AUC Academic Conference 98

Introduction

The following quote returned to me as some distant memory, as though from a former academic life, when we had time for theory, when our task was to critically engage with the media rather than struggle to keep up.

Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film...its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk - the fusion of all the arts in one work. The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. (Curran, et al. (1977), p.352)

Adorno's condemnation of the technologically integrative character of television, which he regards as representative of capitalism's drive for monolithic cultural uniformity, makes me wonder what he would have said about contemporary new media. The shift from analogue to digital production technologies has enabled a far more thorough convergence of media than television could ever offer.

Now it is not only all the various media - moving and still image, sound, text, etc. - that can be technically and aesthetically integrated, but even aspects of physical and social experience itself. My concern here, however, is less with the wider cultural meaning and implications of all this, than with its consequences for teaching media production. How has convergence affected our teaching?

What kinds of opportunities and problems surround the teaching of multimedia production technologies and practices?

New facilities/new teaching

I'd like to consider this question in terms of my own experience in teaching in this area at the University of Canberra. Over the past few years, we have been making the transition from analogue to (Macintosh-based) digital production facilities. The large-scale, committed shift occurred at the beginning of this year when we replaced our darkrooms and tape-based editing facilities with the following:

G3 teaching lab (15 workstations)
2 full Media 100 systems for broadcast quality TV production
DVD video cameras and VCR
10 PowerMac 9600's networked to a 50 gig server for general multimedia production
Peripherals - film scanners, high-end digital printer, CD-Rom burners, drawing tablets, video capture cards, etc.
Software including, Photoshop, Director, Premiere, After Effects, Flash, Dreamweaver, Sound-Edit, Extreme 3D, Light-Wave, Bryce, Poser, Debabeliser, Media Cleaner Pro

Of course, this represents far more than simply an upgrading of our technical facilities. The very nature of what we teach has changed. Perhaps least affected (at this stage) is the television production component, which has simply gained a new means of doing pretty much the same thing that it has always been doing. The old photographic area, however, is completely transformed.

It has become New Media, and encompasses not only digital photography but also the whole gamut of interactive multimedia. At times New Media seems like a monstrous blob, with no sense of its own boundaries, constantly threatening to expand in every direction (if only it had time to master all the relevant software). This is the area that I am responsible for teaching.

If we had greater teaching resources, the unit could be broken up into a number of smaller units focusing on specific areas - interactive multimedia, digital photography, 2D and 3D animation, and so on - but this seems unlikely in the near future. This failure to specialise has some value. It provides students with a broad overview of the new media production field, but it also restricts their (and my own) capacity to develop professional level specialist skills - the kind of of skills that the emerging industry increasingly demands.

But I'm leaping ahead of myself. Rather than speak generally, I'd prefer to relate my comments to a specific final year New Media assessment project which the students were set in the first semester of this year. The project had a number of facets. The first task was to select some place in Canberra that interested them - whether large or small, public or private - and create a photographic portrait of the place. Students shot slide photographs, scanned them into Photoshop for editing, and then printed them out on a high-quality printer. These images provided the basis for a public exhibition.

They then also became the basis for the development of multimedia projects, which were intended to provide a more extensive exploration of their chosen place. These works tended to be structured as slideshow tours, incorporating photography, animation, digital video, and even the odd small game. Ultimately, each of the three classes produced a CD-Rom project, linking together all the individual class-member's multimedia portraits.

The students had just a single semester to do all this. The aim was to provide students with an overall sense of the creative possibilities of new media, as well as solid technical skills in digital photography and Director-based multimedia production.

Well how did things go? Although the following observations focus mainly on the various pedagogical problems which emerged, I think the unit was generally a success.

There was a need for more time - there is always a need for more time - but, overall, the students are now prepared to engage in the more specialised individual project work required in final semester. Here then are a set of notes which reflect upon aspects of my own teaching in the past semester, as a means of addressing more general predicaments and possibilities thrown up by the new technological terrain.

Too much too late

The most obvious teaching problem that I faced was how to train students to produce a project of this kind within the space of a single semester. The students had limited prior experience with some of the software (Photoshop, Premiere, and Sound-Edit), but they had never even touched Director.

The problem was how to provide them with adequate software training without making the unit narrowly software-specific and technical. Apart from this kind of training, there was also the need to address the multimedia production process more broadly, as well as to encourage and enable some kind of critical-aesthetic interrogation of multimedia products.

This made for a very full unit, and, to be honest, technical training tended to take priority, if only because that is what the students expected and demanded.

In general, it seems to have become harder and harder to maintain the traditional ideal of production units which preserve both a practical and critical-theoretical dimension. The practical area has simply grown too large.

This is particularly true of the later-year units, which have become paranoidly jam-packed in a desperate effort to prepare students for the escalating demands of the new media production workforce. There is always this feeling of providing too much information/training too late. Perhaps things will settle down in the next few years, but I'd be surprised.

Learning curves

Everybody has played with the compositing features of Photoshop. Far fewer people have good skills in tonal and colour correction. Early in the semester, I spent some weeks addressing these more mundane (but absolutely vital) aspects of digital photography. Working through these processes, it became very clear how much greater control the digital tools offered than our traditional darkroom methods.

The curves dialogue box in Photoshop enables the most incredibly precise control over tonal and colour variables, infinitely more nuanced and direct than had been possible before. Yet, in order to use this tool adequately, students require much greater conceptual understanding of tone curve characteristics and additive colour principles. Curves adjustment may be quick and simple for the expert, but for the beginner it is highly complex and difficult.

Students tended to spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with curves, struggling to develop an intuitive grasp of something that really requires non-intuitive theoretical understanding.

The same applies to the Mac operating system. To some extent it is intuitive, but at another level it is a language that requires deliberate learning. Certainly, as soon as one is faced with an extension conflict or a corrupt hard disk file, it becomes clear how much a bit of underlying conceptual understanding can help.

In many ways, the old analogue methods never seemed to raise the same quantity of immediate barriers. Even if they didn't fully understand what they were doing, students could still persevere with the work of taking a photograph, developing a film, or whatever.

The borders seemed somehow more fluid between developed skill and stumbling first-time effort. Now there are all sorts of absolute barriers and apparently irresolvable dilemmas which confront students - maze-like processes, evil dialogue boxes, hidden menu commands, system error codes, and the like. The trade-off for gaining a professional tool is professional complexity.

Professional users push for more and more sophisticated control of aspects of image, sound, and interaction, but all too often this leaves first time users stranded, unable to even bumble through to some approximate result. No one wants less control, and software manufactures are making a greater effort to facilitate different levels of proficiency, but there remain crucial problems with steep learning curves and arcane processes.

None of these problems would be too bad if it were only two or three software packages that students needed to learn, but this is not the case at all. Our students need to become competent in at least six to seven sophisticated software packages. Gaining this proficiency in the space of three years is not at all easy, especially given the difficulties of gaining access to computer facilities and all the other demands on student time.

Of course, it is not only the students who have trouble. Academic staff and technical support staff must also learn a great deal. Faculty administrators are often unaware of the level of effort required. Some kind of properly resourced approach to updating, developing, and maintaining everybody's skills is vital. This is something that we are still working on, but one of the best small steps we have taken is to establish a library of third-party training manuals in the production lab. This provides staff and students with easy access to otherwise very expensive sources of technical information.

Fear of variables

The most complex program we teach is Director. Like many other programs, it seems to be moving in two directions at once. It is becoming much easier to use in certain ways (sprite manipulation, behaviours, etc.), but in other ways it is becoming infinitely more complex, especially now that it has become integrated into the Web and linked to Java.

It is a software that students, quite sensibly, find particularly forbidding, especially when lingo gets introduced. Many a keen multimedia neophyte will draw away in horror at anything resembling programming.

This tends to be based upon grim memories of school mathematics and science subjects. It takes cunning and considerable pedagogical diplomacy to convince often very talented design students that programming can be fun, as well as a very creative activity. Better to tempt students into learning lingo than to beat them over the heads with it, insisting that they somehow grasp movie scripts, variables, lists, and the like.

I've learnt this lesson the hard way. My approach was far too direct and forceful this semester, and, as a result, many students lost their enthusiasm for multimedia production altogether. I regret not employing a more relaxed approach, allowing students to do more just using the score and pre-built behaviours.

There is a larger problem here. The lines between media production and the field of information science (computer programming) have become blurred. This is an exciting development in many ways, but it creates all kinds of problems for traditional degree structures in this area. There are not the developed links - certainly within our institution - between information science and media production programs. Many of our students combine media production with graphic design, scriptwriting, or advertising/marketing, but only one or two are doing a computing major.

The need for computer savvy media professionals is certain to increase, and this combination of skills needs to be reflected in our course offerings.

Seeing beyond the buttons

One of the standard ways of introducing lingo programming is in terms of coding button interactivity. This is how I learned things, and, even at the time, I can remember inwardly rebelling, thinking, "Who cares about buttons! I just want to learn how to make interesting projects."

All the button-stuff seemed like visual fairy-floss, an irrelevant delay to learning about what was actually creatively possible. Yet that was years ago, so what did I do this semester? I leapt straight into the buttons, dealing with simple buttons, 3D buttons, normal, rollover, and mouse-down buttons. Then I heard the students expressing exactly the same frustrations that I had expressed years ago.

Clearly, I'd made a mistake. Much better to leave the human interface guidelines until later and focus more on showing the kind of interesting things that introductory-level lingo can accomplish.

The perils of lab teaching

One of the most unsettling and difficult consequence of moving from traditional media production tutorial spaces to computer labs is that it seems to have become much harder to foster large-scale class interaction. The spatial and group dynamics have substantially changed.

Now instead of looking towards the teacher or towards becoming involved in group class activities, students tend to become immersed in their individual computer screens. Once they have logged on, it becomes very difficult to drag them away from their computers to engage in class discussion and the like. If you do manage to wrest them away, it requires such an intrusive pedagogical gesture that students will often slip into a state of shocked and appalled silence, only looking up occasionally to glance wistfully at their abandoned workstations.

Related to this problem, computer lab teaching can be very stressful for the teacher. It becomes harder to foster interaction, harder to maintain direction and control, and students tend to require far more individual attention. The tutor can often end up running from one knotty software problem to another, with scarcely a moment to catch breath.

Certainly, with 15 students or more in a lab, it becomes very difficult to perform one's allotted role adequately. Better staff/student ratios would help, but it is also a matter of insisting upon and facilitating appropriate group interaction. General demonstrations to class can help, but it is also a matter of addressing strategic groups of students, who then end up perceiving themselves as groups and helping each other out with problems.

Overall, however, this is an awkward problem, requiring careful thought to lesson structure and group dynamics, but also to the actual physical layout of labs. Certainly rows of workstations seem less appropriate than a layout based upon a number of smaller rectangles or circles.

Droning on

A related danger is that the tutor can begin to feel like a walking-talking software drone, doing nothing but perform the work of commercial software manuals. Processes need to be established which enable students to do much of their technical software learning in their own time, so that higher-level interaction can take place in the tutorials.

The setting of appropriate textbooks can help, but only to a limited extent. There is almost always a need to develop specific lessons and exercises to meet the needs of individual classes. These lessons require frequent updating as new versions of software appear and units change shape.

An additional pressure on tutors is that students seem to require much more technical assistance than in the past. I spent about two weeks at the end of semester helping students get their multimedia projects working. This involved considerable mental dexterity, as I jumped from one complex and idiosyncratically organised project to another.

I had made the mistake of becoming a kind of portable debugger. This responsibility for clearing up program bugs really needs to be left to the students, unless the prospect of a nervous breakdown has some strange appeal.

Keeping a toe in the analogue

Although we no longer have darkrooms (a source of lingering regret), setting up a hybrid photographic production facility has definitely proved worthwhile. Despite the expense, scanning film transparency originals produces better results than shooting with digital cameras.

But even more important, retaining an emphasis on paper prints provides a material manifestation and authentication of digital processes. Our Pictrography printer produces superb quality prints and enabled us to run a very successful public exhibition at a local independent cinema.

A web or CD-Rom exhibition would have been nice in ways, and is still possible, but the paper-based version seemed to provide a really important experience for the students, fostering a very direct and intimate relationship to a community audience. Screen images and virtual social spaces are becoming increasingly central, but paper and people still deserve some attention.

Creating some kind of dialogue between these two realms proved one of the most successful aspects of the initial photographic assignment.

At the end of the year, we hope to stage another exhibition. This will take a deliberately hybrid approach, combining paper, CD-Rom, and web projects. Again, dialogue is the aim, but in a specific place, for a specific community.

Conclusion

All kinds of dilemmas, false-turns, and the odd success. Our first semester of teaching New Media with new, high-level production facilities has proved very challenging, raising pedagogical issues that will take some time to adequately address.

The broader issues raise questions about the very nature of what creative activity means and involves in the digital production environment. Does it belong in the humanities, or in the sciences? Who is to say precisely where the lines can be drawn, or how helpful such lines are in sketching the character of contemporary creative practice.

And yet the lines still have a certain institutionally-grounded force, which teaching must acknowledge, even if it is only in order to question their validity.

References

Curran, J., Gurevitch, M., Woolacott, J. (1977) Mass Communication and Society. Edwin Arnold (in association with The Open University Press): London

Contact details
Dr Brogan Bunt
Lecturer in media
School of Creative Communications & Culture Studies
Faculty of Communication
The University of Canberra,
ACT 2601;
Phone: (02) 6201 5090
Fax: (02) 6201 5300
Email: bsb@conserver.canberra.edu.au

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