Call for participants in SCMS workshop: Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Taking the Film, TV, and New Media Classroom Online

From: kelly kessler <[email protected]>

The following workshop is being proposed for inclusion in the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, which will be held in March 6-10, 2013 in Chicago. http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=upcoming_conference
Workshop: Teaching and Learning at a Distance:
Taking the Film, TV, and New Media Classroom Online


This workshop seeks to
examine the current swell in online teaching and the unique challenges encountered
by film, television, and new media professors. 
As the academic landscape shifts to more flexible and student-centric
modes of learning, online learning becomes much more attractive to both
students and higher learning institutions. Therefore, university instructors
are finding it necessary—or at least lucrative—to take their classes
online.  This shift from face-to-face to
online teaching and learning brings with it a number of preconceived biases
about the superiority of a synchronous learning environment, in-class bonding,
and effective means of higher level learning. 
As more college and university courses go online, teachers must
troubleshoot how to overcome such biases and how to bring the same quality
learning to the virtual classroom.


Film and media
professors are presented with a curious blend of advantages and disadvantages
as courses go online.  While the new
modality makes separate screening times unnecessary, allows an easy-access
platform for displaying content, and allows students to share media they find
relevant to the subject at hand, it also presents the instructor and institution
with a sticky wicket of copyright issues and new challenges with regard to
student engagement and accountability. 
Just how are today’s professors taking advantage of the online classroom
and how might they overcome some of the inherent struggles of online learning?


Topics might include but
are not limited to:


·        
Copyright issues

·        
Strategies for developing a strong classroom dynamic

·        
Creative resources for television and film content in online
teaching

·        
Integrating students’ mediated passions into effective learning

·        
Using new media to interrogate old media

·        
Twitter as an effective learning tool

·        
High and low-tech online resources

·        
Effective software for communicating media analysis

·        
Methods for creating class discussion around a piece of media (or
genre or series, etc.)

·        
Low-tech production based assignments that can be easily
communicated and posted online


Please send abstracts of
250 words along with a short bio to Kelly Kessler at [email protected] by August 10. Notifications to be sent by
August 15th.