GIF from In the Mood for Love I wrote several months ago about the experience of working alongside UMW’s Chinese History scholar Sue Fernsebner to start imagining how she might integrate animated GIFs into a curriculum centered around film analysis. I tongue-and-cheek referred to it as GIFiculum, or GIF as curriculum. Sue has been doing some serious work on this front, and she recently emailed me about how she will be re-structuring her Chinese History through Film course to make the GIF work central to the film analysis in the final paper. Framing it, to use Sue’s words, as “an exercise in visual and thematic analysis.” How cool is this? A few of us from DTLT will be heading to her class around mid-semester to run a workshop for the students on creating GIFs. This is something Andy Rush and I did last semester and it was a blast. There will also be a GIF Awards ceremony the final week of the course to collectively analyze and discuss what makes an effective “visual and … [Read more...]
All aboard, hippies! Next stop: UMW
It’s official, so I can finally share the good news: this summer I’ll be moving to Fredericksburg, Virginia to work with Lisa Ames, Martha Burtis, Jim Groom, Tim Owens, and Andy Rush as well as an amazing group of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Mary Washington. The DTLT and the people they support are doing really amazing work (UMW Blogs, Domain of One’s Own, DS106, DTLT Today, the ThinkLab makerspace, etc) and I am totally thrilled to join what I consider to be the best damn edtech shop around. I don’t have a whole lot of brainpower at the moment, but I want to take just a second to thank someone who has been an integral part of my getting to this point. To Barbara Sawhill: thank you for all you have done to push, cajole, thwap, and encourage me lo these many years. (Okay, so it’s only been eight years, but I think we’d both agree it feels like longer.) If I have seen further it is by standing on your shoulders, and I am … [Read more...]