MC 101 Wrap Up: Fayette

The final installment of my MC 101 sessions for 2011 took place today at Fayette where the local Media Commons support staff – including two student workers – joined two faculty members to listen to a short version of the MC 101 presentation during common hour.  While much of the presentation was not news to the attendees, there were still lots of questions and everyone was highly excited to learn about things like the One Button Studio, Mobile Media Pilot and new scheduling policies and resources that Carla and I have been working to formalize.  A good session overall – and hopefully one that snags a few more faculty projects in the semester to come.

MCTG – Getting Excited for: Mobile Media Pilot Panel

One of the Media Commons Tailgate 2011 events that I’m most excited for is the faculty panel on the Mobile Media Pilot that we have been offering since Spring of 2011.

Going into its third academic term this Fall, the Pilot has afforded MC consultants at University Park and the Commonwealth campuses many opportunities to work with faculty, staff and students on groundbreaking projects that take advantage of all that the iPod touch affords.  Panelists will present on their classroom experiences with the devices from the consultation and planning stage to student usage and feedback to their plans for mobility going forward.

We’ll be announcing our panelists soon, but you can learn more about all of the pilot projects by visiting our Mobile Media Pilot page today!

Beautiful Data

“[…] data visualization brings a sense of wonder and humanity back to statistical analysis.

Maximum PC has a fun feature on the presentation of data in unexpected – and often arrestingly beautiful – ways.  Above, you see the representation of “Familiar Feelings” by Moloko as a fiery twist of information about the song’s construction as compiled by Matthias Dittrich.  The appeal is immediately apparent, especially to anyone who has lost five minutes by staring into the iTunes Visualizer while a favorite track plays.  While the article is nothing too profound, the gallery is a nice dose of pretty for a Wednesday.

World Wide Narratives

Sometimes you happen upon a project that has the potential to impact far more people than those enrolled in a particular class.  With Harrisburg’s World Wide Narratives – and the connected Mobile Media Pilot – I think I’ve found just that.

Friday afternoon and early evening, I found myself in one of the most diverse classroom settings I’ve ever been in, both as a professional and as a student.  Individuals from differing genders, races, religions, nationalities, sexual orientations, socio-economic backgrounds, ages and more came together as one team in the Olmsted Building for the purpose of documenting the stories of others different from themselves for these categorical reasons – and the same as them in one key respect:  that they are human beings with important experiences to share with the community.

Shivaani Selvaraj, Jo Tyler and Martha Strickland offered a vibrant presentation on the project goals, the critical incidence story listening techniques to be employed and the research campus climate opportunities inherent in World Wide Narratives’ success.  They also invited me along to give an overview of how the iPod touch could be best deployed as a story gathering tool and to give technical advice and guidance to participants.

To say I was honored would be an understatement.

The Excitement Builds

Media Commons has set to work planning out the next installment of Tailgate – and we hope to document the process this year to keep future attendees, presenters and other participants updated.  Each member of our team will be reporting on a different area, with mine being web materials.  Without further ado:

I’ve just updated the Twitter widget and added one for Facebook as well.  You can find these both in the sidebar.  This comes on the heels of last month’s general clean up and reorganization of Tailgate 2010 materials to make way for new content.  Next up:  adding information about the pre-conference workshop (subject to be determined) and names of presenters and panelists as we book them.  

MC 101 Wrap Up: Mont Alto

I’ve just pulled back in to State College after my final MC 101 for the Summer at Mont Alto.  Today’s session was an afternoon presentation and took place during the regularly scheduled Faculty/Staff Development Day.  As such, I was also on campus for a variety of faculty consultation sessions and the Chancellor’s address at the welcome back luncheon.  Having had a chance to hear what was new and exciting at Mont Alto this Fall, I went into MC 101 aware of the topics that would be of interest for the Fall semester.

Faculty were very interested in the Mobile Media Pilot and Dan Mroz, outgoing IT Director, asked if I could put on an impromptu iOS editing demo at the end of my session.  Luckily, a document camera was available in the podium I was presenting from and the demonstration went off without a hitch.  I expect to hear from several individuals with proposals for Spring semester pilot projects (with any luck).

MC 101 Wrap Up: Beaver

Today marked the first of my second set of Media Commons 101 sessions.  It was great revisiting the presentation materials after a month off from it and I found that I left the session just as enthusiastic as when the slides were brand new.  And so were the attendees.  Despite the 9:00 am start time – and FTCAP pulling many registered folks away – everyone was in good spirits and excited to talk about media project possibilities for their Spring courses.  

To The Moon

Revisiting AR Idea

In speaking with Hannah today, we started discussing student writing projects and some potential course applications for the embeddable AR/QR codes I had blogged about back in June.  Now that I have a second set of gears turning, I’m hopeful that we might be able to identify some faculty to approach about possibly integrating existing video projects into classroom writing assignments.  More to come…

Really, It’s Not Scary

The wonderful Ms. Lauren Beal found this resource for learning the very basics of how the modern web works – and is written.  With a hint of sarcasm and a completely approachable attitude, the video modules on Don’t Fear the Internet are perfectly suited to explaining this new language of webcode to those who really don’t want to learn it any farther than they have to.  Just yesterday, Carla was bringing herself up to speed with some tutorials on the matter so I’m sure she’ll be excited to see these videos.  And you’d better believe that I will be showing clients – PSU and freelance alike – the training very frequently from here on out.