It seems that tagging information is useful for more than just organising things (either individually or socially); tags can be art, too! In that vein I’ve just discovered Wordle which can take any series of words – or pull your tags straight from del.icio.us – and let you play with various visualisations. I dragged in my del.icio.us tags, and I have to say I quite like the little word-art picture that resulted:
If you squint, it almost looks like a badly drawn map of Australia! :) What do your tags look like?
On Tuesday, the students from my Digital Media class, as well a few invited guests and colleagues, enjoyed a screening of the Best 8 Student News Projects from the unit. This project, the first major assignment for the unit, takes place after 4 weeks of workshops which introduce digital video cameras, sound recording and (very) basic lighting, non-linear editing and copyright in media production. It’s a bit of a whirlwind, but the culmination of these workshop is a project in which students, working in groups of 4 or 5, get exactly one week to produce a 3 minute news story on the basis of pre-assigned topics (all of which are based on relevant local issues).
Once the projects are completed, part of the feedback process is not just comments from myself or Christina (who is tutoring half of the classes, I’m tutoring the other half) - although we do give a fair bit of written feedback - but we also have a reflective seminar where the projects completed by the groups in these seminars (there are 4 groups in each seminar) are viewed and the other members of the seminar offer written and verbal feedback. I find this is always a very rewarding process, as students often engage more directly with peer feedback. To top it off, at the end of each seminar (there are 8 ) each seminar votes and the best project, along with the top from the other seminars, become those which make up the Best of Student News screening. While I am a little hesitant to place too much weight on the ‘best’ projects - learning is, after all, not a competition - students nevertheless respond well to this voting process. I suspect the idea of them deciding the best projects rather than the course staff is very appealing! Then, in the Best of Student News screening, the students get to vote once more and select their choice for the Best Student News Project of the year.
I have to say, I think the level at which students produced their projects this year has been outstanding. Even though most of them have learnt their media production skills over 4 one and a half hour workshops, many of these projects can stand up against the work of professionals who’ve had 3 year of training. The Best Project for the year, as selected by their peers, shows that humour - when used properly - really is one of the universally appealing elements of media. So, without any further ado, this year’s Best Student Project takes a comical look at the role of community radio in the era of media conglomeration.
At the screening, there is also a Staff Award given the the project which got the highest overall mark. This award went to the group behind a technically outstanding project which explored whether Australia’s young Olympians are adequately prepared to be thrust into the media spotlight at the Beijing Olympics.
There are two other projects from the screening I wanted share: one takes a look at the proposed redevelopment of the Perth inner city foreshore, and the other asks to what extent Earth Hour is a genuine attempt at ecological change.
One other noteworthy aspect of these projects, and of many others students created for the course, is that after our discussions on copyright, each of the projects above has selected to place their finished work under a Creative Commons license. Among other things, this suggests that far from the end of the conversation, some of these student projects may, indeed, have an interesting life being screened and remixed in different settings.
The students in this unit are now working hard on their second project, which is explores more specifically the affordances of digital video on the web, and I have to say, having just heard their Pitches for these projects, I’m really exciting to see the next projects as they’re completed!
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot this semester has been the way my teaching does - or doesn’t - encourage my students to develop that elusive, highly ambiguous but universally sought-after quality of creativity. I’ve been running two units - Digital Media, which is a relatively large second year unit (about 140 students) with a fairly hefty hands-on component; and a far smaller honours unit called Creative Selves which is specifically about exploring the way creativity is thought about, situated and can ultimately be harnessed in the world of work (or, at least, the world outside of formal education).
Even though creativity is often associated with the romantic ideal of the lone creative genius, one of the contradictions I’ve been quite aware of, and something that has come up in both units, is that both individual and group creativity is often meaningfully enhanced and provoked when students are thinking about the audience that might ultimately view/experience/interact with their creative work. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise since over the last 4 years I’ve often encouraged (and occasionally mandated) that students blog their work for just that reason. In so many cases, when the potential audience for a work - written, audio, video or whatever else - stops being just the marker or examiner and starts being a potentially global community, students tend to push themselves to work that little bit harder. Occasionally one or two students have suggested this is unnecessarily stressful, but 99% of the time when students are faced with the large potential audience that the internet provides, they step up to the challenge. There are other clear advantages of getting students to create in the public sphere, too, such as those outlined by Jason Mittell:
One of my pet peeves about teaching is that often you get wonderful student work that is, by design, written for an audience of one, and has no lingering presence beyond the semester. By asking students to blog, share, and otherwise publish their work, it both raises the bar for their own sense of engaging a community with their ideas, as well as offers an opportunity for faculty to publicize their excellent work.
Mittell has written a seriesofposts showcasing some of the impressive work students have made as part of his Media Technology course this past semester. They range from podcasts which interrogate something specific about audio, to video-games based shorts (sort of machinima, but not in the Red Vs Blue sense - more videos which mix and match game footage in different ways to highlight a particular critical or creative point). One assignment I particularly liked was the use of video remixes, or mashups, which included one student effort which remixed current blockbuster trailers - and a ubiquitous iPhone ad - to create an overhyped trailer for technological convergence itself:
Another student collaboration I’ve come across recently is Shake Girl, The Graphic Novel. This graphic novel was a collaboration between 17 Stanford creative writing, art and design students who’ve produced a moving and provocative story which ultimately ends up being a heart-wrenching tale highlighting the terrible phenomenon of acid attacks on women in Cambodia. This is no two-dimensional moral rant, though: it’s a thoroughly engaging story, with sophisticated characterisation which envelops the reader in the story only to shock them with the protagonist’s fate. In their About section, one note rang particularly true for me, regarding the challenges but also the substantial rewards which come from successful creative collaborations between students:
The process of collaboration - we think all of our students will agree - was both one of the most frustrating and exciting experiences of our lives. A lot of the first in the first two weeks, much of the second in the last four. Those of us writing the script seemed to trip over one another in the early stages. We wrote, researched, rewrote, tossed drafts aside, argued, yelled sometimes, tossed our hands up in the air, and then started over. The illustrators waited patiently, until patience ran out, and we were finally left with this mission statement: 1. We want to get this project completed, and 2. We want to make everyone moderately happy.
And with that, we made the jump to light speed. How many late-night hours did we draw, redraw, rewrite, design, redesign, and mostly… really enjoy each others company, efforts, and camaraderie?
All I can say is that Shake Girl definitely highlights an impressively successful student collaboration! [Via BBoing]
This graphic novel also reminds me on one idea for a small-scale creative project I’ve always wanted to do especially with a large first-year class. Many of you will recall the fabulous Theory.org.uk Theorist Trading Cards, which were essentially bubblegum cards featuring well-known cultural theorists. In a large first-year class where new theorists, ideas and concepts are introduced for the first time, I suspect that if students generated their own cards as part of tutorial presentations, this would be a great way to creatively get them reading and thinking about the main features, and differences, between the writers and works they encounter. As an added bonus, these trading cards could be collated online and serve, to some extent, as useful prompts when students are revising for exams.
Along a similar line, this week my Digital Media students are presenting a pitch, outlining an idea for a short video which will critically explore some aspect of digital culture loosely based on arguments about either convergence or citizen journalism, so I hope I’ll be able to post a few of the results in a few weeks time.
Until then, I wanted to end this post by pointing to the very cool and very virally popular video Apple Mac Music Video by Dennis Liu. While not really student work (Lui has just finished formal education, but has been working professionally for a while; read an interview here) this is video is inspirational. It’s a brilliant reminder that under the hood of an Apple Mac (or even a decent PC) is more than enough power to make some truly inspiring and amazing creative work …
Michael Wesch and his 200 students in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007 collaborated in exploring what exactly a student does these days. Their results make a fascinating video and a timely reminder of the way (some) student experiences are changing:
Some of the noteworthy results from 133 of the students survey included:
“My average class size is 115.”
“18% of my teachers know my name.”
I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. Only 26% … relative to my life
I will read 8 books this year.” “2300 web pages” “and 1281 facebook profiles”
“I will write 42 pages for class this semester.” “And over 500 pages of email”
Given how many times Wesch’s first video, ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us’, has been used to discuss Web 2.0, I suspect this video may very well find itself as part of the conversations we have in rethinking student engagement in the twenty-first century.
JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social - and Educational - Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.
As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:
Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:
Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.
Slideshare, the YouTube of powerpoint (and other) slides, just got a lot more interesting with the launch of their SlideCast function which allows users to quickly and easily synchronise uploaded slides with audio to create ‘SlideCasts’ which are, essentially, narrated powerpoint/slide presentations in an embeddable flash format. For all the how-to-ness you’ll need, click here. Nifty! [Via]
Speaking of Second Life, I’m watching Sloodle with real interest, because proper integration between Moodle and Second Life would make teahcing and learning in SL a whole lot easier! See their concept:
I just watched Kathryn Greenhill’s presentation about introducing Second Life via Murdoch Library. Clearly the potential for Second Life in tertiary education and digital literacy is impressive, even if there are some serious obstacles to overcome. Kathryn’s presentation illuminates a very sensible and reassuring way to introduce SL to staff and students, so if you’re thinking of heading down that path, take a look:
Despite the increasing number of Creative Commons licensed images out there, many students still seem to resort to a single service like Google’s Image Search since it’s still the easiest way to find images (copyright be damned). I’ve always hoped to find a tool which makes it just as easy to search for images which are freely reusable, via CC (or other) licenses, so I was delighted when I stumbled upon the Picture Sandbox.
The Picture Sandbox lets you search Flickr (and other services), easily restricting searches to any CC license type, as well as a number of other limiting parameters such as data taken, or user. As this screenshot shows, all of these options areon the frontpage as drop-down boxes, making the service very easy to use:
Simply entering ‘Venice’ (for example) into the search window, brings up pages and pages of photos which students could use in projects and media creations, with simple attribution, and then be able to re-use in the future as part of ePortfolios or the like:
This is a fabulously simple tool so I hope it finds its way into media classes across the entire educational spectrum!
Update: If the Sandbox Flickr search doesn’t work (which seems to happen occassionally) try FlickrCC.
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