Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the YouTube Generation in the Classroom

Wednesday, October 29 11:40 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the
YouTube Generation in the Classroom
Room W230CD

* Peter Decherney, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
* Renee Hobbs, Professor, Temple University
* Susan Simon, Senior Learning Technologist, Dartmouth College
* Anu Vedantham, Director, Weigle Information Commons, University of
Pennsylvania

Undergraduate video creation at American University, Dartmouth College, and University of Pennsylvania engages students from a campus-wide mashup contest to courses in several disciplines where videos replace research papers. New-media assignments have ramifications for copyright and fair use, for viral marketing, and for best practices in media education.

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Session Link

Links are to the examples and includes presentation links. The students made the videos in the lab or at home. Freshman writing seminars at Penn use video projects in small groups. They use three minute films. Groups of students use voice commentary over video to discuss race in films. They also create podcasts: interviewed restaurant owners about the best philly cheesesteak. The students are creating mashups based on anthropological studies. They have an annual mashup contest. Penn reading project: the students are required to read a book before they come back on campus over the summer. There is now a national video contest. Students are spending hours on these videos and sharing them on YouTube - there is a high level of engagement and student ownership of the learning. Teaching them to do this allows them to be critical viewers of the media and therefore critical citizens - conscious of how consent is manufactured. Cautions: they provided a lab, training, and equipment - there is no pressure on faculty - faculty do not have to train the students. How to assess? There is a link to this conversation on the webpage.

Susan Simon: They have a Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. She showed the Student Video Projects at Dartmouth website. They have an online form to help the faculty create assignments. There are also collections of previously built assignments and the student final projects. The site contains testimonials from students about the projects. "Visual argument" assignments. This website is very thorough - includes assessment, handouts, training, everything we would need at a community college to create assignments like this. They do a video project survey - we can view the questions. She discussed the benefits of group learning.

Rene Hobbs: Questions of copyright. Founder of the "Media Education Lab" at Temple University and Center for Social Media. Creating a code of best practices in copyrighted media. She asked "What is the purpose of copyright?" She said that the Const. says it is for promoting creativity. There is too much confusion in educational use guidelines. This is why they are creating this "code of best practices." "Transformative use is fair use" and favored by the course. Five principles Code of Best Practices in Fair Use - they claim that we can use any copyrighted material for educational purposes.

Peter Decherney: Talked about the DRM issues. DRM limits media tighter than the law would call for. We do not properly understand the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They proposed a class of works to be exempted. Proposed an exemption to college libraries for DVDs in their collection. Copyright as censorship. The exemption was granted to educational use in the classroom by media studies film professors. 2009 will see a number of exemption proposals.

New Media Festival Video Workshop

Spike Lee and Nokia team up for film - International Herald Tribune

Spike Lee and Nokia team up for film - International Herald Tribune: "Spike Lee and Nokia team up for film
By Laura M. Holson
Published: April 24, 2008

Who says cellphones are good only for talking? Today they are bringing together two unlikely brand names: Nokia and Spike Lee.

Lee, the director, is teaming up with Nokia, the cellphone maker, to direct a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones.

By hiring Lee for the project, Nokia is seeking to combine the populist appeal of user-generated content with the power of a famous director's pedigree. The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity."

New Media Festival

I am organizing a "New Media Festival" here at Tacoma Community College. We will design workshops for the students in new media, open source, and web 2.0 tools, have the students create media, host the media online (YouTube, PodcastPeople, iTunes, etc) but collect it all at the Tacoma Challenge. We will then give awards out in the Fall where we will show nominees and give out awards and prizes.

The purpose of this enterprise is many-fold. I am looking for a way to bring all of these great tools and resources we have on campus to the attention of the students. I want to help create cross-discipline curriculum (why can't the art dept. work with the computer music class?). I want to host all of the entries in the student news site (The Tacoma Challenge) and thereby increase the community. It will have gone from a newspaper, to a news site, to a community of people sharing ideas in completely new ways.