EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
Course Where Approach Has Been Used:
CINE 495: Film in the Age of New Media
11/8/2004
For a number of years I've taught a film studies course called Film in the Age of New Media. As in most cinema studies courses, our main objectives are to develop in students a critical awareness of the medium and the ability to analyze particular films, which is essentially the ability to explain how a film uses form, style, and cultural references to create meaning and to generate emotions and responses in viewers. The particular spin I take with Film in the Age of New Media is to study feature films that are simultaneously traditional (drawing from the classical Hollywood cinema) and innovative in their pronounced use of new media, that is, video games, computers, the Internet, and digital production and presentation technologies. Each week we watch, critique, and discuss a new film such as Forrest Gump (for its extensive digital effects), Groundhog Day (for it's video game-inspired narrative form), or Toy Story (the 1st feature-length fully digital animated film).
Students are given course credit for posting comments and analysis of each week's film. This approach has been very successful over the years, encouraging dynamic discussions and sophisticated observations both online and in class. One way I help stimulate student discussions and introduce ideas to the mix is by creating a newsletter style home page for each week and each film in the course. Although the material posted on the home page (film reviews, criticism, film web sites, recent developments in technology) is not required reading, the students seem to enjoy and utilize these resources in their online and in-class discussions. I believe that a newsletter style home page encourages students to be more active explorers of our course home page and course web site.
The weekly newsletter provides a mechanism for a number of important teaching responsibilities: selecting, editing, and annotating from among endless content. I will often chose film reviewers that disagree with one another, or else present provocative statements. I always use the online newspaper and magazine model where I post a short sentence or paragraph of a longer article or essay and then have a "more" link to the fuller resource.This helps me promote certain writers and articles and parts of articles to students, without simply providing dozens of links to students without being judicious and highlighting what I deem important. The "Site of the Week" and the "Quote of the Week" and "In the News" all provide logical channels that help me privilege some content over the myriad of other choices.
You can use the header of your Compass page for your course title or weekly segment title and announcements. The body of the page is where you add links to Compass tools and weekly assignments and information:
3 main page areas to work with inside Compass: Header:
add course and/or course section title and announcements 
image showing 3 main page areas: header, body, footeradd newsletter style home page information
- Open in a New Browser Window: For all web pages outside of my local Compass course, I always choose to have web sites open in a new browser window. This helps ensure that students don't get too far from my Compass course and that some more dynamic web sites don't open inside the limited Compass course home page area. Thus, I want external web sites to open in new windows for 3 reasons: marketing my own course; to avoid technical conflicts between Compass and advanced web pages; and, due to limited "real estate" of the Compass home page frame, I don't want to squeeze larger web sites into this limited space. The HTML command for opening links in new browser windows can be done in FrontPage by choosing Target Frame | New Window; in Dreamweaver use the "Target" dropdown and choose the "_blank" option. The HTML code for a web page to open in a new window is "_blank," displayed in red below:
- <a target="_blank" href="http://www.uiuc.edu">http://www.uiuc.edu</a>
Each week I take down my old course newsletter and archive it by adding a new Organizer page named for the week and film, and then paste the HTML code for the newsletter into the footer of that Organizer Page. The footers of Organizer Pages behave just like the footers of the Compass home page.Resources:
Tools and Information to Help
Template file to get you started: 2 Column Newsletter Template
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