DMA identity

The Digital Media course has developed a stable, mercurial identity as a Liberal Arts course in the field of Media Studies with a decided focus on the Fine Arts/creative-uses of digital media. 1/3 of the course features developing the creative skills of the Liberal Artist (talking/communication skills mainly, but also reading, writing, and thinking skills), 1/3 involves applying those skills to a cadre of Media Studies luminaries (Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Lev Manovich, Mimi Ito, et al) and issues (privacy, copyright, etc.), and 1/3 involves composition-studies (hands-on projects including a website composition, and image, audio, and video remix compositions). The current website for the course is located at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma20092110/ I also maintain a separate website for the Liberal Arts content of the course at: http://sites.google.com/site/mediastudiesnow/ And a separate site as well for the Media Studies content at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma0910/ All of the quizzes, gradebook stuff, and copyright-protected content are contained in Blackboard sites, one for each section.

The 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 structure or cadence in some ways mirrors the progression of Web 1.0 (the read-only, passive, or lonely web), Web 2.0 (the social-active web), and Web 3.0 (the knowledge-contruction web). The phases of the course also of course include significant overlap. We use plenty of media in the first the second thirds of the course, and we continue to talk about issues in part three.

At this point in time, the course seems to strike a pretty good campus-wide balance for a required first-year offering. Students who may typically shy away from technology may find even the entry-level introduction to technical-skills they get in the Digital Media course to be challenging to learn. On the other hand, students who might typically shy away from interpretative skills and theory may find even the entry-level introduction to the Liberal Arts and to the field of Media Studies to be challenging to learn! That's the nature of a first-year required course, or at least that's how I see it.

In any case, on the technical-side, the Digital Media course provides an entry level, art-focused set of technical skills for students to work on. They learn to work with Google Sites and Docs, Photoshop Elements, Audacity, and Movie Maker, and an array of other tools including screen-capture utilities for still and moving images.

My perception is that the need for advanced or more detailed technical-skills instruction varies pretty wildly in degree and kind, and timing, across the various Schools. My favored approach to delivering highly specific technical skills-training (if students need more or advanced work on Photoshop, more or advanced work in audio-editing, etc.) is to develop suites of online screen-movie tutorials (of the sort I use fairly extensively and produce via Jing or Camtasia). If study of online tutorials is combined with tests that require students to sit at at a computer in a classroom in the instructor's presence and execute the skills the tutorials address, this can work very well. I guess this is to say that DMA is not a tech or computer-skills course, yet it includes such things in context, and if I felt more of such things were needed I would not necessarily put them in a face-to-face framework anyway.

I am reminded of a webmaster job interview I once had. The interview consisted of a short verbal Q and A session with a Human Resources person, then I was handed a sheet or paper with a list of things to do, which included the address of a website I was to critique. I was then given access to a computer where I had to create a website, including a page on the site to enter my critique of the website they had given me the address to. Afterward I felt that this organization got a pretty accurate picture of applicants' skills (including their thinking skills and aesthetic-critiquing skills) by using this methodology. If students who needed advanced skills-training were to use online tutorials to acquire and practice the skills, and were then tested face-to-face, they could be given course-credits for their work, analogous to a job applicant getting into the next round of interviews or getting a job offer.

If face-to-face courses in advanced-skills are the only way to go --in other words if an online tutorials + face-to-face testing model would not work for one reason or another-- then multiple courses would likely be needed at UNCSA, at very least one per each School. Therein lies the next-level design-problem; namely there are not enough teachers, and there is not enough time, to do this. So this, too, makes me think courses may not be the best design-solution for advanced technical skills training.