Newswise — A new program sponsored by the Office for Information Technology (OIT) at Williams College is advancing media scholarship on the Williams College campus.
The initiative, Integrating Digital Literacies - or IDeaL - allows faculty to enhance current course assignments with media components to allow students to express themselves visually, and to engage with and publish their research in varied digital mediums.
During class time set aside by the professor, student mentors from the Media Education Center teach multimedia production and workflows to the class and facilitate its implementation.
By using student mentors, faculty members are able to maintain their teaching focus on their content without the distraction of needing to support the students’ media production work in tandem.
"Faculty direct and guide the content and the research. We pick up the support and training," said Tamra Hjermstad, OIT Media Studios and Technologies Coordinator. Students who need additional help contact their Media Mentor for technology support outside of class or can make use of a team of student workers in OIT, the Student Media Consultants.
According to Hjermstad, the addition of media production to courses is not a replacement for scholarship, but an expansion of academics that includes a new means of communication.
"All of the students coming in are basically digital natives and they're used to a visual environment," Hjermstad said. "Many of them are comfortable expressing themselves visually, but they don't necessarily have the skills to apply that in the academic realm."
IDeaL allows students to present what they have learned and researched in a visual manner, in formats other than text on paper, said Hjermstad. "And, in each instance, it generally starts with a written assignment. There's a lot of student research and scholarship going into completed projects, as opposed to just playing with media instead of writing."
The program began last fall, when three professors participated in the pilot. For one beginning German class, that meant a single assignment where students used a comic book format to sharpen their written and conversational language skills.
"The teacher wanted them to have an alternate vehicle to publish and share their work," Hjermstad explained. "They learned software for authoring graphing novels called 'Comic Life' and then put their language skills to use in terms of narrating the story."
The program goes beyond workshops to teach students how to work with media.
"We explore copyright. We explore fair-use guidelines for academic publishing. How do you manipulate the images so that they are exactly what you want to fit the story you're trying to tell? And how do you pull it all together in a final piece?" said Hjermstad. "We're really looking at media literacy and integrating those concepts into these assignments that already exist, but we're enhancing them visually."
At the same time, a biology class, "Natural History of the Berkshires" added a new twist to a traditional assignment where students produced written field reports on the changes in the environment and animal life at a specific site. Instead of limiting their weekly field journal entries to text and the occasional map or still photo, with the help of their student mentor, the class added audio and video to their reports. Their findings then were published to a web blog for a global audience.
The possibilities are endless.
"Faculty sit down with me and talk about the current assignments for particular courses, and about what they're interested in exploring in terms of media, scholarship and usage," Hjermstad said. "I try to take something they're already doing and add a media component or enhance it with a media component so that it's not changing what they're teaching. Faculty are the content experts."
This spring, four faculty added technology to their curriculum. The German instructor who participated in the fall took the same assignment to an advanced class that did a much longer, graphic novel. A theater course utilized some advanced PhotoShop techniques to aid in digital costume designs.
Using iMovie, Professor Janneke van de Stadt's advanced Russian class created their own digital story, which allowed them to be creative with a language that has a lot of rules. She wants her students to effectively express themselves in longer paragraphs, speak with more detail, and to use complicated Russian adjectives and participles.
"Russian is a very tonal language, like Chinese is," said van de Stadt. "It has very strict rules around how to intone particular kinds of questions or statements. If students are stumbling over words, why is that? It's really thinking about how the language feels in their mouth, beyond how it looks on the page. I wanted to take Russian more out of the classroom and into their more intimate sphere."
Professor Kimberly Springer's "Race and New Technologies" class responded to their experiences regarding the role race plays in online and video games. They made personal response videos and graphic novels based on research they conducted by playing commercial games such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero, The Sims and Grand Theft Auto.
"As the course focused on new media, it seemed appropriate to encourage the students to engage with and critique new media in a way other than through essay writing," Springer said.
"The mentor provided tutorials and troubleshooting help in using software programs like Comic Life and iMovie," Springer explained. "Some students were already familiar with audio and video for the Web, but most were adept consumers, not creators."
Next fall, Hjermstad hopes to grow the program. "We're almost doing students a disservice if we're not including some of those visual and digital literacy skills as they graduate and go out into the world. They need to know how to communicate in those formats, as well as with text and with words."
Founded in 1793, Williams College is the second oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college’s 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their teaching and research, and the achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in their research. Students' educational experience is enriched by the residential campus environment in Williamstown, Mass., which provides a host of opportunities for interaction with one another and with faculty beyond the classroom. Admission decisions are made regardless of a student’s financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted.
To visit the college on the Internet: http://www.williams.edu/ Williams College can also be found on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/williamscollege and Twitter: http://twitter.com/williamscollege
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