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

Third Life, Media Life

Last night, at the same time as my class met in Second Life, my family was featured on a local TV show, Chronicle. The show was about twins and multiples and they spent about four hours shooting us, so I figured that would add up to about a minute of air time, especially after the producer told me that the following day she was shooting a mother with TWO sets of twins, which surely makes better television than my one set. Anyway, I e-mailed my teacher that I would be late, figuring I would watch with everyone and then catch up. I saw that we would be taking a field trip to a scripting tutorial sim and spent some time in it ahead of time.

But as airtime approached, it suddenly (and belatedly) occurred to me that maybe the kids shouldn't watch the show live. What if there were inappropriate content? So we waited 12 minutes into the half hour to give ourselves some room and then started watching on the DVR in chase play mode, and so I teleported to class, a little late, but just as Nettrice typed, "Lori was on tv." I responded, "I might be on right now," and that's when it hit me: how many lives was I leading right then? First life/real life, already split by being at home and also online; "second life" of L1Aura Loire, present in "body" at Boga Island, although mostly distracted; and then a third existence, on tv, a persona and image as yet unrevealed to me, yet already broadcast.

Nettrice sent the class off on the field trip exercise and must have had a tivo of her own, because she typed that she had seen me on tv. A very interesting confluence of presence and absence, simultaneity and sequence: my attention shifted abruptly from my computer screen back to our television screen and we watched, rewound, watched ourselves again (slightly more than 1 minute, but I still have some time coming to get to my allotted 15 minutes of fame). Certainly television watching is different when you know you are recording it, when you know it is not just a fleeting moment of something live, that it leaves a trace, that what it means for a medium to be time-based is different.

What does it mean to my three year-old twins to be on television? They are used to seeing video of themselves on the computer in a way that I certainly was not growing up. It is a shift not unlike the first generation to have photographs of themselves when previously there were only paintings and drawings, except those first daguerrotypes were purposeful and time-consuming, and today's digital images are ubiquitous and instantaneous. It makes me think of the short story "Snow" by John Crowley, in which there is a device called a wasp that can record thousands of hours of audio and video of a person's life to be seen by their loved one's after they die, but the "memories" are not archived in a way that can be accessed deliberately, only randomly, and it seems that the moments that play for the narrator are increasingly ones of snow. One photograph can prompt a memory, sometimes becomes the memory, replacing it, rewriting it with the image at its center, but what about a dozen, hundreds, thousands? Video? My twins' three years are pretty well-documented, and they love to see themselves. How does that effect their sense of self, literally, their self images? And as avatars become one of the ways we see ourselves represented visually, how will they contribute to our changing sense of self?