A Review of DigC202
Honestly, hands down, best work yet. The bar has been raised yet again in the DigC major. After last session’s gaming presentations, I thought the group would be hard-pressed coming up with innovative and new ways of pitching ideas. Very, very wrong! This class is a great example of the way in which new media can facilitate learning, changing the old-school lecture format and actually having students participate and engage with the material. It reminds me of Rheingold’s (2009) ‘Participatory Pedagogy’ article and the way in which participation and the skills in digital literacy are simultaneously being taught at the same time as the subject material. When I was at high school, I had a number of subjects that I knew I would never pursue later in life and saw as completely redundant. The answer from my teacher was that I was correct, I would probably never pursue a career in physiological sciences, nor find myself in the situation where I needed to quote the third verse from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (which by chance, I did find myself in that situation recently, thank you Ms Carmichael). What I was learning was how to learn, discipline and methodology. The content was largely irrelevant (although fabulous for trivia). In no way am I suggesting this session’s work has been irrelevant, far from it. It’s the most relevant course I’ve come across in my tertiary academic education. But what have been even more significant are the skills that I have amassed along the way. I feel that I have a competent level of digital literacy (Rheingold, 2009) after finishing this session.
The projects were all outstanding. Not one group disappointed. The boys’ presentation on Xbox Live was amazing. Their use of TinyChat for a web conference worked really well and highlighted how the medium could be viably used in gaming. The YouTube group’s analysis of the company from a commercial aspect in the form of a documentary was very engaging. I particularly liked the linking of research material and group commentary. The third group, Globama, were exceptional. The approach that they took to dissecting the entire campaign was new and gave a new perspective on the campaign. Analysing past president’s media use was a very clever idea, and the theoretical foundations that underpinned it gave a solid foundation for the presentation. Our group’s presentation successfully delivered all the concepts and ideas we wished to address. Part of this came from the fact that our project actually succeeded far beyond what we imagined. In our pitch, things were looking a little shaky, largely because we had very few visitors to the site Film Voir and couldn’t comment on user behaviour. Upon checking today, Film Voir has had 653 visitors, with users still signing up to the fan page on Facebook. Having data to work with made our presentation far easier and provided us with fresh new material to discuss. Our choice to build a media kit stemmed purely from the very media-oriented nature of our web-celebrity project. We had so much fun shooting the ‘mockumentary’ and are all really proud of the work we produced. We may have just opened up an entire new can of worms though, with the assignment looking like a really solid preliminary basis for next year’s major works.
References:
Rheingold, H, 2009. Participative Pedagogy: for a literacy of literacies, http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html, accessed 31/10/09
