Multimedia in the Core, a pilot program launched in fall 2006, brings multimedia instruction to general education at USC College. Press play above to view a video introduction to Multimedia in the Core. To view a gallery of student multimedia projects, click here.
USC College and the School of Cinematic Arts join together to put multimedia tools into the hands of more undergraduates
By Pamela J. Johnson January 2007
Louis de Berniéres wrote that love is a temporary madness.
St. Augustine said that love is the beauty of the soul. Still, Lope de Vega said harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto.
But what if you had to explain love in a picture? The assignment for the multimedia lab class had been to bring in a powerful image representing love.
“We’re going to ask you to think visually in a way that you’ve never done before,” Allison de Fren told her class last semester at Taper Hall.
Each student sat at a large computer screen depicting images such as an iPod, the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album, a mother breastfeeding her baby and primates snuggling.
De Fren was a teaching assistant in a pilot program launched this fall, dubbed Multimedia in the Core. The program extends USC’s multimedia pedagogy from a select group of students to the undergraduate community at large.
This academic year, as many as 420 students will take seven general education (G.E.) courses that offer hands-on experience in multimedia authorship. The program will expand next year.
The enterprise is a joint effort between USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences and the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML). A leader in undergraduate education, USC is the first university to incorporate multimedia curriculum in a wide variety of courses — from earthquakes to early American Indian history. Only a few universities offer a spattering of G.E. courses involving multimedia projects.
“USC’s emphasis in multimedia literacy is very much a pacesetter within academia,” said USC Provost C.L. Max Nikias, who launched the program. “The very nature of literacy has evolved dramatically in a short period of time. I’m proud that we’ve placed USC’s intellectual community at the forefront of efforts to understand and guide these monumental changes.”
Nikias called the program “a model for cross-disciplinary collaboration on the part of our cinema school and the College.”
To support the effort, the College built two multimedia labs where students can work and check out equipment such as digital cameras, video cameras and sound-recording gear.
Inside the lab, the image covering 23-year-old senior Kirk Sullivan’s computer screen depicted Britney Spears and Madonna during the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards. To Sullivan, that image represented love.
For his multimedia project, senior Kirk Sullivan selected an image representing love that depicted Britney Spears and Madonna during the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards.
Photo credit: Phil Channing
“It’s the moment before they embrace in a warm, passionate and loving kiss,” Sullivan said.
“Is that love, or just a result of public relations people wanting to make money?” asked de Fren, a doctoral candidate who teaches the lab class with Jonathan Weil, a College graduate student in philosophy.
“Never underestimate the amount of respect that these two esteemed artists deserve,” Sullivan replied.
“Either you’re being sarcastic or you’re very idealistic,” de Fren said. “I’m not quite sure which.”
“You have all semester to figure it out,” Sullivan said, grinning.
The lab was part of Ed McCann’s philosophy class. McCann is among the six College professors participating in the pilot. He requires multimedia presentations for his course, “Love and Its Representations in Literature, Philosophy and Film.” McCann’s course explores key works — Homer’s Iliad and Dante’s Comedy and the like — that have shaped the European and American notion of love.
Olivia Everett, a 19-year-old junior majoring in cinema-television and history, took McCann’s class last year as part of a smaller pilot. She said intertwining video, audio, graphics, animation and text makes a project multilayered.
“It’s a whole new ballpark when using visual and sound representations,” Everett said. “Images speak differently than words.”
To read about multimedia course "The Ancient Near East," click here.
To view a multimedia slideshow about Bruce Zuckerman's work with ancient cylinder seals, click here.
To go to the multimedia story homepage, click here.
While more laborious than term papers, the broader medium, she said, enables a student to develop a rational argument that also engages emotional and aesthetic sensibilities.
“You have to switch your brain from what you’re used to doing, using words,” Everett said. “It really does make you think in a different way.”
Other courses this academic year include: “The Changing Pacific: Culture, History and Politics in the New South Seas,” “Earthquakes,” “Russian Thought and Civilization,” and “The Ancient Near East.” Most professors were chosen because they have long used multimedia in their classes; McCann was among a small group of professors that the IML first trained.
Under the auspices of the IML’s early classes, students created non-linear projects. Most notably, a few years ago, a collaborative project on ancient Troy — an interactive 3-D model of the city made famous by Homer’s account of the Trojan War — earned awards for the College undergraduate students and was featured in a New York Times article. Those early classes eventually became the model for the IML Honors Program.
The multimedia language of the screen is the current vernacular, so weaving it into general education was a natural progression, McCann said.
The visual, he said, can be just as important in communicating ideas and information as text. Pondering an argument by skeptics that multimedia may replace text, he was, well, philosophical.
“Poets, rhetoricians and philosophers have argued about the true way to communicate since the days of Plato and Aristotle,” McCann said.
