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multimedia

Africa, China, and Globalization

January 23, 2018

by Duncan Yoon
Fall 2017

Africa, China, and Globalization was a First Year Interdisciplinary Seminar taught by Professor Duncan Yoon in the Fall of 2017. Over the course of the semester students combined traditional humanities and social science curriculum with the software platform, Story Maps—an ArcGIS (Geographic Information Systems) presentation software that harnesses the power of digital mapping and other multimedia visualizations. In conjunction with Data Services at Bobst, and the expertise of Himanshu Mistry and Michelle Thompson, students took workshops that trained them in the technical skill set necessary to run Story Maps. These workshops also introduced students to the larger world of digital mapping and “spatial reasoning.”

“These projects are not only visually stimulating, they are academically rigorous in the spirit of Gallatin’s commitment to interdisciplinarity.”

In the seminar, students chose an African country and topic linked to Chinese involvement upon which to focus. They compiled an annotated bibliography that included both traditional scholarly sources as well as multimedia. The semester’s research culminated in a digital project. Instead of a classic term paper, students created a Story Map of 2500 words and at least 15 multimedia visualizations. These projects are not only visually stimulating, they are academically rigorous in the spirit of Gallatin’s commitment to interdisciplinarity. Students now have an example of both a technical skill and their critical thought, which they can store in their E-Portfolio for future career aspirations.

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Imagining the Library

December 25, 2017

Greg Erickson
Spring 2017

Having received positive feedback about students’ use of Web Publishing in his previous courses, Prof. Gregory Erickson once again implemented the platform in his newly designed course, Imagining the Library, taught in the Spring of 2017.

The course invited students to “imagine a library,” by asking a series of questions: “What is worth preserving? Who has access to certain information? How do we organize this information?” The main goal of the course is to aid students in developing and writing a final research paper.

In addition to functioning as a hub for all course-related materials, the website provided students with a communal arena for sharing weekly responses, project ideas, and research questions with one another. The majority of students who responded to our end-of-semester survey indicated having used the website to, amongst other things, viewing work posted by their peers.

Making use of the platform’s multimedia capabilities, students published posts detailing their own imagined libraries, outlining their research questions and methodologies, and responding to a variety of prompts.

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The Consumerist Gaze

June 23, 2017

Lisa Daily
Spring 2017

The Consumerist Gaze was a course taught by Prof. Lisa Daily in the Spring 2017 term that focused on how commodity images play a role in the process of production and consumption. This course was particularly focused on exploring the notion of “the gaze” from different theoretical and cultural stances with regard to global capitalism. The course structure required students to go through different kinds of textual materials, videos, movies, case studies, and images, an approach that  enables students to take a reflective approach while analyzing these resources. As part of the weekly assignments, students were required to write blog posts based on their critical evaluation of the readings and other cultural materials. Such blogging assignments can act as pre-writing activities for longer writing assignments, and have the additional benefits of facilitating close reading, creating transparency and dialogue between students, and encouraging the development of learning communities.

Professor Daily and her students used NYU’s Web Publishing platform to share the readings, blog entries, ethnographic studies and final projects. Students also created an archive of images that they had collected throughout the semester. The images were based on the theme of the role of the consumer’s gaze in commodity markets and capitalist economies. To execute these tasks effectively, some of the plugins that were used while creating the course site were NextGEN Gallery by Photocrati, User-Submitted Posts, Image Wall, Doc Embedder, Attachment Importer, etc. The use of different kinds of technological resources helped the students and instructor share their work and engage in meaningful class discussions.

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