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Issue: Spring 2004 Requiem for the Term Paper - Reading, Writing and Web-Authoring The tactful phrase “technology-challenged” is actually a euphemism for 21st-century illiteracy, say USC missionaries of multimedia. They’re spreading the word one course at a time.
It began with a provocative question posed by filmmaker George Lucas ’66 to USC cinema-television dean Elizabeth Daley: If students don’t start learning to read and write in the cinematic language, the vernacular of sound and images, won’t they soon be considered as illiterate as students a generation ago who couldn’t read or write a sentence? Lucas wasn’t just talking about film students. He meant all students in the Information Age. “Not to have any idea that there are rules and grammar and theories that operate the same as they do in written language is putting [students] at a great disadvantage,” Lucas told the New York Times in a Nov. 9 feature article on USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (www.iml.annenberg.edu). Daley, who is also executive director of the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, launched IML in 1998. Six years later, hundreds of projects that have flowed from the institute directly address Lucas’ concern. Take “St. Petersburg Central,” produced for Russian literature professor Marcus Levitt’s class in 2000 by Matt Corbitt ’04, Brian Omura ’02, Michelle Stuckey ’02 and Alexis Lamb ’01. The students assembled elements from a rich mix of online media: maps, photos, film, paintings. The opening display shows a detailed street map of the czarist capital where Crime and Punishment takes place; alongside is a menu of the novel’s major characters. Selecting Raskolnikov displays the tortured protagonist’s geographical movement through the narrative. Select a map point and, startlingly, a photo pops up showing the building in question. Additional links give carefully sourced footnotes, from background on the characters to the architectural history of the city. Another IML-assisted project, “Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz,” brings to life the history of blackface comedy. Created for an American studies course, the striking montage of sights and sounds links racial stereotypes from Al Jolson’s minstrel shows to actor Jimmy Walker’s clowning in the ’70s-era sitcom, “Good Times.” A project by art history doctoral student Linda Nolan virtually dusts off the ancient Baths of Caracalla. Julie Moffitt’s project for an American lit course “recovers” – through letters, photos and audio interviews – the memory of her grandmother, a woman she never knew. “Consuming Shanghai” presents an interactive collage of the city’s sights and sounds circa 1930; yet another reconstructs the history of Japanese internment through oral histories, archival footage of camps and interactive maps. IML program specialist Karen Voss MA ’96, who works with faculty on projects such as these, smiles if you ask her whether they’re mere stunts pandering to Web trendiness. “You can pull an all-nighter to write a paper,” she notes, “but nobody can do a project like this as an all-nighter.” Voss points to a tradition already taking root in the IML-assisted classes. At the end of each semester, students create souvenir CDs containing all their projects. “You would be amazed at the amount of energy that goes into designing these,” she says. This scholarly dedication presents IML with an unprecedented problem. Some students simply won’t leave. “After the semester is over, they come back and want to keep working on their projects, even after they’ve gotten a grade,” says IML director Stephanie Barish. In recent months, the presidents of Scripps College and the University of Michigan, along with MacArthur Foundation officials, have visited IML. Like Caltech, Cal State University and Pepperdine University, Scripps and Michigan are partnering with USC to introduce similar programs at their institutions.
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