New media about new media!

I was really intrigued by the Anderson article... new media about new media! The whole interactiveness was really interesting because we truly did get to control how we read/viewed/experienced this. It is interactive, allowing the reader to pause the video to read the texts, view other videos and images, listen to sound clips, etc. It definitely fits Manovitch's description of what new media is.

In this piece, Anderson states that "equipping students to participate in new media discourses empowers them to act in a world in which the knowledge currencies are increasingly digital." This really resonates with me and my own beliefs about incorporating technology in to the classroom. When I taught Skeleton Creek, I had students work together to plan, script, film, and edit their own "mystery," which really related to what they were experiencing in class and taking it a few steps further. Some students had experience with different aspects of the digital project, some were clueless. Working together, as novice and experienced students and teacher, we were able to share our digital knowledge and work in ways that would have not been affective with pen and paper. Talking about digital video and digital projects allows you to make connections to similar conventions in writing.

The way this article was laid out reminded me of the Video Paper that my students were going to make for their Skeleton Creek video assignment using free software called VideoPaper Builder 3, tying in their written work, visual work, and video work. Unfortunately, we ran in to a lot of compatibility issues and weren't able to complete them.

Anderson's article fits in to Manovitch's idea of new media being modular. The different pieces of video, text, links, sound clips function together on the web page, "assembled into larger-scale objects but continu[ing] to maintain their separate identities" (30).