04/09/07

Kip is learning to make movies.

I took a class at UCLA that I thought was going to be about interpreting media. Turns out, the class was largely about creating media. We spent our time building websites, reading, screening, and filming. I already knew about building websites and reading. So this is about creating film.

The class was called "Women's Studies/Education 278: Critical Media Literacy & the Politics of Gender: Theory and Production." Reading all those words in that absurdly long course title, I didn't realize the last word ("production") would be the most important. Now that I'm in the middle of it, I'm glad to be learning this stuff. And it is crucial. Media overflow with ideological manipulation. Especially as technology to create and view content is so widespread, there needs to be an integrated way to teach:
 

- evaluate media products
- produce valuable media
- mediate production values

Okay, I got carried away playing with words, that's ridiculous. But you get the point.

I see what Rhonda Hammer is doing with WS/ED278 as crucial. This is as close to the future of university education as anyone has gotten. A class where the students create teaching content while the teacher connects them with resources, to create and comprehend it. Media is power, in both good and bad senses of the word. We must stare the beast in the eyes. Depending on the skills required - lighting design skills, YouTube skills, semiotics skills, podcasting skills, nunchuk skills - the teacher or the students, interchangeably, can share their experience and knowledge. 

It was a good quarter. But too hard. Can't do that again.