I am the proud co-creator/producer/director/writer of LilyDidIt.com, an innovative site offering free video ecards that feature an original cast of relatable twenty-somethings and star the irrepressible Lily.
I also assisted in research and production for the debut season of PBS Kids TV show Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman.
Moreover, I have facilitated media literacy programs, advocated for meaningful digital learning, and live in the twenty-first century.
Therefore, back in the fall of 2010, I decided it was time to “walk the walk.” Yes, it was time to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, and CSS, time to remix and vlog and launch my own website — perhaps past time! I enrolled in the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Learning‘s 501 course (taught by Associate Director Dr. Virginia Kuhn) in order to get a better appreciation of digital scholarship, as well as gain proficiency in image editing, graphic design, mobile video capture, and video editing. This course also offered students access to a third area: exploration of their own personal interests.
I learned by doing. I analyzed digital texts via posting to a class Wiki; harnessed Adobe Photoshop while ruminating on the politics of gender and sexuality in America, past and present; and built video-based cases for supporting youths’ access to meaningful, self-directed learning opportunities.
- Textual talk back: Responding to Galloway (2000), Berger (1972), selections from The New Media Reader (2003), and classmates regarding Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robinson, 2006)
- Gender and sexuality: Designing like Barbara Kruger and Shepard Fairey, interpreting The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Stone, 1996)
- Child’s play: Sincere and satirical original videos emphasizing the importance of supporting youths’ healthy development
From the IML 501 syllabus…
Developments in contemporary media technologies have fundamentally transformed the ways we perceive, think and communicate. IML 501: Digital Media Workshop is a seminar course combining hands-on media authoring, readings and discussions dedicated to investigating the close interrelationships among technology, culture and communication in order to form a solid foundation for scholarly multimedia authoring. Students will explore the emergence and impact of social media, information visualization, video and interactivity within academia and across the disciplines, working to enhance existing modes of creative and critical expression and research methods. We will proceed from the assumption that theories of “old media” can significantly inform our understanding of “new media” and provide insight into the affordances of contemporary technologies. In addition, we will examine several genres of multimedia scholarship, mapping their features in terms of Raymond Williams’ concept of the residual, the emergent and the oppositional. The goal is the ability to deploy generic conventions strategically in a variety of academic contexts.
This foundational graduate course combines theory and practice in order that you begin to think through the media, rather than outside it. At the IML we believe that the history and theory of new media are best understood through the development of practical skills in multimedia authoring To that end, we will engage in extensive online discussions of the reading assignments, and we will spend extensive “hands on” time during class. There will be several projects—image editing, video capture, editing (remix) and, finally, interactive—which will help reinforce the theory we confront.