Teaching

An increasingly important aspect of my teaching is devoted to theorizing and understanding the impact of digital media and technology on university education. The classes I teach at USC and the programs I have helped design serve as a laboratory for practice-based research on technology-enhanced teaching and learning.

New technologies are an indisputably significant component of learner-centered pedagogy. But a strong technological infrastructure is only as valuable as the programs through which it is implemented, which in turn find value in technology only to the extent that it is integrated organically rather than imposed from above. In recognition of my efforts in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, I was honored to receive one of two Teaching with Technology awards from the USC Provost’s office in spring 2009. This award recognized my own in-class innovations with pedagogical technologies, as well as my years of research, teaching and faculty development at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

In my own teaching, I am convinced that the most effective way to engage with digital media is through the rigorous conjunction of theory and practice. In addition to gaining a solid historical and theoretical foundation, I ask students to develop a mode of critical practice that emerges directly from their engagement with theory, rather than simply exploiting the potentials of the current generation of tools. In their creative work, I strongly encourage students to move beyond the prescribed uses of both hardware and software to defamiliarize their relation to media, bringing questions of form and content into a relationship of productive tension and dialogue.

Courses taught

CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
2008-present

CTIN 548: Preparing the Interactive Thesis Project
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
2008-present

ASIMS: Methods in Multimedia Scholarship
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication 
Summer 2009
Co-taught with Sasha Costanza-Chock (Annenberg)

COMM 620: Mobile Phones, On-Line Community, and Social Change
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication
Fall 2008-Spring 2009
A year-long multidisciplinary research seminar co-taught with François Bar (Annenberg) and Murali Annavaram (Viterbi School of Engineering)

CNTV 603: Media Arts and Practice Professionalization Seminar
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
2007-present

CTIN 478: Designing Online Multiplayer Game Environments
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
Fall 2008

CTIN 534: Experiments in Interactivity
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
Fall 2007

CTCS 505: Survey of Interactive Media
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
Fall 2005-present

ASIMS: Methods in Community-Based Multimedia
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication 
Summer 2008
Co-taught with Sasha Costanza-Chock (Annenberg)

IML 101: The Languages of New Media
Institute for Multimedia Literacy: Honors in Multimedia Scholarship
2004-2007

CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Spring 2004

CTCS 478: Technologies of Space, Time and the Body
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Fall 2003

CTCS 478: Technologies of History and Memory
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Fall 2002

Film 313: History of the American Sound Film
Loyola Marymount University
2002-2004

FVC 21: Critical Approaches to World Cinema
University of California Riverside
2000

Graduate advising

Ph.D. Dissertation advising
Veronica Paredes (SCA Media Arts and Practice) Chair
Jennifer Stein (SCA Media Arts and Practice)
Brett Service (SCA Critical Studies)
Susana Ruiz (SCA Media Arts and Practice) Chair
Jeff Watson (SCA Media Arts and Practice)
Chris Gilman (College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Slavic Languages and Literature)
 completed fall ‘10
Chris Hanson (SCA Critical Studies) completed summer ‘10
Amaranth Borsuk (College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Creative Writing)
 completed spring ‘10
Sasha Costanza-Chock (Annenberg School for Communication) 
completed spring ‘10
Elizabeth Ramsey (SCA Critical Studies) completed fall ‘09
Daniel Chamberlain (SCA Critical Studies) completed spring ’09
Andrew Syder (SCA Critical Studies) completed fall ’08
Allison de Fren (SCA Critical Studies) completed spring ’08

M.F.A. Thesis advising
Elizabeth Swensen ’11 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
Sean Bouchard ’11 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
William Graner ’11 (SCA Interactive Media)
Daniel Ponce ’11 (SCA Interactive Media)
Sarah Brin ’11 (School of Fine Arts, Public Art Studies)
Peter van Dyke ’10 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
Taiyoung Ryu ’10 (SCA Interactive Media)
 Chair
Nahil Sharkasi ’10 (SCA Interactive Media)
Jamie Antonisse ’09 (SCA Interactive Media) Chair
Maya Churi ’09 (SCA Interactive Media)
Jorge Mora Fernandez ’08 (SCA Interactive Media)
 Chair
Susana Ruiz ’06 (SCA Interactive Media)
Ashley York ’06 (SCA Interactive Media)

Mechanical Cockroach stalks Zemeckis Center

Garnet Hertz’s infamous Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot made a surprise appearance in CTCS 505: Survey of Interactive Media last night during a presentation by Critical Studies grad student Amelia Guimarin and IMD’s own Sean Bouchard. The Roachbot was Hertz’s Master’s thesis project in the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, using a Madagascan hissing cockroach that controls a modified trackball to maneuver a three-wheeled robot. I for one would like to see some IMD thesis projects explore the possibilities of cockroach as CPU.

Online Multiplayer Game class featured by SCA

A feature story on the development of Second Life spaces in support of SCA classes (including CTIN 482: Designing Online Multiplayer Game Environments) and programs (including the IML’s Honors in Multimedia Scholarship) just went live on the Cinematic Arts website.

Virtual Campus design declaration

This Wordle image is a visualization of the initial discussions in CTIN 482 about the design of a virtual campus for the School of Cinematic Arts. Wordle is a free online tool for computationally visualizing the frequency with which certain words appear within a block of text. This image was generated from the contents of the course wiki, which includes student reflections, the course syllabus and our initial design challenge. It will be interesting to see how this visualization transforms over the course of our design process. In my ongoing attempt to figure out the right mechanism(s) for documenting our design process in the class, this Vuvox document brings together a combination of images, inspirations and reflections by students on the initial design stages. Currently in beta, Vuvox functions on the principle of “cloud” computing, offering a free online tool for designing presentations and/or web-based documents. Although still slightly buggy (particularly text functions and embedded video playback), its simple authoring mode and gestural interface is a welcome relief from the page-based metaphor of Powerpoint.

Sandbox phase continues in CTIN 482

The ‘sandbox’ phase is continuing for CTIN 482 on IML2. In last night’s class, we broke up into three design and development teams to begin concrete planning of projects to populate the SCA virtual campus. To begin establishing group dynamics and workflow, each group was tasked with completing a simple lab exercise: create a simple learning object that makes use of all the basic affordances of objects in Second Life (sound and animation scripts, particle effects, textures; notecard, landmark and URL attachments, etc.).

Bjorn created sample cubes to demonstrate these basic functions and deliver the exercise parameters. Part of the exercise also involved simultaneous group construction, with multiple avatars performing modifications on the same object as a way to ingrain principles of collective authoring and to begin figuring out possible distributions of labor within the groups.

The three projects that the class decided to undertake represent a range of the kinds of learning environments and objects that we have discussed in lecture and in readings. One group will focus on designing a toolkit for teaching various principles of film production using embedded video and the interactive delivery platform of Second Life.

Another group is focusing on sound design and the potentials of designing a creative space for dynamically generating combinations of sound and visuals. Although this project veers the farthest away from the “virtual campus” mandate, the full potentials of sound in Second Life are rarely exploited and this project offers an opportunity to experiment with combinations of environmental effects, music, and event sounds embedded in a responsive environment.

The last group will research the subject of media censorship and design an analytical space for performing transmedial comparisons. The space will be architected to support media analysis based on different critical lenses, with the potential to substitute various media sets and modes of criticism.

Building begins on SCA Virtual Campus

Students in CTIN 482 have begun experimenting with building in Second Life on IML2 the Virtual Campus for the School of Cinematic Arts. In the background, we see IML1, the virtual home of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Bjorn created a smoked glass effect on the east wall so that visitors to IML1 could watch construction on the new parcel. For the initial stages of development, terraforming and building privileges are limited to students enrolled in the 482 class. Soon we will be breaking the class into design and production teams to strategize the overall concept for the island as an innovative learning space.

Students immediately began experimenting with altering the terrain of the island, creating huge pillars of granite, precipitous mountains and deep chasms.

During this free-form building session, the only rule was that all objects created should be collectively owned, with full privileges to edit, modify, delete or transform each other’s experiments. In essence, the island is currently functioning as a 3D wiki space. Unlike the class wiki, however, which has thus far functioned as a polite space for individual reflections on course readings and discussions, the SL wiki seemed to invite students to radically transform each other’s work. “How’d you do that?” became a key to sharing newly acquired skills.

Although some students had prior experience with 3D modeling in different platforms, everyone in the class is new to Second Life. This class session resulted in an incredibly steep learning curve as students began making unexpected discoveries and sharing strategies for building that ranged from creating and texturing basic shapes (prims) to exploring more advanced visual effects like glowing surfaces and simple animations.

This initial period of experimentation served to ramp up excitement about the possibilities of Second Life as a design space. The advantage of SL over other MMOG environments for conceptualizing and creating a physical environment, literally from the ground (or pixel) up, were made immediately apparent. And while educational spaces continue to proliferate in Second Life, the opportunity provided to this class of designing and building and entire land parcel as a learning environment remains unprecedented.

IML2 goes online in Second Life

The IML’s brand new 64-acre parcel of land in Second Life just went online last night in time for the first meeting of CTIN 482: Designing Online Multiplayer Game Environments. The design challenge for the class this semester is to create an innovative learning space and a set of game-based learning objects as part of a virtual campus for the School of Cinematic Arts. The new space is a tabula rasa, waiting to be terraformed, designed, developed and put into practice. From here you can see both the old and new IML spaces. If you have requests for what you’d like to see in a virtual SCA campus, now is the time to make them!

Mobile Voices project and class

Comm 620: Mobile Phones, On-Line Community, and Social Change, a year-long biweekly multidisciplinary research seminar
Instructors:
François Bar (Communication),
Steve Anderson (Cinematic Arts)
Murali Annavaram (Viterbi School of Engineering)
This seminar explores how mobile phones can serve to build on-line community, even among people who are mostly off-line. It runs in parallel with “Mobile Voices”, an academic-community partnership project to research and design a platform allowing low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. The seminar provides a venue where researchers can explore the social, theoretical and technical issues raised by Mobile Voices. Students will engage in year-long research projects, individually or in groups, structured to culminate in publication by the end of the year. Some of these projects will directly be part of Mobile Voices, but there will be room for other research projects exploring the role of mobile phones in fostering community and/or social change.
Information about Mobile Voices can be found at https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/VozMob and a syllabus-in-progress for the class at https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/VozMobClass

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Being Steve Anderson documentation

This short video documents a class presentation from CTCS 505 last fall, in which Ian, Cynthia and Taiyoung worked with students from other SCA divisions to create an immersive mobile game inspired by the Spike Jonze film Being John Malkovich. Thanks to Ian and co. for their extraordinary efforts in integrating an optical tracking system with a mobile video transmitter to maneuver the instructor around the Zemeckis Center and into chance encounters with other students bent on discussing immersive experiences. This is what interactive media is all about.

Free Culture comes to USC

Some students in the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program are starting a USC chapter of Free Culture, the national student organization devoted to promoting participatory culture and copyright reform. I included a plug for the group in an interview for Podtech on the Sony acquisition of Grouper, which also includes commentary by Chris Swain. Students who are interested in Free Culture at USC should contact Cameron Parkins: parkins [at] usc [dot] edu