Penn State New Kensington students may not be traveling to Turkey this year for the annual Country of Focus program, but they will still be connecting to the country through the creation of multimedia projects.
“I think it’s really nice when you can bring two campus initiatives together, in this case increasing our global focus for our students, but also increasing the use of multimedia,” said Deborah Sillman, instructional designer and Biology faculty member at Penn State New Kensington. “Helping our students become digitally literate is awesome when you can put those two things together in a nice package and encourage faculty to kill two birds with one stone.”
The Country of Focus, which began in 2007 and is a campus-wide program, has incorporated many trips to different countries (see map below), including, but not limited to, China, India, Ireland, UK, Kenya, Spain, and Tanzania. This year, use of multimedia is spotlighted, and the campus will continue to sponsor numerous cultural events, which usually involve food and music from the chosen country, according to Sillman.
A collaborative workshop was created at the beginning of the academic year to introduce faculty to various ways they could use multimedia to help their students study Turkey without actually having to travel to the country. This presentation was made possible by Sillman; Amy Rustic, Penn State New Kensington’s reference and instruction librarian; and Nick Smerker, a traveling Media Commons consultant for Penn State’s western campuses.
“It was a really good chance for each of us to bring our unique skill set to a single presentation,” Smerker said. “And a good opportunity to use some of the collaborative tools that we have at our disposal at the University to work remotely on this.”
Seven instructors from various departments, ranging from Women’s Studies to Biology, attended the workshop, which was held on Sept. 9. Smerker said that the workshop went very well, and instructors shared firsthand insight into what has worked, what has not worked, and potential areas of success for using multimedia projects. One instructor in attendance had never done a multimedia project in the classroom and said the feedback was helpful.
According to Rustic, who also serves as chair of the International Committee for Penn State New Kensington, the instructors who had already used multimedia were excited to explore other ways to strengthen their courses. Some new faculty members were slightly hesitant to integrate multimedia projects in their courses. “For faculty who are kind of hesitant or nervous about using multimedia, I think that having that kind of session on campus definitely helps put them more at ease,” Rustic said.
Rustic said that the creation of multimedia projects is very important for students. It helps them gain not only international literacy, but also helps them with their media, digital, and information literacies. In most cases, students are already very familiar with writing a research paper or creating a PowerPoint presentation, but they are not necessarily that knowledgeable about multimedia, Smerker said. As opposed to doing a traditional research project, multimedia allows students to dig a lot deeper when researching, which allows them to think a lot harder about what they know and do not know about a topic.
“I think they get more of a feel for another country when they are looking at multimedia, when they are looking at video, audio, and still images from that country,” Sillman said. “I think they’re getting an emotional connection to the country by having them look at that country from a multimedia standpoint.”
“We are all inundated in media, specifically video media, but also other forms of multimedia, on a regular basis,” Smerker said. “I think that it’s very important for students to understand how to produce those forms of media in their future careers, as more and more people are being asked to produce multimedia in addition to traditional forms of communication as part of their jobs.”
One multimedia project this year is BIOL 110’s national park project, which has been conducted for the past four years. BIOL 110, which Sillman teaches, along with William Hamilton, assistant professor of Biology, encourages students to explore a national park in the chosen Country of Focus. The BIOL 110 students conduct library research, locate images, and learn about copyright issues.
In the past, students who traveled to Ireland worked on multimedia assignments with the use of Media Commons iPads they had borrowed, Rustic said. These students created projects featuring various aspects of Ireland, such as castles and Irish dances. Below is one multimedia project a student created after the trip to Ireland in 2013.
Students at New Kensington have access to campus iPads now, along with many types of video and editing equipment available in the Media Commons, to use for their projects. According to Sillman, she always encourages students who are new to multimedia projects to use either iMovie or Windows Movie Maker on campus. For the more advanced students, there is Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro.
“I think the cool thing with so many of the devices being mobile now is that it’s really easy for students to record their experiences while they are actually traveling and then come back with video and pictures and actually put it together as a presentation,” Sillman said.
(Original article by Emma Stuck for Teaching and Learning with Technology)