Reporting from the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning
Well, this isn’t really a live “report from the symposium”, but it just ended last night, so it’s fresh in my mind! The Symposium offered a variety of interesting sessions, an it was a great way to learn about other schools’ projects and ‘meet’ others in SecondLife without having to spend money on travel. More about the SecondLife aspect below, but first I want to talk about 2 sessions that offered content of interest to readers of this blog.
First, Anu Vedantham and Peter Decherney represented Penn admirably with their presentation “Mashup Video Projects for Classroom Creativity” This ties in with Anu’s most recent post here about the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards, but the presentation also covered ideas and tips for how to incorporate mashup video projects into courses not directly related to film. Peter also generated a lot of interest with his part of this well-attended presentation, discussing copyright and related issues in mashups. I encourage you to check the link above for more information about this great presentation.
The other session that I thought provided a lot of information that would be of interest to readers of this blog was the one titled “Your Video Projects Suck, but That’s OK ’cause So Do Your Papers: Moderating Student Expectations When Teaching New Media” by Jared Bendis of Case Western Reserve. Anyone who has ever been to an NMC event knows that Jared is always a popular speaker, and this was no exception. But this time he had a lot of practical tips for instructors who are assigning video projects to students who have never done any such thing before. Of course he recommended the usual things like having several smaller “due dates” for storyboards, etc. before the completed project is due. But he also pointed out that the “type A personalities” often end up with incomplete masterpieces, while the “slackers” set realistic expectations and often get the assignment finished with respectable work. He also had a very interesting perspective on getting signed releases: everyone must sign a release, including people who appear in a video and the student making the video, because the university has no control over where the video might be posted or shared after it’s submitted.
You can see the rest of Jared’s tips and some good sample videos of what to do and what not to do at http://fc.case.edu/newmedia/video/ The release form that he uses is linked in the middle of that page.
Also, a video of each session will be posted at http://www.nmc.org/2009-nml-symposium/program by March 30th if you’d like to watch it.
Now a word about SecondLife: I had played with SecondLife briefly, but this was the first time that I ever attended a scheduled event, or even spent more than 10 minutes at a time in this virtual world. The software has definitely become more stable since I last used it a year ago, but I did have it crash once, when I was attending a session where a video was being shown on a “screen” in SL. And I use a computer that’s less than a year old and has a lot of RAM. Other than that, I had a very positive experience. I admit that I was a skeptic going in, but that’s why I wanted to register for this conference. And it really was more engaging to watch an avatar on the screen give a talk, and be able to move around the room or change views, than it is to watch a ‘talking head’ in a rectangle of video for the same amount of time. And I only embarrassed myself once, when I arrived at the “room” and had my avatar sit in what appeared to be an empty seat – but it turned out that the video world hadn’t fully loaded on my screen, and I was sitting on someone’s lap! But the person was gracious, we both had a good laugh, and I ‘met’ someone I might not have.
So that’s my report ‘from the field’. Please let me know if I can answer any questions about it.
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