Project Milestone 1: March 18, 2008

Objectives

As CUNY’s college of technology, our academic and pedagogical objectives are driven by invention and innovation in both faculty research and pedagogy. This is evident in the form of collaborative projects and pedagogical methodologies which take place between departments and divisions within the college, as well as between the college and other institutions. We would like to build a collaborative podcasting project between our School of Technology & Design, which includes application-driven programs, and the School of Professional Studies, which uses the applications and research from these programs to help inform their professional careers.

• In the School of Technology & Design, Entertainment Technology and Advertising Design & Graphic Arts will use podcasts to teach their students best practice data acquisition. This includes microphone technique, lighting and setting up useful shots, storyboarding, editing, compression, and uploading for RSS feeds.  In particular, students will work with other departments as listed below, serving as technologists, editors, and content providers in both  Musical underscoring, sound effects, level matching, and other techniques will be used to increase the final quality of the podcasts developed within otther departments.

• In both schools, the actual podcasts will cover educational lectures. Demonstrations of professional techniques, such as small system installations (Entertainment Technology) and nursing techniques will be covered. In most cases, the podcasts will be a series of lectures.

• The podcasts for Nursing will be JUST IN TIME podcasts, which will be used at ACTUAL sites. The nursing shortage has created scheduling hardships for both health care institutions and for registered professional nurses (RN), who staff these organizations. It is a challenge for many institutions to provide release time to RNs who desire to return to school but find it difficult to succeed around a challenging work schedule. Podcasting technology may offer both the RN student and academia a remedy to the dilemma of educating a student who has full-time work related scheduling conflicts. Podcasting will allow RN students more academic flexibility to view educational content when and where they find it most convenient, including medical centers.

• The podcasts for Law and Paralegal Studies will free up on-ground class time for exercises, group work, and other active learning techniques. The pilot will be a series of lectures for the Capstone class. There would be an introductory lecture on the history, purpose, and structure of the New York Lawyer’s Code of Professional Responsibility, as well as four more lectures focusing on the specific Canons. Since the ABA requires legal ethics to be included in every substantive law course, other professors can assign these podcasts for virtually every legal studies course.

• The architectural technology department will begin a series of lectures THIS SPRING hosting guests in the architectural field and related areas to discuss recent projects, past works, and leading edge technology. These lecturers have been selected because they represent vital currents in technology and design.They are leaders in new fields which they are currently pioneering, and they are responsible for merging fields that previously were not thought to be intertwined. Mike Webb will be the first speaker. Michael Webb is an internationally renowned architect and visionary. Webb is one of the prescient and influential founders of Britain's Archigram Group, a team of architects founded 40 years ago that has posed seminal - if outrageous - solutions to provocative problems in urban building and design. Like the other members of Archigram, he has had a tremendous influence on an entire generation of architects, many of whose ideas - technically unfeasible when they first proposed them - are realizable today. Above all, their "sci-fi" assumption that members of a highly mobile society could plug into a sophisticated, worldwide communications network no longer is a fantasy.