On Tuesday, February 20, the MA+P thesis classes convened an alumni panel made up of students who graduated from the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program With the 10th anniversary of the Honors program this year,, it was fitting that several came form the very first cohort.
The following alums were present:
Below are a few slides for the Technology in the Classroom panel sponsored by the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching and organized by three CET Fellows: George Carstocea, Emma Bloomfield, David-James Gonzalez. I’m delighted to join Professors Owens and Sheehan on this panel.
IML300 Reading and Writing the Web
Professor: Evan Hughes
Website Re-Skin Assignment
50% Visual Rhetoric | 50% Code Work
Overview: This project draws from the highly creative and practical CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) for inspiration. Everyone will receive the same content – a structured HTML document. Each student will plan a design for the site and style the HTML document using only CSS. This project has two deliverables and will be done in two stages:
Stage 1: Review content and mockup a design for the project (due: week 5)
Stage 2: Use CSS to style the HTML document according to your mockup design (due: week 8)
Goal: The goal of this assignment is to hone both your design technique (stage 1) and your CSS coding skills (stage 2) in preparation for the final project.
Parameters: Nothing on the HTML document can be changed or altered unless there is a mistake that compromises the structural integrity of the site. Make sure that you make the professor aware of the necessary change. You can incorporate images, but only as part of the CSS.
Procedure:
Step 1: Download the HTML document from the class wiki
Step 2: Create a style sheet: css/styleProjectOneSkin.css
Step 3: Create and code a unique design using only CSS
Step 4: Make sure the site is up and running on the server
Step 5: Present your site to the class
Grading Criteria: This assignment is both a design and coding challenge, and therefore, 50% of the grade is based on the visual rhetoric of the site and 50% based on using best practices for coding in CSS. See the scale below for a more specific breakdown of the grading citeria.
Helpful Sources:
Weinman, B. (Aug 7, 2009). CSS Positioning Best Practices. Retrieved from http://www.lynda.com/CSS-tutorials/positioning-best-practices/47543-2.html.
CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty of CSS Design. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.csszengarden.com/.
W3Schools. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.w3schools.com/.
The C.R.A.P. method. (n.d.)Think around corners blog. Retrieved from: http://www.thinkaroundcorners.com/2011/10/c-r-a-p-principles-design/.
Assessment in more detail: 
Sunday, February 22, 2015
4PM to 8PM SCI Building
Media Arts + Practice Division
School of Cinematic Arts
The last few years have seen an emphasis on the gender and racial inequity in many Oscar nominated films, both behind the camera, as well as in front of it. In 2014, the New York Times* reported that the ratio between speaking roles for male versus female characters in all Oscar nominated films was more than two to one. Moreover, an extensive study commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute for Gender and carried out by a team at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism reported the same gender as well as racial imbalance in the top ten box office markets globally.*
Using clips from Oscar nominated films as a starting point, students will analyze their features, before “talking back” to them by editing, and/or generating new clips via The LAMP’s MediaBreaker online video editor and media advocacy site (see below for a demo).
* Sources:
Lee, Kevin. “The Gender Gap in Screen Time.” The New York Times. 27 February 2014. Online. 4 March, 2014.
USC Annenberg School of Communication website. “Gender stereotypes persist in films on a worldwide scale.” 22 September, 2013. Online. 30 September, 2014.
In 1945 Vannevar Bush decried the deleterious effect of information overload and poor data management, noting that Mendel’s groundbreaking work on genetics was lost to the world for a generation because it was not accessible to those who might expand upon it. More than half a century later, the situation has increased exponentially: Contemporary culture is characterized by information overload, data deluge and an awareness of the systems complexity of a globally networked world. As such it is no surprise that the visual display of information has exploded as a means of representing vast datasets.
Infographics and three-dimensional simulations join conventional pie charts and bar graphs as numerous consumer level tools for creating these visualizations have emerged over the last few years. Critical engagement with these images and with the tools that produce them will form the basis of this assignment, as we work through the interpretation and production of information visualizations in various forms. Using a comparative model, you will explore and analyze the ways in which information shifts based on the type of visualization used to express it, and speculate about how this impacts knowledge in the key research area into which your thesis project is intervening.
The rationale for this assignment is twofold: first, most of the theses over the last few years have included some aspect of data visualization or infographic and this makes complete sense given that digital technologies are as amenable to images as to words. Thus, your visualization may well be directly placed into your thesis itself. However, if it is not appropriate to your project, the visualization will become part of your documentation, showing the research that you have done, even as it may also demonstrate “multiple approaches to the same issue,” which is a sub-area within the thesis parameter RESEARCH COMPONENT.
Project Plan due on wiki: 2/3. Project due on wiki: 2/24.
Below is a slideshow with several models from previous theses, followed by the four thesis parameters and the three facets that demonstrate each.
CONCEPTUAL CORE
• The project’s controlling idea must be apparent.
• The project must be productively aligned with one or more multimedia genres.
• The project must effectively engage with the primary issue/s of the subject area into which it is intervening.
RESEARCH COMPONENT
• The project must display evidence of substantive research and thoughtful engagement with its subject matter.
• The project must use a variety of credible sources and cite them appropriately.
• The project ought to deploy more than one approach to an issue.
FORM + CONTENT
• The project’s structural or formal elements must serve the conceptual core.
• The project’s design decisions must be deliberate, controlled, and defensible.
• The project’s efficacy must be unencumbered by technical problems.
CREATIVE REALIZATION
• The project must approach the subject in a creative or innovative manner.
• The project must use media and design principles effectively.
• The project must achieve significant goals that could not be realized on paper.
This is a presentation for the Karen Kensek’s class with students from the Masters in Building Science at the USC School of Architecture.
If you woke up tomorrow, and your internet looked like this, what would you do?
Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites.
Think about what we would lose: all the weird, alternative, interesting, and enlightening stuff that makes the Internet so much cooler than mainstream Cable TV. What if the only news sites you could reliably connect to were the ones that had deals with companies like Comcast and Verizon?
On September 10th, just a few days before the FCC’s comment deadline, public interest organizations are issuing an open, international call for websites and internet users to unite for an “Internet Slowdown” to show the world what the web would be like if Team Cable gets their way and trashes net neutrality. Net neutrality is hard to explain, so our hope is that this action will help SHOW the world what’s really at stake if we lose the open Internet.
If you’ve got a website, blog or tumblr, get the code to join the #InternetSlowdown here: https://battleforthenet.com/sept10th
Everyone else, here’s a quick list of things you can do to help spread the word about the slowdown: http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/96020972118/be-a-part-of-the-great-internet-slowdown
Get creative! Don’t let us tell you what to do. See you on the net September 10th!
via Battle For The Net.
These are some materials for discussion in the 2014 Annenberg Graduate Fellows Microseminar convened by Aniko Imre and Virginia Kuhn.
Much of my work centers on digital pedagogy and these pieces are grouped below, along with a few seminal essays that I use in teaching.
“Teaching the Video Essay Assignment,” Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol. 1(2) Spring/Summer 2013. Various authors.
Critical Commons: http://www.criticalcommons.org/ This is a media advocacy site run by a colleague; you upload clips that you use often in class and add some commentary making the fair use evident. It takes some effort but then you have them for good! You can use others’ clips too, and it makes a great class project to upload and annotate.
The Rhetoric of Remix, Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9, 2012. (Kuhn) This is a rationale for remix as digital argument. It’s one of my most cited essays so it might be helpful.
Nomadic Archives: Remix and the Drift to Praxis, from Digital Humanities Pedagogy, Open Book Press, January, 2012. (Kuhn and Callahan). Full collection available online. This is an overview and rationale for the trajectory of a foundational class. (For a graduate version with some examples, please see: Hacking the Classroom: Eight Perspectives and then “Kuhn” although all of these pieces are smart and useful.)
Speaking with Students: Profiles in Digital Pedagogy, (Kuhn, Johnson, Lopez) Published in Kairos and republished in a “best of” 2010 articles book. A video-based rationale for students producing digital theses.
The YouTube Gaze: Permission to Create? (Kuhn) in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Special issue on Video and Participatory Culture, October 2010. Lists alternatives to YouTube.
From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology by Dennis Baron. A seminal articles that has influenced my thinking a great deal.
Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate, International Journal of Learning and Technology (done in Scalar ). This is the first piece published in Scalar, which is a good option for using in class. It’s free and open source, created by academics for academic scholarship.