Making a film for the Boise Library was surprisingly easy and fun. I think what helped in a huge way was working with another person who was technically proficient and with two others who not only had great work ethic but a true passion for the subject. It was fun because we got to focus on seeking the best rhetorical options for our client instead of spending time learning the technology.
<<I must have been dreaming when I wrote the above paragraph.
This was one of the most difficult, yet most rewarding things I have done for school.>>
I came to this program and this class with a strong amateur new media and graphic design background. Prior to school I worked as a freelance copy/art/production coordinator, a position that gave me wide latitude to learn and employ digital media skills. So the service-learning assignment we faced was not unfamiliar nor intimidating. What was challenging for me, at least in the beginning, was working with a group. I have never experienced group work in a way that was satisfying. While my most recent group work was done in the professional field, it seemed much like what I had experienced as an undergraduate: disorganized, time consuming, and an overall disjointed, unproductive experience. This project, on the other hand, proved radically different. Our group of four was easy to work with, our connections (both logistic and personality-related) with the City of Boise librarians was painless and welcoming, and our production method fairly effortless.
The production of this project, as well as this class as a whole, has fueled my interest in new media and its use in public discourse. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich writes of the particulars of cinema sinking into invisibility as it got to be more common and more commonly used. And he seeks to record the rise of new media before it sinks into invisibility as well. From this project, I feel quite confident in saying that there is no chance of that happening for BSU’s first-year students any time soon. My introduction to the many and various free applications on the net spawned the confidence to introduce them within my English 101 classroom. While my students were eventually able to negotiate the use of both Prezi and podcasting, it took effort and handholding on my part to get them through it. It seems that they have been more passive than active in their internet use. In instructing them about the use of Prezi, I mentioned a royalty-free stock photography site that I have used in various personal and professional projects for years. Using the overhead, I quickly took them to the site, found an image that was applicable to a student’s topic, saved it to the desktop, and imported it into the Prezi example. The entire process took 5 minutes and seemed quite straightforward to me. I did not have one student that was able to negotiate the creation of a Prezi without technical issues that threatened to derail the project. I can’t tell you how surprised I was.
I was further surprised when I asked them to record a podcast for another unit. Almost all of them own late-model laptops, on which cameras and microphones are built in and readily accessible through a host of software programs and drivers. Remembering the struggles of their experience with Prezi, I even allowed them to video-record their essays, the process of which even my 6-year-old son can do. Most of them chose an audio recording anyway, yet were mostly perplexed on how to record their voices, how to export the file, and how to share it with me.
At the end of our class time together, I am left pleasantly full of good feelings about the future of digital rhetoric along with confidence in my ability to both produce this sort of project as well as teach my students how to do their own.
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