Dear All,
As a number of you know, the Writing Center that I co-direct with Petra Zaus has DAAD funding for 2021. Through our DAAD project "WueGlobal - Writing, Teaching, Digital Connection" we are able to push forward on cooperative teaching projects with teaching assistants (global tutors/international writing fellows) and also put together symposium formats using the great ideas of the "Environmental Humanities" class at the Graduate School as well as a number of other ideas currently taking shape.
One thing that we proposed in the DAAD application was to connect writing skill development (the expertise of the Writing Center program to date) and teaching collaborations (the central focus of WueGlobal) with an exploration of forward-facing, public humanities efforts in podcasting and video casting. Our name for this idea is "Media-Connect Initiative." The DAAD seemed to think this was a good idea, which we are, of course, happy about. We are also glad that we called it in an "Initiative" because it signals that we want to get started on these formats rather than further building on established strengths.
However, now we actually have to take the initiative. And that is where we need your help! We are organizing training units for the core team and the tutors that are already on board in WueGlobal so that we can build up basic skills in this formats within the project. What would further help us is to have examples of podcasts, video cast, media use in the humanities that are actually good (no wobbly smart phones, mumbling monologues, uses of flying emojis or special effects generating "Fremdschämen," etc. ) and achievable with modest budgets (so the Stanford Literary Lab is probably not our model....).
So, now to get specific: As you are young, hip, super smart, and well-informed, we would love to profit from your discoveries. If examples come to mind, it would be really wonderful if you could note them down for us so that we can collect a range of positive examples to learn from and maybe even adjust the training units towards.
I have set up a google.doc for this purpose: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pDbegBZperbBsX3CAlTF_-qSfx9hUd6telVGjv-Z8d8/edit
Any and all ideas appreciated!
All the best,
MSK