MediamakingTechniques

Contents 1 Outline 1.1 Year One 1.2 Year Two 1.3 Year Three

Outline

This is the moment of plunging in and making stuff.

This often happens in collaboration with others. This invariably involves both creativity and research skills. This takes place in a back-and-forth movement with processes of reflection and critique.

This page is about the technical and creative competencies that we teach. It provides an overview of the skills or practices, the ways of doing, that we teach and rely upon. This includes theoretical or critical competencies as well, since we regard these as complimentary literacies to what is often naively described as technical practice.=A Grid of Practice (what doings we do when)= This outlines the technical we use and where they occur. All literacies are progressive in that each builds on the other and later subjects assume and rely on these literacies for tasks undertaken. In the table that follows critical, theoretical and reflective practices are implied in the application of each of these things that we do - they are not just technical skills.

Year One

introductory computer use

might seem obvious but the number of students who think they know how to use their computers, but then when you ask them to do something specific like "create a word document, name it x, and save it in a folder inside a folder inside a folder with these names" a surprising number have no idea. And then there's the RMIT specific network use, shortcuts for using our OS X based labs, connected to servers, saving copies of work, network etiquette and so on. (network literacy)

basic audio and image use

all students use 'domestic technology' (as of 2007 iMacs and primarily Apple's iLife suite) to learn how to record, capture, edit, compress and export photos, video and audio to physical and online media. This is done on the assumption that regardless of which traditional broadcast media (tv or radio) you may undertake in future years a basic understanding of all media should be foundational. This we regard as a very basic technical media literacy.

introductory HTML and web authoring

hand writing of HTML code. This is done to familiarise students with the basic principals of html as a tagged markup language and the nested structures it requires. This lets them be able to customise their future blogs and provides the minimal web literacy for future online activities. (network literacy)

basic blogging

all students are provided with a public, individual fully featured blog and learn how to post, edit, link, maintain a blogroll, add images and video, and add basic templates to their blogs. The blog is then used throughout the rest of the student's learning career as the site for reflection, documenation, social and professional networking and the publication of their work. At this point blogs are only expected to be online journals and there is no expectation or requirement for them to be 'blog like' (deeply intertwingled with the network). (network literacy)

Year Two

wiki writing

students may use a wiki to write, publish and edit collaborative research projects. This requires students to experience collaboration in writing and research, helps move them from being information consumers to knowledge producers, and further develops their research, critical and creative skills. (network literacy)

online interactive video

students use simple software to create interactive QuickTime works that are multilinear and can combine text, video and audio. The works have links and are porous in relation to traditional media. (network literacy)

blogging

while students are introduced to blogging in year one it is year two where the blogs move from being only an online journal into something that is much more network aware and integrated. This is modelled and supported. (network literacy)

Year Three