“A Noise-Based Curriculum for Technological Fluency” by Brunvand

General education curricula at many universities require students to take courses in wide ranging areas outside of their specific majors. Conspicuously missing from many of these curricula, however, are engineering and technology courses. As part of a program sponsored by our Office of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Utah, I am developing and delivering a new course that uses the notion of technological fluency [2002] as a starting point for a conversation about the role of technology and engineering in a general education curriculum. To position the course as an interesting choice for a wide variety of undergraduate students, I am developing the course to specifically introduce technological ideas through arts and music projects. Essentially this is a way to introduce students to computing and increase their technological fluency but through digital media projects rather than engineering projects. It is also a way to expand students’ ideas about technology in the arts and how arts and technology interact in our modern world.