The main goal of this project is create a flexible teaching and learning environment for four cultural studies courses with video segments situated in a specific context supported by student and teacher generated leading questions, movie descriptions, and commentary, while continuing to populate the database with purposeful content. This will facilitate on demand teaching and promote student contribution via database in the form of student annotations, links to relevant web sites, for example a link to the screenplay for a particular video clip. Students will also contribute to an individual course site through a bulletin board system where at the minimum they will address leading questions posed by Broughton. In addition, there are plans to broadcast a few live and archived web cast lectures by relevant speakers and Broughton, which can be viewed in or outside of the classroom.

While providing a seamless environment to search and view video, images sequences, summaries, student annotations and Broughton’s comments, CCNTML intends to streamline the video production process and move the video database to a more robust DBMS. Currently Broughton, CCNMTL, and three student assistants lead the video production process. Part of the production process is creating the image sequences that are now generated randomly. We plan to take more care in selecting the image sequence in order to provide the richest and most meaningful content to the students. The image sequence in conjunction with the CU Analyzer will provide a canvas for students to think about imagery and draw connection between other media.

In the end, the course web sites and video database will be part of a larger web site that lays out the emerging scholarly area of Cultural Studies education at TC. It will include various course offerings, and interactive archive of introductory, supplemental and discussion-stimulating media to augment teaching and learning both inside and outside of the classroom. This project may even serve as a shared resource for Columbia University. In particular, cultural studies at Teachers College and the gender studies program at Barnard College.

Project: Cultural Studies Course Environments

Project Manager: Kristen Sosulski

A common problem among Columbia University faculty using technology in their teaching is taking the tools that they use (slides, images, movies, audio, text) and integrating it into a meaningful course environment. The database model is a way for faculty to put their content online in an organized layout that connects different media in nontraditional ways.

Professor John Broughton of Teachers College in partnership with The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning are developing a database to store information and pointers to video clips, image sequences, movie summaries, commentary, screenplays, and supplementary resources used in Broughton's Gender and Violence Spring 2001 course. Broughton uses cinema movies in his classroom to illustrate how gender and violence are dramatized. The need for the database evolved out of Broughton’s desire to have students make connections with disparate media without the limitations of time or space.

CCNTML and Broughton purpose to further develop and expand this project to encompass four courses, integrate leading questions in a bulletin board, carefully select frame sequences from the videos, and film guest lecturers and selected course lectures. The courses the project is centered on are Gender and Violence, Youth Cultures (Youth and Violence?), Popular Culture and Aesthetics of Technology, all taught by Broughton. In addition, the project will serve as a larger resource for Cultural Studies at Teachers College and other disciplines within the university.

This project extends over four courses at Teacher College and is a resource for the entire cultural studies faculty and students within Teachers College. This project will serve as a model for other courses and programs in the University. An area of potential use is gender studies, films studies, and any course, which makes substantial use of video and film clips for illustration and analysis. The project model and resulting tools allow faculty to re-purpose the extensive existing collections of video and film resources of CCNMTL and other groups within the University.