Digital Commons at Penn State

Dr. Peter Froehlich and Dr. Maggie Froehlich assign one podcast and one video in their four sections of English 15 taught at Hazleton.

The podcast is a podcast narrative highlighting a year in American history (post 1945) of the students choosing.  For the video, the students were put into groups by era (e.g. the early 1990s) to create a 10-minute video narrative based on their combined years.

About the Course Project

Course: ENGL 15 – Rhetoric and Composition
Instructor: Maggie Gordon Froehlich and Peter Alan Froehlich, Hazleton
Number of Students: 80+ students across four sections
Semester: Spring 2009
Duration of Assignment: 4 weeks for podcast and 5 weeks for video

Benefits

Students exposed to writing for new media. Students uploading podcasts to iTunes have a better sense of who the “audience” is in terms of writing.

Because iMovie 09 no longer encapsulates media into the project file like iMovie 06, the procedure to backup an iMovie 09 project and media is slightly different than just copying a single file to the Digital Commons Server.

iMovie 09 will autosave all of its data into the users Movies folder. You will notice that there are a number of folders created. Each one has a special purpose and must not be renamed or else iMovie 09 will stop working.

The iMovie Events folder contains all of the media imported into a project.

The iMovie Projects folder will contain all of the actual edit information.

If you have Shared a project out to another program, it may also appear in your Movies folder.

I consider myself something of a political junkie. So needless to say as a creator or digital content I was very intrigued by the YouTube presidential debates. The general public would finally have a voice in the debates, or so it was advertised – but is that really what happened?

After watching the second debate last night I realized that in trimming over 5,000 questions down to around 20 to be asked during the broadcast CNN often chose the questions which had high production values. Choosing the best looking questions rather than the best questions makes sense; television is after all a visual medium. From an animated Dick Cheney, to a head super-imposed on a dollar bill the people who took the time to make their presentation unique were the ones rewarded with having their questions asked on air. That is not to say that the questions with high production values were the only ones asked, or that they were bad questions, but the best way to get your question noticed seemed to be having a great presentation.

Digital Commons Orientation

Duration: 40 Minutes

Equipment Safety

• How to handle the lights including heat warnings and not touching the lamps (Use Sand bags to prevent lights from falling over)
• Camera Lens Cover
• Tripod Quick Release (Click or Lock into place and test before letting go)

Equipment Overview

• Camera uses and limitations
• 3 point lighting setup (we can set this up prior to the training and just show them how it works)
• Function of the Podcasting microphones
• Functions of the Editing Systems

Time Management

• Pre-Production
• Production
• Post-Production