26 April, 2004
Generally, my work at the Media Centre falls into three categories: research, production and training. Plus the occasional administrative task like this.
The research I do is more R&D than science, looking for practical solutions to some of the educational and technological questions we face here at the Media Centre. Questions like "how can I train a dozen people in multimedia production and use them to create usable educational multimedia at the same time without spending any money?" (The Role of Division of Labor in an In-situ Multimedia-training Project: a South Pacific Case Study) or "what do we have to do to make this stuff actually useful for students here?" (Cultural Pedagogy and Usability of New Media in the South Pacific) or "how can I create a free tool that will make it easier for staff and students to create web pages" (Open Source Content Management Tools for USP).
The production side of my job involves creating educational multimedia for learning here at USP. I've made animations about seaweed, a CD-rom on technical drawing, an interactive map/ timeline of the pacific, some interactive video, etc. As I am the only member of the multimedia unit, I usually have to find ways to wheedle time out of others in exchange for training.
Training can be a black hole for time here. training took up a disproportionate amount of my first year, so I have scaled back my training since then to allow for the rest of my job to progress. Mostly I teach "just-enough" workshops, short trainings on how to search on the Internet or how to build a web page. These range from one-offs that last a few hours to weekly classes that last a few months.
I am generally quite happy with my job here. The work is interesting and the quality is high. The major change I would like to see is another fulltime employee in the Multimedia Unit.
My first year was dominated by training, my second year has been dominated by research and development, and I would like my third year to be dominated by production.
I'll outline a few other specific areas I would like to focus on below.
We are doing some exciting things here at the Media Centre, and if more people knew what was possible, we could do even more. I'd like to help achieve this through a series of creative workshops, some academic papers, and some mainstream articles.
I would like to extend the Media Centre's outreach and publicity by running a few creative, hands-on workshops:
As my current research and development project draws to a close, I'll need (and want) to publish a few papers on this in academic journals. I'd also like to write some articles for mainstream press to widen the audience and impact. It is important that people think about the cultural and pedagogical side of educational technology here in the South Pacific rather than importing wholesale the methodologies of "the west."
Although many people are quite eager to work on projects with me, their own work responsibilities take priority, so it can be hard to rely on them. I could achieve a lot more if there were someone else to work with in the multimedia unit. It would also help me pass on the knowledge to a local person in a more meaningful way than the sporadic training sessions achieve. Shalen showed interest (and promise) when he worked with me during the interim between terms, and Sangeeta is always a pleasure to work with.
To ensure my technical skills remain valid, I'd like to do some work with DVD, some Open Source Content Management System work, and some work integrating XML and PHP with rich media like Macromedia Flash and Director. I also want to publish in both mainstream and academic press.
I'd also like to look into taking an experimental statistics course, a research methodology course, and/or ED253/ED353, which look at Pacific approaches to teaching and learning.