Where the action is: DIGITAL NARRATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICE

I will try not to neglect this blog, but I am pretty excited about my new course, Digital Narrative Theory and Practice, and will be posting on the blog for that a lot this semester. For the past 4 years, I have been teaching a course in the Film Scoring Department at Berklee that I designed for the film composing students, to help them better understand the movies that they will be scoring and be better able to communicate with the directors with whom they will be working. Now, with the explosion in audio for video games, reported on by the Boston Globe (with a great picture of my student Nazer who is President of the Video Game Music Club!) and picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, I've created a new class, Digital Narrative, to explore gaming and other forms of new media in their wider contexts, to provide the students who are working in this new field with a stronger background in storytelling and to start to think about what the people who make the games, DVDs, and immersive environments they will write music for are thinking about. In the Fall, we'll start having minors in the Liberal Arts, and Visual Culture and New Media Studies will be one of them, and I am completely thrilled to be developing this area at Berklee.

The Second Life component of Digital Narrative is something we are going to evolve together as a class. It is an easy platform for us to use as a group, to try out some gaming, computer-mediated communication, ideas about immersion and interactivity, synthetic camera, virtual subjectivity, etc. We can of course also use it to make machinima or for screen shots for comics for the the projects. We want to do some gaming together as a class, so I am trying to figure out the best ways of doing that, without only doing what I already know. Should all be very interesting, and I invite you to see what we are up to on the class blog, and later, if all goes well, to check out the wiki we are going to make. I'll be using the blog to post things for students, and also projecting it in class as lecture/discussion resource.

L1 Had a Busy Week at Berklee Last Week!

Last week, on Monday at Berklee College of Music, I was really thrilled to bring together an amazing panel of Second Life musicians inworld while Pathfinder Linden and I held down the fort in the physical venue at Berklee's annual faculty development conference, BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching).

Then on Wednesday night, I was just trying to show the new students what L1 looked like while I was welcoming them on behalf of the faculty at the Spring Entering Student Convocation, but you know her, she is not one to keep quiet . . . .

Everybody Dance Now!

In my Technology, Self, and Society class, we have been doing experiments with being in class in person and meeting in Second Life. One day, a student was sitting in class but her avatar was dancing in our class space in Second Life. As she stopped her avatar dancing, she muttered, "If I could dance in class, I would!"

I started thinking about this and haven't stopped. Why not dance in class? What would be the differences between dancing in SL and dancing in our classroom? (We are musicians and artists, remember, so this is not as strange to us as it might be to others!) So we have been. Twice now, half the class has been only in SL and the other half in the classroom, with me and one other person in both the virtual and physical class spaces. And we have been dancing! I am going to invite my students to talk about that experience first, and then I will chime in. But in the meantime, consider getting up . . . . putting on some music . . . . and dance!

Reboot!

OK, this is more about my first life, or maybe Life 1.5, online and digitized if not in SL, but still . . . . these posters (made by Mike Carrera in the CTMI) for my Reboot Summer Institute on Teaching with Digital Media are fab. 

Here is the info, but the Institute is only for Berklee faculty.

Teaching with Digital Media

Designed and taught by Lori Landay with support 
from Mike Carrera and Madeleine Toh

Click here to apply.

Tired of hauling bags of videotapes, overheads, audiocassettes, and CDs to class? Ready to move into the twenty-first century and use digital images, audio, video in your teaching?  Interested in making PowerPoint presentations, putting material online, or developing multimedia project assignments for your students?  The Reboot Institute on Teaching with Digital Media will provide a framework in which you can acquire new skills and complete a project that will complement your teaching.   

In this introductory level institute, participants will learn the basics of the different types of digital media (still images, digital audio, and digital video), the best ways to manipulate them, and what forms they can take in your teaching.  During the workshop sessions, participants will learn about digital media, and get a hands-on introduction to software including iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iWeb, and iDVD), PowerPoint, Audacity, and Adobe Photoshop Elements applications. You’ll work with a mentor and the CTMI to create “learning objects” that make the most of the digital technologies available to us. The Institute is open to all faculty, regardless of prior experience with digital audio, images, and video.

To help develop the skills you’ll need to successfully complete the project, you’ll attend the kick-off dinner/planning session, a minimum of three workshops, and a project showcase at the end of the summer.  In the first three workshops, you’ll find out about the kinds of media that will comprise your project, whether it results in a multimedia DVD or an aesthetic and interesting PowerPoint presentation.   The fourth and fifth workshops branch out to cover resources at Berklee and to embrace forms of  “user-generated” digital media associated with “Web 2.0” such as podcasts, blogs, and virtual worlds; we’ll also explore some ideas for developing digital media assignments for your students.  You’ll work with a mentor (who will guide you through your project), resources (books and online resources), and the fine folks at the CTMI (who will help you acquire the skills you need to realize your project). We’ll conclude with a showcase of participants’ projects and a discussion of ways of enriching teaching with digital media.  

As a gift, participants will receive a USB Flash Drive, a training book, and a 3-month subscription to Lynda.com to support their projects. Lynda.com is an award-winning provider of educational materials, including an online training library. Faculty will have access to video tutorials and online courses on a variety of software and design topics, such as Photoshop, Web Design, Logic Pro, Garageband and many others. 


Dinner session: 
Overview and Project Planning
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
6:00–8:00 p.m.
The Loft, 921 Boylston
Dinner provided
Lunch provided


Workshop 1: Still Images
Thursday, May 28, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Workshop 2: Digital Audio
Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Workshop 3: Digital Video
Thursday, June 11, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Workshop 4: Teaching with Digital Media

Thursday, June 18, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Workshop 5: Moving Forward with Your Project
Thursday, June 25, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Project Showcase
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
6:00–8:00 p.m.
The Loft, 921 Boylston 
Dinner provided

Relaxation Response

By "relaxation response," I do not (only) mean a summertime post, but the counterbalancing response to stress theorized by Herbert Benson, M.D.; click here for the Benson-Henry Mind-Body Institute's website.  There is a study starting in early September in which I've agreed to be a subject that will investigate whether people can be taught to elicit the relaxation response in Second Life.   There is one session in which the avatars do yoga, but the people do not.  The researchers postulate that the people will get a real-life benefit from their virtual yoga.

This is pretty interesting stuff.  It explores the mind-body connection as it applies to people's relationships to their avatars, to how their avatars' experiences effect them.  I wrote previously about how much more fun it was to have L1Aura do physical things like dance at a rave, jump off a cliff with Nettrice, or hang glide than I ever would have thought they would be.  They are experiences, more so than if I had only watched them in a film, but not fully physical, either.  Is the difference the participation, being able to control the motions?   Is it the identification that we build up with our avatars?  

On another note, there is an article about my Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship Award in the current issue of the Berklee Alumni Magazine, Berklee Today.  I took the picture they used of me myself, so figure that one out.