I’ve been working with my colleagues at NeoVox developing our new site, which I had hoped to get going this semester, but now obviously we begin in the fall. We’re using Movable Type for the students to post entries, to encourage interactivity with commenting, and to ease the production process. However, we don’t want the site to look like a blog (not that there’s anything wrong with that, right?). And we don’t necessarily want to look like a commercial magazine (e.g. Salon) or like a news site, even though those are obvious examples for us to draw upon in some respects.

We have three primary variables we need to consider in our design:

1. Our students: so far our students come primarily from the Art department’s new media design major and the professional writing major. We need to expand to increase both the variety of majors and the general number of students involved. Predominantly, those students will be producing text content for the site and will be almost totally inexperienced with web production. The big question is what will they write?
2. Our content: the answer is our second variable. We will be expanding our range of media to include podcasting and video blogging (hopefully we’ll interest some of the communications majors who have background in this stuff). However, the bigger question is not the media but the content (if you’ll allow me the illusory distinction). The general purpose of the site is to provide a "college" perspective/voice on issues from current events to popular culture to campus life. We’ve published on a weekly basis, but perhaps there’s no need to do that. Or perhaps we could have a varied publishing schedule, like a blog. With our hoped for influx of writers, there will be more material than our designers can design for. Fortunately, Moveable Type will allow for easy publication of these texts. Then, we can focus our design team on a monthly publication related to the blog.
3. Our audience? Good question. It’s more a question of who we want our audience to be. We can begin with improving name recognition for the magazine right here on campus. Then we need to think strategically. One thought that’s stayed with me is targeting SUNY campuses across the state; that’s some 400,000 students. We might even do some section on SUNY-specific and New York state news/events.

So how does all this relate to the idea of a killer teaching app? I
suppose that’s my interest in the project. It will be tough to get
anything to work at Cortland. We don’t have many Humanities students,
who would be the most likely demographic to join us. Though we have had
a lot of great technical support, our campus culture is not one that is
particularly excited about adopting new technologies (though I suppose
many campuses are like that). So, if I can make it work here…

The point, btw, is not that the magazine itself is an application.
It’s the product of an application. The killer application is figuring
out how to use design tools, networks, and databases to bring students
from across the campus together to compose an extensible new media
object. I am thinking of the following parts/features:

• a database of media as raw material which would of course
  include the Web, library databases, and materials developed by students;
• a wiki-like ability for collaborative composition (in a variety of media) to promote ongoing collective projects;
• a blog-like ability for singular recording (in a variety of media) that extends into collective exchange;
• media-production capacity to produce and edit images, sound, and video;
• and a means for publication/distribution.

Of course, this functionality exists through the use of a
constellation of applications and peripherals.  Clearly it would be the
rare student (or faculty member for that matter) who was well-versed in
each area. It is for this reason that projects become collaborative. A
project like NeoVox then becomes an organizing structure for gathering and distributing student work.

Why do I think this such a move is significant? Well, if you look at
the typical use of the technology in a humanities classroom, you might
see a CMS (e.g. WebCT) with a threaded discussions, maybe online
assignments and quizzes. You might see students and professors giving
PowerPoint presentations (yeech!). The key to the CMS is the "m" for
management. The CMS gives us carefully orchestrated discussions with
verifiable attributions of authorship/intellectual property. The
PowerPoint presentation gives us a related rational, linear object
where the text (at least in theory) is subordinate to the spoken word
(even if in practice the opposite often happens).

The blog and the wiki provide dynamic collective textual production.
They allow technical practices to develop organically. The integration
of other media at least offer the potential of moving beyond the
auspices of print rhetoric. Specifically, typical educational media
allow for the reinforcement of disciplinary conventions: the instructor
sets the scope of the CMS conversation; the PowerPoint follows its
linear path remediated to the practices of the oral presentation. The
integrated application I am describing takes disciplianry knowledges,
with their arbitrary boundaries, as material for editing and
recombination: rinse and re-use.

This is what I am hoping will happen with NeoVox. It’s not
the conventional disciplinary connections where history helps us
understand literature, which helps us with psychology, which helps us
with communications, etc. Instead its understanding that history,
literature, psychology, communications, and all the rest come to
students as texts, other media, methods, and practices that are mixed
together and shaken out onto a new plane where they are subject to an
entirely new set of technological operations. The result, again
hopefully, is a new set of new media rhetorics–practices of knowledge
production and communication–that understands the intersections
between the student body (both singular and collective), information,
technology, and subjectiviy in a new way that leads us beyond the
limits of the modern university.

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