Today I will look at the technology available in the Ellen Terry building. Some examples of how this technology is being used by the students and staff and also how students and staff are sharing and distributing their work through new web based platforms.
In the course of this short presentation I want to try and get across how quickly the media landscape is shifting, and pose some questions about how we might respond to this in our teaching and interactions with students.
Technology in Ellen Terry
Proprietary software Avid, Adobe Suite, FCP, being used then output in an ever increasing number of formats for web and mobile platforms.
Avid Screen Capture
doneUse of screen capture software to build an archive of technical software walk throughs
Sharing Work
Over the past three years it has become an increasing feature that students are using new web platforms to share, distribute and gather peer comments about their work. The increase in the use of new web platforms and the expectations and use of technology that students have has been commented on at exam boards this year. How are we responding to students expectations of technology use?
Covmedia was set up as a space to show this work and link to students work and importantly to show staff work as well.
It has become a useful space to gather and share the work of students and staff into one easily accessible public area. An outward looking space.
In the last 18 months students have had their work featured on Four Docs a Channel 4 social networking platform, attracted large audiences on YouTube and have had their own exhibitions.
Reactive Media
During the course of this academic year Evan Raskob has introduced to second year undergraduates for the first time scripting reactive installations using Max/MSP. Each group of students was tasked with creating an installation using the interactive multimedia software program Max/MSP/Jitter and a variety of sensors and controllers incuding Wii remotes that allowed gestural interactions with the artefacts rather than relying on the mouse. With the success of the final exhibition we are going to extend the reactive media work with the undergraduates and invest in more resources for the coming academic year.
Utilising Blogs 315cmc
This module has been running for the last two academic years and looks at new Web 2.0 tools. How to mix them together to create simple “mashups” or collages of different data from several sources. The blogs tend to work and become popular as it is a requirement that all module tasks most utilise the technology being explored through the course of study itself. Many students pay for their own blog server space as they can use the work created as a showcase of their skills and achievements which they take with them after graduating.
Participatory Media
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities.
“One of my proudest accomplishments so far in life has been the creation of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) graduate program at MIT. At its core, this program encourages students to think across media, across historical periods, across national borders, across academic disciplines, across the divide between theory and practice, and across the divides between the academy and the rest of society……….my own sense is that the academic disciplines which emerged around the problems of the industrial age have outlived their usefulness in a networked culture and that we need to reconfigure the ways we organize and communicate knowledge to our students.”
Henry Jenkins Video Clip;
done
Jenkins has recently written an influential white paper on New Media Literacies which can be found at you guessed the New Media Literacies web site.
In this white paper participatory culture is defined as having particular qualities:
1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices
4.Where members believe that their contributions matter
5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
Live Project:
Thare Machi Charity produces health lessons distributed on DVD together with cheap players that can run from solar power or small batteries, that can connect to TV’s or projectors and take the user through a series of verified health knowledge with a series of questions and a simple quiz. The DVD’s cover controversial topics like HIV, safe sex and contraception. They are distributed in South Africa, backed by Mandela and his nephew, Cambodia, India, and Eastern Eurpopean countries.
The project was structured around the problem of turning the DVD content and functionality into web based materials. The students have used both wiki’s and blogs to share their work, code and prototypes and have together produced solutions that have bettered a commercial company who have also kindly devoted time to creating for free web based resources from the DVD content.
