "Metadata in Theory and Practice" in the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University: Bethany Campbell, Michelle John, Samantha Reid-Goldberg, Anne Sexton, and John Weimer.

This course focuses on the Great Depression and World War II and how they led to a major reordering of American politics and society. We will examine how ordinary people experienced these crises and how those experiences changed their outlook on politics and the world around them.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the American Abolitionist Movement. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Examines in detail the works of several American authors. Through close readings of poetry, novels, or plays, subject addresses such issues as literary influence, cultural diversity, and the writer's career. Topic: American Women Authors. This subject, crosslisted in Literature and Women's Studies, examines a range of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present. It aims to introduce a number of literary genres and styles- the captivity narrative, slave novel, sensational, sentimental, realistic, and postmodern fiction- and also to address significant historical events in American women's history: Puritanism, the American Revolution, industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century, the Harlem Renaissance, World War II, the 60s civil rights movements. A primary focus will be themes studied and understood through the lens of gender: war, violence, and sexual exploitation (Keller, Rowlandson, Rowson); the relationship between women and religion (Rowlandson, Rowson, Stowe); labor, poverty, and working conditions for women (Fern, Davis, Wharton); captivity and slavery (Rowlandson, Jacobs); class struggle (Fern, Davis, Wharton, Larsen); race and identity (Keller, Jacobs, Larsen, Morrison); feminist revisions of history (Stowe, Morrison, Keller); and the myth of the fallen woman (take your pick). Essays and inclass reports will focus more particularly on specific writers and themes and will stress the skills of close reading, annotation, research, and uses of multimedia where appropriate. A classroom electronic archive has been developed for this course and will be available as a resource for images and other media materials.

Throughout the early twentieth century, women looked to break new ground in ways never before possible, and the sky literally became the limit. As the nation moved into the aviation age, many women saw flying as a way to break out of traditional societal roles. It gave women not just an opportunity for adventure and excitement, but a way to earn a living outside of the home that demanded respect. Aviatrix Ruth Bancroft Law described it, after defeating the cross-country distance record: "There is an indescribable feeling which one experiences in flying; it comes with no other form of sport or navigation. It takes courage and daring; one must be self-possessed, for there are moments when one's wits are tested to the full. Yet there is an exhilaration that compensates for all one's efforts." In this exhibition we explore the early history of aviation and the courageous women who took to the skies—aviatrixes who found freedom, broke new ground, and inspired generations of women along the way. This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA’s Digital Curation Program by the following students as part of Professor Debbie Rabina’s course "Information Services and Sources" in the School of Information and Library Science at Pratt Institute: Megan DeArmond, Diana Moronta, Laurin Paradise.

This unit, designed for a freshman Civics course, focuses on the basics of American citizenship.  The unit introduces the requirements of being an American citizen, how one can become an American citizen, and how American citizenship has been molded over the course of our nation's history.   This unit is introduced after students have had an introduction to American Government and have taken an American history course.  

Civics HSCEs:  C.5:  Citizenship in the United States of America

An examination of "classic" documents in American history from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including writings by authors such as John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln; Horatio Alger, Jacob Riis and Thorstein Veblen; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Music, taped speeches, television programs, motion pictures, and/or other visual materials may also be included. Class meetings consist primarily of discussions and there is one required museum trip.

This lesson introduces students to American colonial life and has them compare the daily life and culture of two different colonies in the late 1700s. Students study artifacts of the thirteen original British colonies and write letters between fictitious cousins in Massachusetts and Delaware.

This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the ‰ŰĎgood life‰Ű through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.

This course explores the experiences and understandings of class among Americans positioned at different points along the U.S. social spectrum. It considers a variety of classic frameworks for analyzing social class and uses memoirs, novels, and ethnographies to gain a sense of how class is experienced in daily life and how it intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and gender.

This lesson extends over several class periods. Students analyze the claim, grounds, warrants, qualifiers and counterclaims in three articles about the American Dream. Students conduct research and find two additional articles about the American Dream. Students then analyze the argument in those articles. Finally, students write their own argument essay about the current state of the American Dream.

Groups of students read and discuss American folklore stories, each group reading a different story. Using a jigsaw strategy, the groups compare character traits and main plot points of the stories. A diverse selection of American folk tales is used for this lesson, which is adaptable to any text set.

Examines the causes and consequences of American foreign policy since 1898. Readings cover theories of American foreign policy, historiography of American foreign policy, central historical episodes including the two World Wars and the Cold War, case study methodology, and historical investigative methods. Open to undergraduates by permission of instructor.