May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Paul McEwan
 Muhlenberg College
 
 
 

“What’s the most interesting idea you’ve learned here in the past year?”

A few weeks before students begin my Video Production course, they receive this prompt from me, in an email that spells out the requirements of the story pitch they must deliver on the first day of class. The written part of the pitch has to explain the idea, and then provide three possible plots that might convey that idea on screen. The best one of those three is the one they will pitch to their classmates, in a bid not for money but for time, since we work in groups of two or three so only the best pitches can get made.

Teaching at a liberal arts college, I can use the above prompt knowing that my students have taken a broad range of courses before they arrive in my classroom. Students at Muhlenberg use about a third of their total credits taking general education requirements, and these cover all areas of the curriculum, from the traditional humanities to social science and natural science. I tell them that good ideas for films can come from “philosophy, psychology, physics, and everything in between,” and recent experience has confirmed this hopeful view.

The prompt was a reaction to a frustrating situation in the first few iterations of the course nearly 10 years ago. Students could pitch decent stories (sometimes), but even halfway through the semester they could not tell me what their film was about without simply reciting back the plot. This was not just an intellectual exercise. Given the million and one adaptations to chance and circumstance that must occur as a film gets made, filmmakers who do not know what they are trying to say, or what the point of the work is, find themselves unable to make decisions about what to do next. The only way to make sure their work had a theme was to make them come up with that first.

By the time they arrive at college, nearly all students are capable of talking about the themes or ideas underlying artistic works on at least a superficial level, and most can go relatively deep with a little prompting. In the film studies courses I also teach, this is how we spend much of our time. Despite this, they are reluctant to think about their own work as having a theme, since they seem to think of that as a synonym for making a social issue film or being directly political, and that seems both limiting and intimidating. Many of them have of course made films that are explicitly political, and this is encouraged, but the sense that tackling a “big important issue” was a requirement to make a substantial film was a bar too high for most undergraduates. This is why asking them “what they wanted to say” did not work. It made the message too direct, like a call to action, while most of the serious films we watch in class are better described as observations or commentaries on some facet of human experience. Thus, starting with an “interesting idea” broadens the possibilities considerably.

The proposals vary widely, but certain themes re-occur, and of course some are more compelling than others. A common “most interesting idea” is an unusual condition they have learned about in a psychology class, and the students want to turn these into some kind of psychological thriller. While a couple of these have worked well, as I point out in the original proposal assignment the goal is not to act out the idea literally, but to use it as the foundation for a story. So a psychological condition could be read as social rather than medical, it could be a way to consider individual isolation, or it could simply be a metaphor that undergirds a narrative about healthy individuals. It need not be a story about a person with X syndrome, and should not simply be a story about someone’s descent.

One of our more ambitious films came from a short story that a student had read in Spanish class (films can be found here) [1]. She didn’t adapt the short story itself – just one of its conceits, that a story that at first seemed to be constructed in flashbacks eventually became one in which it was impossible to tell if the protagonist was in the present day imagining the past, or in the past imagining a future. For the rest of the semester, this fuelled endless discussions about what elements of our society could have been reasonably imagined by someone 100 years ago. Two narrative films inspired by ethics courses examined the question of what we owe long-term friends from whom we have grown apart, and what the difference is when you become the medical caretaker of someone you are dating and to whom you do not necessarily have a long-term commitment.

The latter film was one of the strongest our students have produced, and we ended up talking a lot about making our films non-exploitative. Many of our students have taken a course on the ethics of documentary making in which they spend a semester thinking about what it means to decide you are going to tell someone else’s story [2]. These are the kinds of intellectual linkages for which the liberal arts curriculum was designed, and film making offers students a way to process and share ideas they have encountered in a way that requires them to translate those ideas into a new form, and think about the act of translation itself. While these are intellectual goals that are not limited to the liberal arts, liberal arts colleges are uniquely situated to develop and nurture them.

Although film production and the liberal arts are an ideal fit in many ways, this is not immediately obvious when one looks at the range of production programs in the United States. Most of the elite production programs are at large universities, and most liberal arts film programs are focused on studies rather than production. On the surface this makes sense, given that larger universities have the resources and the space to offer what can be a relatively expensive program. Liberal arts colleges have generally developed from a great books model of teaching and learning, and while there are now obviously a great diversity of approaches and styles, there can also be a greater reluctance to embrace programs that seem practical and skills-based rather than more purely intellectual pursuits.

Despite this general hesitance when it comes to skills-based programs, liberal arts colleges generally do not have a problem training painters, actors, and musicians, as art-making courses have long been part of art, theatre, and music programs. It can be a bit more difficult to find a place for filmmaking, given the perception, mostly true, that it is more commercially oriented than other art forms. In our screenwriting courses, which are taught in collaboration with the college’s creative writing program, some of the creative writing students expressed concern that the pedagogy was too focused on selling a screenplay rather than simply the craft of writing, inverting what they are used to hearing in their other courses on poetry or fiction writing. Screenplays are unique as a writing form in that they have almost no social use outside of trying to get the films made. There is no non-commercial audience for a screenplay in the way that there is for other kinds of writing. Even plays, their closest relatives, are objects of scholarly study in a way that screenplays rarely are. Given that this difference is real and substantial, bridging the gap is an ongoing process. Our film students want to write screenplays that someone will make into a film, but our pedagogy has to recognize the fact that other students might see them as simply an exercise. We have to support broader pedagogical goals on our campus rather than just benefiting from them.

That sharing also helps with more practical budget matters. We do not have the resources of a larger school (or a large endowment), but by shopping carefully have managed to build an equipment closet with most of what we need. We have several hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment at this point, much of which is represented by a production studio with up-to-date television cameras and professional lighting and sound. This investment made sense to the college because the space is also used by theatre and dance and art students for camera-oriented courses. The space is now used much more than it was before, and our students can form collaborative working relationships with students from across the campus. For campuses with more limited resources, the rapidly dropping price of equipment means that you could start a production program for $25,000 or less, assuming you don’t already own sufficient computers for editing. If you do, the price is much lower. With that and perhaps $5000 per year for new gear and maintenance, you could grow your program slowly over a few years. If demand outstrips the supply of places in your courses, that will be a good problem to have. It helps to be able to make the case that film and video production do not have to run alongside the liberal arts curriculum, but can be an integral part of it.

Notes

[1] The story is “La Noche Boca Arriba” by Julio Cortazar, and the film was Doll Face, originally conceived by Joanna Whitney and made by her, Nicole Machrone, Lara Pollack, and Jake Ramsay. This, and the other films mentioned here, are available for viewing on the Muhlenberg Film Studies website at http://www.muhlenberg.edu/main/academics/film-studies/

[2] This course is Documentary Research, designed by my colleague Lora Taub-Pervizpour. It is a required course in the Media & Communication major, which many production students are completing. The rest of the students are drawn from Film Studies and other majors.

 

Paul McEwan is Associate Professor of Media & Communication and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College, where he teaches both production and studies.  He edited a special section on “Teaching Difficult Films” for Cinema Journal in 2007 that included his essay on The Birth of a Nation. That film is also the subject of a BFI Classic volume he has recently completed, to be released later this year.  He is currently working on an annotated bibliography on film pedagogy for Oxford Bibliographies and is the author of a book, Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (2011) and a forthcoming essay on Griffith’s Intolerance for the Companion to D.W. Griffith.

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May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Bryan Sebok, PhD.
 Lewis & Clark College

 

Teaching film and media studies, including production, at liberal arts colleges offers unique opportunities and unique challenges that differ from other types of institutions.  Small class sizes and a focus on advising and mentorship afford a level of intellectual and creative engagement impossible at larger institutions.  Limited physical resources and a smaller faculty body in the subject area restrict the scope and scale of course offerings and limit the types of student projects created in classroom settings.  Many media studies programs in the liberal arts, including my own at Lewis & Clark College, have grown out of communication sciences programs housed in the social sciences, and remain focused on a wider and less specialized curriculum spanning rhetorical criticism, interpersonal communication, and socialization, along with media studies and production.  Professors teaching media studies in this context are, in a very real sense, “one (wo)man bands,” who are responsible for film and media theory, history, and production.  Here, I’d like to offer a few strategies for how to build that band into an orchestra of support for students interested in exploring media studies and production.

The orchestra begins to form via the recognition that collaboration, engagement, and involvement are necessary and inherently valuable.  Scott Carlson’s recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “A Caring Professor May Be Key in How a Graduate Thrives” reviews the Gallop-Purdue Index Report suggesting that College graduates “had double the chances of being engaged in their work and were three times as likely to be thriving in their well-being if they connected with a professor on the campus who stimulated them, cared about them, and encouraged their hopes and dreams…Graduates who had done a long-term project that took a semester or more, who had held an internship, or who were extremely involved in extracurricular activities or organizations had twice the odds of being engaged at work and an edge in thriving in well-being.”  The research suggests that liberal arts colleges do a particularly good job in this regard; engagement between faculty and students defines the small college tradition while offering a viable avenue to value creativity and institutional differentiation in a competitive academic marketplace.  So, if we all (presumably) care about our students and encourage their hopes and dreams, what are the best practices to turn that sentiment into a collaboration that will result in thriving alumni with strong ties to their alma mater?

First, a collaborative model of curriculum support and development is necessary to foster an atmosphere supporting students and faculty alike.  While we may appear to be going it alone, we must recognize that media support services staff at our institutions play crucial roles in technology maintenance, training, and development, and can be key collaborators in training students and faculty in software and hardware use.  Technology workshops offered by support services staff in conjunction with my own classes create a complementary atmosphere that aid student learning.  Staff initiated workshops and “showcases” featuring faculty who are innovating with technology in the classroom stimulate creative integration of technology into course and assignment design.  Technology upgrades should be executed after consultation with supporting staff.  Technology grants, institutional grants, dean’s office and departmental budgets should be tapped into in order to maximize monetary outlays for new cameras, sound, and lighting equipment.  Learning these new technologies alongside staff allows faculty-staff bonding and camaraderie that translates directly to the classroom.

Furthermore, collaborative course offerings allow students to build links between conceptual and practical skill sets while connecting experiences from courses across the social sciences and humanities.  Revisions to a media studies curriculum growing out of social science traditions should strive for efficiency by building links between theory and practice into each course and across the division.  In so doing, inter-departmental collaboration complements intra-departmental curriculum design and embraces the diversity of perspectives coming from the social sciences.  Courses in media studies can be linked to courses in political science, sociology, anthropology and economics through shared course projects, collaborative teaching, and team research.  I have had the pleasure of collaborating with my colleague, sociologist Robert Goldman, on a course designed to innovate new techniques to put big ideas into short media forms.  His expertise in advertising and critical theory complements my experience in short film production, movie trailer production, and film theory.  In this liberal arts context, students’ work in the arts serves to broaden their interests and sharpen their aesthetic skill sets, while their work in the social sciences connects patterns of human behavior and socio-cultural structures to film texts.  In each stage of coursework, a co-curricular and extra-curricular offering can complement the work being done in the classroom and afford students the opportunity to master techniques and concepts in more depth than in a single classroom.

Once a collaborative and coherent curriculum is established, extra-curricular and co-curricular offerings should work to engage students with professors.  One strategy to involve students in research and creative work is to incentivize students with internship, practicum, or independent study credit.  Students participating in these offerings should be able to apply credits toward graduation in the department, rather than solely as general elective credit.  Another is to apply for internal and external grants to pay students for their time and effort.  In so doing, students re-conceptualize the nature of their work as pre-professionals, often engaging more seriously than otherwise would be the case.  Demonstrating that student labor is valuable, and should be compensated, is crucial to building an enduring relationship over long-term projects.  With each creative and research project I undertake I involve my students in key collaborative positions.  For instance, for the past year and a half I have been directing a feature documentary about the mobile food movement.  Over the course of pre-production and production, I have worked with nearly two-dozen students.  Rather than conceptualizing such student labor as a burden requiring additional management efforts, I view their contribution as key collaborators who have demonstrated their competencies first in my documentary class, then in their own creative work outside the classroom in film clubs and internships, and finally each day on location.  I view each day shooting as an opportunity to present a module to my students on documentary technique, ethics, engagement, and executing a vision.  They have been trained in sound recording and camerawork in the classroom, and are able to provide key contributions in those areas.  Each day begins with a production meeting that identifies goals for the day, reminds the students of key framing and sound considerations, and links that day’s shoot to the broader project goals.  Each day then concludes with a summary of the accomplishments and challenges of the day while reflecting on the broader issues of documentary style, form, and ethics.  Students have ascended to roles as widely differentiated as project manager, sound technician, and social media manager.

Student experiences, therefore, are enriched by mentorship, engagement, and reflection.  I embrace every opportunity to involve my students in all aspects of my work both within and outside of my home institution.  For example, I am currently writing this entry at the Cannes Film Festival, where I serve as a mentor for students interning with businesses buying and selling media content.  Through the American Pavilion, students from around the world gain access to the festival via these internships.  Five of my own students are currently interning with companies ranging from Lionsgate to Archstone Distribution to Lakeshore Entertainment.  Their involvement enriches their Media Studies experience in the liberal arts, and is contextualized via mentor meetings with me.  I link their internships together and spend time asking them to reflect on the differences between distributors and production companies, and the structure of their companies, the division of labor therein, and how their business experience is integrated into their experience with media coursework.  The students go to screenings in the evenings and are exposed to global cinema on an amazing scale.  I encourage them to broaden their horizons by going to screenings from filmmakers they haven’t heard of, from nations around the world they may not have access to when they return to Portland.  They blog about their experiences, write reviews of the films, and share their stories with our home institution.  This reflective exercise serves to both afford the students the opportunity to process their experiences in detail and in real time while also promoting the department’s co-curricular dynamism to the broader institution.

Whether curricular, co-curricular, or extra-curricular, student-faculty collaboration builds bonds, enriches student experiences, and strengthens the links for alumni to the institution.  This process, though, must begin with faculty collaboration within and between departments and faculty-staff collaboration in technology acquisition, training, and maintenance.  The liberal arts environment should foster an atmosphere where collaboration is not only possible, but becomes crucial to long-term success for students and faculty alike.  Building an infrastructure for media studies and production means embracing students as collaborators, working with them over long periods of time as they work towards graduation, not as an end unto itself, but as a step in a lifelong chain back to the College.  It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes an orchestra to teach Media Studies in the liberal arts.

Works Cited

Blow, Charles M. “In College, Nurturing Matters.”  The New York Times, May 7, 2014, accessed May 15, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/opinion/blow-in-college-nurturing-matters.html?_r=0 

Carlson, Scott. “A Caring Professor May Be Key in How a Graduate Thrives.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2014 , accessed May 15, 2014. http://chronicle.com/article/A-Caring-Professor-May-Be-Key/146409/ 

 

Bryan Sebok is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College, where he teaches courses that integrate film and media studies with production.  A working filmmaker, he has produced a narrative feature, Dance With the One, and is currently directing a feature documentary on the mobile food movement.  He has also published articles in Velvet Light TrapMediaScape and Spectator.

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May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Chuck Tryon
 Fayetteville State University

 

This essay offers what was essentially a tactical response to both the devaluation of the liberal arts and the decline in funding for higher education. Specifically, I focus on how my colleagues and I redesigned Fayetteville State University’s (FSU) Introduction to Film and Visual Literacy course to respond to a changing technological, economic, and social landscape at FSU. To make sense of how to teach film and media in an era of declining resources, it is crucial to focus on the characteristics, needs, and even histories of the specific institutions involved. All colleges and universities face specific challenges and offer unique opportunities that may not be available elsewhere, making a tactical approach necessary.

FSU is a historically black university that has its origins as a normal school where students were trained to become teachers, most of them in liberal arts fields. This emphasis on teacher training resulted in our university’s film course being housed in the English Department because it was a requirement for North Carolina teachers, but this placement shapes how the course has fit into a wider curriculum, in part because students enter the course expecting training on how to use film and visual media in the high school classroom. Like many state colleges and universities, FSU faces significant budget cuts, especially to operating costs, a reduction in funding that was attributed to a declining economy. These challenges exist within a state political climate where the very value of a liberal arts education has been called into question. In interviews, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory has dismissed the value of liberal arts degrees and proposed that universities be funded not based on enrollment but on whether graduates can get jobs (Kiley 2013). While I am highly skeptical about this stance, both in terms of their value for promoting critical thinking skills and their ability to prepare students for a competitive work environment, it is well worth asking how liberal arts curricula can respond to this political and economic climate.

With that in mind, I began thinking rhetorically about how to reposition the course both in terms of my goals of promoting critical thinking skills and in terms of situating the liberal arts as a field that could prepare students for a wide variety of careers. Thus, rather than continuing to teach the class as a course focusing on the formal elements of film, I began thinking about how the study of film fits within a wider civic culture, one in which my students are or could be participants. As a result, I reframed the class to require that students not only study documentary storytelling but also to make their own documentaries as part of a service-learning project to ensure that students could use these critical thinking skills in a real-world context.

This effort to revise the Film and Visual Literacy course was based not only in statewide economic trends but also within a specific institutional context, informed by the work of education scholar George Kuh, in which high-impact practices, including service learning, were placed at a premium (Kuh 2008). Service learning is a practice that involves students performing community service as part of a graded assignment for a course. The project is something that is designed to meet specific community needs, and students are expected not only to engage in a community project but also to reflect on their experiences. Our university places tremendous emphasis on service learning because of the benefits to students, to the university itself, and to the wider community. Proponents have offered evidence that students who complete service-learning projects have higher retention rates, a major concern at FSU. For this reason, the service learning office had some funding available that could be dedicated to consumer-grade cameras and other tools, such as tripods, that may have been unavailable through other channels. Experiments with service learning and innovative uses of technology are also viewed favorably when it comes to promotion and tenure, even if there is relatively limited funding to support such projects.

Finally, the university’s core curriculum was changing dramatically. In the academic year 2012-13, I worked with colleagues in my department to significantly revamp our Film and Visual Literacy course to address this new core. Instead of a discipline-based model, students would now take core requirements that would provide them with various literacies or skills, such as information literacy, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and global literacy. One of the new requirements entailed taking a course in “ethics and civic engagement” (ETCE). Recognizing the important role that ethics plays in the documentary film, I saw this as a useful opportunity for providing students with a set of questions that would allow them to reflect on how documentary has been used to shape our interpretations of the world. Students would be expected to reflect on documentary both as consumers and producers of media. They would consider the ethical implications of specific filmmaking choices while also recognizing that films—including documentaries—can have a profound effect on the world.

As a result of these expectations, the course is structured around two major assignments: a five-page paper on documentary ethics and a five-minute documentary on a local community organization. To frame these assignments, the class would watch one documentary per week that could be used to address ethical issues, using Bill Nichols’ (2001, 13-15) formulation for describing how documentary filmmakers should treat both the people they film and the audience for the film: “I speak about them to you.” This formula, as many teachers of documentary will know, proves tremendously pliable in looking at everything from Morgan Spurlock’s condescending depiction of working-class people in Super Size Me (2004) to the playful manipulations of identity in Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). But in teaching these films, it’s also important to remind students that documentaries invariably entail some form of what John Grierson calls the “creative treatment of actuality” and that most documentary filmmakers should not be expected to maintain complete objectivity (Aufderheide 2007, 2-3), but instead are free to convey a point of view about the world.

In practice, these discussions of documentary ethics can grow out of relatively subtle directorial choices. One of the cases I invariably address is a key scene in Steve James’ Hoop Dreams (1994), the brilliant documentary that follows two Chicago as they pursue their goal of having a career in professional basketball. In one scene, Bo, the father of Arthur Agee, one of the two players, is seen in the background buying drugs while his son plays basketball on a playground nearby. As Nichols (11) points out, the filmmakers agonized over whether to include the scene, in part because of the risk of incriminating Bo legally or embarrassing the family. But the Agee family actually insisted the scene be included to show Bo’s struggles with drugs and his eventual recovery. This discussion often provokes further inquiry for many of my students, even those who might normally be reluctant to participate in class. Because Hoop Dreams taps into so many of my students’ concerns about the world—poverty, racial bias, competitive sports—many of them independently do further research on the experiences of the two teens at the center of the film and they are quick to recognize the film’s subtle politics.

Once students have begun reflecting on these ethical issues, I then introduce the documentary project. Each semester, my classes partner with a local community organization—in spring 2014, we worked with a local chapter of the American Red Cross—to document some of the services that organization provides. A representative from the organization will speak to my students early in the semester, and I then form groups of students. The first stage of the filmmaking process is a proposal, in which groups describe how they plan to make their film. My students and I discuss in detail how their filmmaking choices—even details like framing a shot or musical cues—might have ethical implications. I then provide students with several weeks to shoot their videos. Once they have finished filming, they are required to submit a rough cut of the film about twelve weeks into the semester. Both the community organization and I view the rough cut and make suggestions for changes. I then schedule a screening party for the last week of class, inviting not only members of the community but also department and college administrators, a technique that ensures students will feel an additional layer of accountability for their work. The project officially concludes with reflection papers written by each student about their experiences with the project.

Creating videos as part of a service-learning project is not new. However, this project functions as a calculated response to shifting institutional dynamics. It helps to provide students with professional and critical thinking skills that go well beyond video production. Students are required to craft memos and other professional documents with concrete audiences, giving them vital professional experience, and the final product—a short video—can have dramatic real-world consequences, a detail that ensures that students will reflect on the ethical nature of their interactions with the world, even when they are forced to come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems. In this sense, the course brings together two highly pertinent objectives for higher education in the liberal arts: it provides valuable professional experience even while ensuring that students must use critical thinking skills to produce a short documentary that depicts others respectfully and ensures that their stories are used in a meaningful way.

 

Works Cited

Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

“Definition of Service-Learning.” Colorado State University, n.d. http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/service_learning/definition.cfm.

Kiley, Kevin. “Another Liberal Arts Critic.” Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2013. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/30/north-carolina-governor-joins-chorus-republicans-critical-liberal-arts#sthash.zriv2vRw.dpbs.

Kuh, George. “High-Impact Educational Practices.” Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

 

Chuck Tryon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Fayetteville State University.  His research focuses on the transformations of movie and television consumption in the era of digital delivery. He is the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (2009) and On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (2013), both from Rutgers University Press. He has also published essays in The Journal of Film and Video, Jump Cut, Popular Communication, and Screen, as well as the anthologies, Moving Data: The iPhone and My Media and Across the Screens: Science Fiction on Television and Film.

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Dec 102012
 

This is a project from an Intro to Digital Media class in which students explore the role emerging media are playing in the lives of college students.  I had my students work in groups of about 3 to develop a set of questions about media experiences, interview students from outside our class, and put it together as an edited audio file with narration. Students worked with Audacity and created screencasts for each other to share helpful tips for using the program to improve their podcast episodes.

Overall, I was pleased with what the students produced and received positive feedback about this project.  In the future, I will probably include an opportunity to present a draft before finishing their final mix, and I will be more explicit about what types of sources I expect them to reference in their narration.  I can include links to some of my students’ works once I get it up on my page.  I liked this assignment because it asked students to do real analysis while working in a format that was new to most of them.

Podcast Assignment

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Feb 272012
 

Background:

This assignment is intended for classes that include an examination of new/digital media (e.g., Media Literacy, Media Studies, Digital Media & Society, Digital & Social Media, Communication Technologies, etc).   It is designed to help students draw connections between critical scholarship and everyday use of digital media; to give them an opportunity to identify, develop and share knowledge and skills related to digital media; and to provide them a chance to practice and develop their communication skills.  This assignment could be implemented as either an individual or group project.

 

Instructions:

For this assignment, you will create and present a tutorial about digital media, using digital media.  Your tutorial should be geared toward providing both technical instruction and media literacy on your chosen topic. While your tutorial should be theoretically/conceptually informed by course materials (readings and in-class discussion), its subject matter is up to you.  For example, you might create a tutorial on managing personal data online; using social media for political/activist purposes; creating a wiki; understanding and navigating race, gender and sexuality on multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs); etc.  Please create your tutorial in a form you can share online.  For example, your tutorial might take the form of a website, a blog, a wiki, a short video, a podcast, etc.

This assignment includes several components:  a proposal, a project update, your tutorial itself, a presentation (with an accompanying visual aid) and a written analysis.

  • Proposal (300-500 words):  First, compose a proposal for your project in which you identify the focus of your tutorial, its purpose, your target audience (e.g., high school students; older adults; people involved with a particular cause; etc.); and how you will go about constructing your tutorial.  In other words, what is it you want to do?  Who are you trying to reach?  What is your underlying goal?  How does this goal relate to theories and concepts covered in the class? What steps do you need to take to create this tutorial?
  • Project update (200-300 words):  Your project update should be a document that describes a) how your conceptualization of your project has changed and developed since your proposal, b) where you are in the process of constructing your tutorial, and c) the steps you need to take to complete the tutorial.  You should also specify 2-3 concrete learning objectives that support your tutorial’s underlying purpose.  For example, if you are creating a tutorial on how to use Twitter to organize a protest or rally, your learning objectives might include 1) how to create a Twitter account, 2) how to craft short, powerful messages and 3) how to circulate your messages strategically.
  • Create & post your tutorial online:  On the day your tutorial is due, post a brief description (2-3 sentences) along with a link to the tutorial on the discussion forum
  • Presentation (10-15 minutes):  Prepare a presentation that describes your tutorial (its target audience, its purpose, how it works, etc.) and explains how your tutorial is informed by course theories/concepts.  Ideally, your presentation will also include a brief demonstration of how your tutorial works.  If for some reason you are unable to provide an in-class demonstration, please be sure to include some kind of visual and/or aural aid to help illustrate what your tutorial is and how it works.
  • Written analysis(2400-3200 words): Your written analysis should elaborate on the material you shared in your presentation.
    • Briefly summarize the focus of your tutorial, its target audience, its underlying purpose, and the 2-3 learning objectives it’s designed to meet.
    • Next, describe how your tutorial is designed to reach its target audience, achieve the learning objectives, and work towards the underlying purpose.  What kinds of decisions did you make to reach out to your target audience?  What did you do to learn about your target audience, their needs, and their pre-existing skills and literacy with digital media? How did you consider their needs, goals, skills and digital media literacy in constructing your tutorial? In other words, how did your knowledge of your target audience impact your decision-making?  How is your tutorial designed to reach the learning objectives you identified?
    • Discuss how your project is theoretically/conceptually informed by readings and class discussions. What concepts or theories are relevant to your tutorial?  To its purpose?  Its leaning objectives?  Its design? Be sure to define the key concepts relevant to your tutorial and cite relevant course material.
    • Finally, briefly assess how effective you believe your tutorial is in reaching its target audience, meeting the learning objectives, and working towards the underlying goal.  What are your projects strengths?  Limitations?  What might you to make your tutorial more effective, reach a wider audience or have more of an impact?  A strong analysis will incorporate a discussion of the feedback your peers gave you on the day of your presentation.

 

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Feb 272012
 
m4s0n501

Background:

This assignment was developed for a Media Literacy class, and it could be easily adapted for a variety of Media Studies classes (including classes on Digital Media & Society; Digital & Social Media; Communication Technologies, etc.).  It is designed to help students draw connections between critical scholarship on media, popular culture and everyday use of the media.  It is also intended to help students draw connect media theory to the production of media, and asks students to think of themselves as media producers.

This assignment could be implemented as either an individual or group project.  This particular version asks students to work in pairs.

 

Instructions:

You and your partner are being asked to design a media intervention that is theoretically/conceptually informed by the course materials.  In other words, I am asking you to create and pitch an idea for a DIY media project that communicates a message of your choosing, as long as it relates to course concepts.  You decide what concept(s) you’d like to engage with, and what kind of media intervention you’d like to make.  For example, you could design and propose a short video, a television show, a film, wiki, blog, digital game, etc.  Your media intervention should be something you could create, as students, with resources you can readily assemble (in other words, with a limited budget and access to whatever technology & expertise you can find).

Examples might include: A film that challenges race- and class-based stereotypes, a news article that examines media ownership, a digital game that challenges heteronormativity, or a wiki on the issue of internet neutrality.

The purpose of the assignment is to spark thought and discussion about possibilities for creating our own media messages with the resources that are at hand.   It is also an opportunity for you to engage with the course materials in a creative way: for you to explore what messages you, as a potential media maker, could create yourself.

This project includes several components:  a proposal, a presentation, and an individual reflection paper.

  • Proposal (200-250 words):  First, you and your partner will compose a proposal for your project in which you describe what kind of media production you are envisioning (e.g., a digital game, a wiki, a short video, etc.) and what you want your project to accomplish (e.g., spreading awareness on internet neutrality, challenging racism in cyberspace, provoking debate on digital surveillance, etc).  You will post your proposal to the class discussion forum and exchange feedback with other students.
  • Presentation (8-10 minutes):  In your presentation, please describe the concept for your media intervention and how your project relates or responds to course concepts.  Please provide some kind of visual and/or aural aid to help illustrate your idea (e.g., sample graphics, storyboards, a draft of a website, etc).  In addition, please be prepared to respond to questions during a brief Q&A period that will follow your presentation.
  • Individual reflection paper (1000-1200 words):  Your reflection paper should elaborate on the content you presented to the class and discuss your experience collaborating with your partner.  Please describe your DIY media intervention, its purpose and how you could go about creating your project using resources and skills you have at hand.  In addition, discuss how your idea is informed by, responds to and/or critiques theories and concepts covered in class.  Be sure to define the key terms and theories you refer to, and cite sources appropriately.  Finally, discuss your experience collaborating with your partner:  What were the most difficult aspects of collaborating?  The most interesting ones?  Did you encounter any obstacles in designing your project?  How did you and your partner decide who was responsible for what?  How do you think would this project be different had you worked individually or in a larger group?

 

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Feb 202012
 

For those teaching TV production, this is a humorous object-lesson in some continuity issues, a meta-conversation about production folded into the production itself, and a send-up of the Downton Abbey series.

Uptown Downstairs Abbey, Part two – Red Nose Day 2011, BBC Comic Relief Night

(There is a part one, which is also clever, but a little less production-oriented).

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Aug 192011
 

Here’s a very simple exercise I use to get students to discus s how video-makers make use of some aesthetic purposes of lighting.  I  show 3 clips from very different types of productions (such as a TV game show, a noir style movie, and a music video) and ask students to work in small groups and answer questions such as these:

How does the lighting and shadow tell us about outer orientation/inner orientation of the scene?  Where is the light source coming from?  How could you have lit each of these scenes differently to change something about its mood, atmosphere or meaning?

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