In another lifetime I worked as a Writing Fellow through the CUNY Graduate Center. What writing fellows did (and still do, I imagine) was work with a variety of faculty from numerous disciplines to integrate writing into their course. So, for instance, I worked with both an Economics professor and a Film professor at the College of Staten Island (CSI) to integrate a variety of writing assignments, workshops, low stakes exercises, as well as help them think about assessment—oh my! At CSI this initiative had a specific name, it was called Writing Across the Curriculum, a.k.a WAC. In fact, WAC was a much broader effort that had national, if not international, reach and was a way of making writing central to the reflection process in all disciplines.
Now, this is a model that in many ways makes perfect sense for integrating digital media media across the curriculum (DMAC?). This is something Martha Burtis has been talking about ever since we started teaching ds106 in tandem during the Spring, and I absolutely believe this is a model that UMW’s DTLT should pursue rigorously over the next year or so. Work with faculty from around the university to integrate digital media assignments into their course. A few requirements off the top of my head would be they share the process of designing these assignments, they consider encouraging students to submit their own assignments to an assignment repository, and they model the assignment by doing it themselves during the semester. I was thinking we could get the Teaching Center to provide some incentives, workshops, and community support and basically have the two centers work together to see it through. I particularly like this approach because it is just one assignment to start, the stakes are low, and the possibilities for turning faculty on to the creative potential of new media is limitless.
Fact is, I think ds106 has laid the groundwork for us in UMW’s DTLTto start supporting faculty with specific disciplinary possibilities, using the platforms of internet radio (read ds106radio), streaming video (read dtlttoday), as well as UMW Blogs as community amplifiers for these assignments.
I have to give a special shout out to Jonathan Blake whose email and video (included below) reinforced how this approach might have some legs.
Hi Dr. Groom [for the record, I am not a Ph.D.],
I took your class last semester. This semester I had to create a short economics project and I just wanted to let you know that I wouldn’t have been able to do it like this without having taken your class. I used everything I learned from yours. So, thanks!!!
If you want to see it, it’s here:
What’s more, the recent NERCOMP conference that seemed to focus on digital storytelling and digital media integration into the curriculum just reinforces that this is not only timely but important to approach it as a wider programmatic, disciplinary approach to rethinking the curriculum by working directly with faculty on re-imagining some element of their existing courses.
A few weeks back, while returning from Portland, oregon—did I mention i still have an epic post about Portland to write?—I did a little experiment on my flight back East. On the first leg from Portland to Salt Lake City I bought wireless on the airplane for $12.99, thinking I would be in the air for roughly 6 or 7 hours, and it might be fun to tweet from 30,000 feet. On the short flight from Portland to SLC @Scottlo trie brining me in via Skype to his ds106radio show, but it turns the connection was not solid enough. What’s more, when i checke what applications I could and couldn’t use VOIP and Skype were forbidden, however it didn’t say anything about streaming audio. So, on the second, longer leg of the journey home from SLC to Washington, D.C. I got on the internet again an found the connection much stronger. So much so that I decided to try my Papaya app to see if I could live stream audio, and it turns out I could quite clearly. So, sticking to the wireless guidelines I figured I was totally in compliance. And below is a minute or two of this broadcast from 30,000 feet wherein I let the stewardess know she was live on ds106radio. She was not too pleased with me, she told me it was illegal to be on the radio while in the air on a plane, but I quickly countered “it’s not radio, it’s the internet ma’am.” And that is true, ds106radio both is and isn’t radio simultaneously, and my response was both preservation an a certain amount of truth. Why is radio illicit, but not Twitter or Facebook? Why streaming video, but not streaming live audio as radio? Why do we still feel the need to call ds106raio radio? I’m not sure of any of the answers, but I think that within the old metaphorical forms we use to understand the new there is both intense sense of potential and limits all at once, the 30,000 foot broadcast realized both of them immediately and intensely simultaneously. A post 9-11 broadcasted flight has strange new overtones, everywhere an everyone is always already being streamed, the vision of the future is a struggle between these points of light an strength.
