MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition

Having had much time to write here (pretty obvious I think). I’ve been working hard on a grant application for this Digital Media and Learning Competition for our NeoVox Project. Anything with MacArthur is likely to be highly competitive, but I believe we’ve got a strong idea.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell. Since 1999, NeoVox has operated as an "international college student magazine." Usually we have worked with faculty at various institutions to have their students submit work and collaborate with our students. Occasionally students have submitted material on their own. It’s worked out fairly well.

My idea, however, was to intensify the level of collaboration possible between students and faculty by building a website that encourages greater participation. Currently, all you get to see is the end product. My idea is to have the entire collaboration take place online in a participatory fashion. We are proposing to work with faculty at institutions in Turkey, China, Kenya, Peru, and Costa Rica (places where Cortland already has institutional relations). We would collaboratively decide upon a couple themes that have global dimensions (e.g. poverty, environment, education, etc.). Working within the context of courses, students from these institutions would meet online and discuss potential, specific projects and tasks to undertake. They would then carry out these tasks and upload raw material (in the form of text, video, image, audio, etc.) to the site. This material would then be discussed. Finally students would use the uploaded material as a media database for creating multimedia productions for publication in the magazine. As a result, every piece could include media from each of the institutions.

Clearly we will face issues of translation in some of these instances. We do have plans for working that out. In fact there will be a number of challenges to engaging in this level of coordination. That’s why we’re looking for external support to move in this direction. At the same time I think it’s a great opportunity to combine international education and digital literacy.