Student Showcase (cont)

Philip's Background1

I am in Baylor University’s University Scholars degree program. This frees me of some core requirements, which are replaced by a sequence of Great Texts courses and a thesis project. Though this means my major is officially 'University Scholar,' I am currently working toward the equivalents of a major in Film & Digital Media, and a minor in Spanish. I have been making animated short films since 5th grade, and what started as a hobby nin years ago has become something I plan to pursue as a career. I have competed in several national and international film festivals, placing 1st in the youth divisions of the Crossroads and Kanza Fest Film Festivals, as well as the adult division of the 2008 Nickelodeon ‘Nicktoons’ Animation Contest.

In addition to my filmmaking, I also operate one of the largest and most active stop motion animation communities on the web, bricksinmotion.com. My YouTube Channel can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/SmeagolStudios.

[Philip - excellent work! - Appreciatively, Christina]

Dr. Campbell's Course Description 1

[To Our Readers - To give you all an idea of all the thought that went into this course, here are the notes that Professor Gardner Campbell sent me regarding the project, course, and assignment for the Final Project - Christina.] 1a

Course title: From Memex to YouTube: An Introduction to New Media Studies

The course is a First Year Seminar in the Honors Program at Baylor. I taught this particular class in the spring of 2009. I’ll teach it again this fall. This is a new course at Baylor. I’d taught it twice before at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I was a professor of English for fourteen years prior to arriving at Baylor last fall.

Instructor: Dr. W. Gardner Campbell

Title: Director, Academy for Teaching and Learning; Associate Professor of Literature and Media, Honors College

Personal webpage: http://www.gardnercampbell.net

Honors Program webpage: http://www.baylor.edu/Honors_Program/

The assignment was to imagine and create a final project related to the work we’d done in the class. There were only a few requirements:

The project had to demonstrate academic/scholarly expertise in a particular aspect of New Media. Each student thus had to compose a written analysis/explanation of their work. This written component was to be in their “blog voice” and posted to their blogs.
The project had to demonstrate expertise in its making: that is, the students had to make something in the materials of New Media they’d chosen to analyze. In Philip’s case, the video was the result. Other students did work in image-based storytelling (Flickr’s “tell-a-story-in-five-images” group), in social bookmarking (using Delicious tags as educational affordances and explaining in a ‘screencast’ how that works), and in website creation using a wiki. Projects in this course are typically quite diverse. I like it that way!
The analysis had to connect with at least two of our readings in some substantial way. Our text was a wonderful collection from MIT Press called The New Media Reader. We read both of the Engelbart pieces in that anthology: both “Augmenting Human Intellect” [Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework 1962] and the research report leading up to the 1968 demo he co-authored with Bill English [A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect 1968].

I designed the course’s online components for maximum mutual reinforcement. Their relation is straightforward but there are many interlocking ties. It’s no exaggeration to say that I try to make my courses into bootstrapping environments. In fact, that’s precisely what I tell my students.

The course syllabus is on a wiki: http://gardnercampbell.wetpaint.com/page/FYS+1399+Memex+to+YouTube+S09. The front page of the wiki is editable by me only, but each day’s reading/activity is hyperlinked to a page on which students were encouraged to write preparation notes, take notes during class, embed relevant and interesting material, etc. The wiki thus becomes a kind of shared class resource and an interesting record of what each student brought to the meeting’s work—and often, what they took away as well.

The students in the class were required to blog once per class meeting (2x a week). The “motherblog” that aggregates their work is at http://courseblogs.gardnercampbell.net/baylor_nms_s09. All student blog posts are republished here, but if one clicks on an individual post title, one goes to the student’s own blog space. The blogs are running on a WordPress Multi-User platform, which means students have full capability to customize their own blogs: titles, look-and-feel, information design, “widgets” and plug-ins, etc. Philip’s individual blog is at http://courseblogs.gardnercampbell.net/philip/

There’s a link to the class syllabus in the upper right of the motherblog. Just beneath that link I’ve fed in (via RSS) their comments on each others’ blogs. On the left sidebar I’ve fed in all their links in the social bookmarking service Delicious. I encouraged them to grab these resources before, during, and after class, tagging them as they go along however they like, but also making sure at least one of the tags is the “class tag” (in this case, Baylor_nms_s09). Anything tagged with the class tag will feed automatically into this aggregation sidebar.

I hope this information is helpful. Again, my apologies for the length. At the very least, you can see that I want my classes to be exercises in exactly the kind of augmentation/bootstrapping that your dad aimed at with ARC. His idea of the integrated domain and level “c” improvement inspires me deeply. I try to share that inspiration with my students and help them imagine how school at its best might be—and how they can make it so.
[Gardner - you have captured the spirit of the vision fabulously! - Christina]

My thanks once again for this great opportunity.
[Gardner - my pleasure! - Christina]

Best regards,

Gardner