Prize Recipient: Steven Anderson
Title: Director of USC’s Ph.D. Program in Media Arts and Practice and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media
School: USC School of Cinematic Arts
Department(s) or Affiliation: Media Arts and Practice
Anderson was recognized for three USC academic programs that make innovative uses of media and technology in the classroom: Multimedia in the Core and Multimedia across the College; Honors in Multimedia Scholarship; and the Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. program. The Multimedia in the Core and Multimedia across the College program has integrated media-based authoring into more than 80 courses at USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in the past three years, contributing to the education of more than 2,000 students. The Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program integrates a range of multimedia authoring tools and platforms into a student’s course of study. The Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. program is one of only a handful of programs nationwide that aim to foster the development of the next generation of media and technology-enhanced scholarship.
Anderson has also developed Critical Commons, an online media sharing tool that facilitates the sharing, annotating, and curating of media for classroom teaching, while simultaneously informing educators about their rights and responsibilities under fair use.
Prize Recipient: Virginia Kuhn
Title: Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and Research Assistant Professor
School: USC School of Cinematic Arts
Department(s) or Affiliation: Institute of Multimedia Literacy
Kuhn was acknowledged for creating a new course in the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, titled “The Praxis of New Media,” which investigates the close interrelationships among technology, semiotics, and culture in order to form a solid foundation for scholarly multimedia authoring. The course’s main goal is to provide students from diverse backgrounds with a critical understanding of how to create and interpret media.
This year, Kuhn’s course centered on the original documentary film Iraqi Doctors: On the Front Lines of Medicine. Students learned to use sound, images, and database materials to construct new endings—and new meanings—for a partially shot documentary about doctors in wartime Iraq.