This fall students from Dr. Autumn Sutherlin’s CHEM 101: Consumer Chemistry class produced short infomercials introducing their subjects to a general audience.
You and your partners will create a 5-8 minute video infomercial about a Green Product. A green product is a product that claims to have little or no impact on the environment. Your final infomercial will explain the advantages and disadvantages of this product over the “non-Green” product it is replacing. You will need to consider things such as environmental impact and the cost of both the Green and Non-green Products.
This is the second year Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker has introduced digital storytelling into her PSYC 401: Psychology Seminar class. Students were asked to reflect on the skills and attributes that first led them to psychology through short media narratives.
As you work through the semester thinking about the career that will be the best fit for you, you will construct a digital story reflecting on Max Lucado’s book Cure for the Common Life. The Lucado readings will focus thinking about your work as a way to live within your God-given calling, gifts, and passion.
This has been a busy year in the Learning Studio. Since opening in 2011, we’ve offered workshops to 287 teachers from ACU and other schools and universities. Our records show that 17,278 total reservations were made to the 10 collaboration rooms in the new facility. And we’ve offered hundreds of tours to thousands of visitors interested in the design of the space and our programs.
As we wrapped up the spring semester, staff in the Learning Studio began work on our Year One Report, an interactive overview of our first year of operation. The report tells the story of many of the students and faculty we’ve worked with in Year One with examples of projects and testimonials from the participants.
As the summer winds down, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to hear a few of the stories and achievements of our students and faculty this first year.
(Note: To view embedded video and interactive content, make sure to download the iBook Version. Apple iBooks require an iPad running the iBooks 2 app and are not currently viewable on a Mac, PC or smartphone.)
Highlights
The 35-page report includes interviews and projects from 35 faculty and students
Our 8,800 square foot facility is presented from early design sketches to a full virtual tour
7 content galleries and 14 movies—including the Year One feature video—introduce major projects
A “by the numbers” section summarizes facility usage, workshops participation and equipment checkout
About the Report
Learning Studio staff produced the Year One Report using iBooks Author for display on iPad, in part to better understand the software and assess its potential in producing next-generation learning content.
On September 19th, we’ll be presenting on the process in an NMC Connect webinar hosted by the New Media Consortium. We’ll post more details when we have them to Twitter and Facebook.
Last fall, Lawson Soward and Caitlin Bradford submitted their first film to the Sundance Film Festival. It started with a conversation in January 2011 about a story idea Caitlin had been chewing on. The two of them began artistic design for the production in our screening room during the student grand opening in February. Lawson was the first in line in March when Canon made DSLR cameras available for checkout to student filmmakers. And the two of them spent Spring Break editing in the media lab where Adobe After Effects made the final montage possible.
Since 2004, students have produced 100 films for ACU’s FilmFest, a student short-film competition. The contest began as an iMovie contest with Apple providing access to iMacs and digital camcorders. By 2011, most entries were edited on Apple’s FinalCut Pro, so the move to DSLR cameras shooting HD video was a natural next step. Paul McAniff from Canon joined us for a pro video workshop the week before FilmFest officially kicked off, making Canon 5D bodies and pro-series lenses available for checkout through the Learning Studio.
The result of this unprecedented access and opportunity is a film like “Hazel & Jack.” At the FilmFest premiere downtown at the historic Paramount theatre, Lawson and Caitlin went home with 10 awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writer. The film wowed industry judges at the symposium the next day, where Randy Brewer, executive producer at Revolution Pictures in Nashville, Tenn., was the first to encourage them to submit their film to other festivals like SXSW and Sundance. “FilmFest was exciting to be a part of this year due to the beautiful photography in a lot of the pieces,” said Brewer. “I use the Canon 5D in music videos I shoot with major artists and the increased image quality really showed in the student films.”
This fall students from Dr. John Ehrke’s section of MATH 361: Ordinary Differential Equations course produced the following video assignments.