MESA 2009 FilmFest Panel

2009 MESA FilmFest Panel

	P2298 Sunday, November 22, 2009 11am-1pm "Using Middle Eastern Film in the Classroom (Year 3): Incorporating Non-Traditional Visual Resources into Middle East Classes" Thomas B. Stevenson, Chair, Ohio University, Zanesville Using and Benefiting from Media and Technology in the Academic Classroom Alex X. Caviris, Suffolk County College Working with Artists' Media Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University What’s Context Got to Do with It? Char Simons, The Evergreen State College Using Short Films and Documents from Internet-based Sources in Language and Culture Classes Dinah Assouline-Stillman, University of Oklahoma Organized by Nadia Hlibka, MESA FilmFest Coordinator Panel Abstract When introducing students to areas of the world with which they are unfamiliar or misinformed, visual images are an important supplement to lecture and stimulant for discussion. They are essential for today’s media savvy and visually saturated students. While there is still a place for 30 or 60 minute films, they often consume too much class time or too much of a department budget. Maintaining student attention is challenging. New media sources available on the internet are more geared to students’ viewing styles. This panel explores available resources and their use in the classroom.	FilmFest 2009 "Sneak Preview" (.pdf) FilmFest 2009 Hours FilmFest 2009 Schedule FilmFest 2008 Catalogue (.pdf)
	Working with Artists' Media Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University This presentation will encourage colleagues to show experimental media from the Arab and Muslim world in courses, and to work with art media distributors. While conventional documentary has the value of being expository, and conventional fiction film is readily accessible, experimental media has the virtue of offering aesthetic and intellectual meditations on the issues it presents. Experimental media does not try to be transparent, and this requires more "unpacking" by viewers, especially in Western contexts. Thus it helps viewers reflect on the impediments—political, cross-cultural, and other—to direct presentation that artists face and to admire the ways they deal with them. Showing artists' media also involves us in the infrastructure of non-profit organizations, independent distributors, and galleries with which Middle Eastern artists work. I will provide contact information for some of these organizations. While some of this material is available online, I will argue that it is worth paying a little more to support these organizations, and discuss public performance rights and the relative merits of rental and purchase. Finally, I will suggest ways extend your courses to a larger audience by organizing public screenings.
	Using and Benefiting from Media and Technology in the Academic Classroom Alex X. Caviris, Suffolk County College Technology has become not only the wave of the future, not only the doorway to tomorrow, but also the tool professors must employ both effectively and efficiently so seize their classes today. Like it or not, the days of simple lecture and slides is swiftly dissipating into a vapor of what, to many, has become uncertainty. Aside from the lifestyle which students often lead, which for better or worse, has become dominated by the media, many students come from backgrounds where they have experienced liberal doses of technology in the classroom already, and have some manner of familiarity and comfort with the idea of being pampered. As educators, we must avoid feeding any of our students’ feeling of entitlement, but must also use their tendencies to our advantage, peppering our lessons with effective usage of non-traditional technological media. Additionally, there are many very traditional resources available on the internet that are ready and ripe for use by academics. Of course, there are many pitfalls and dangers from engaging with internet sources; however, the rewards are many as well. Freedom of access and availability of copious amounts of not only documents, but images as well, make the internet indispensible in the 21st Century.
	Using Short Films and Documents from Internet-based Sources in Language and Culture Classes Dinah Assouline-Stillman, University of Oklahoma In the span of a few years, a true media revolution has taken place that renders almost obsolete the use of showing movies in VHS format, in their entire length of 60 to 95 minutes, to an ever-more computer-savvy student population. While a good number of classrooms are still not even equipped with VHS-DVD combo machines to complement professors’ lectures, wifi and broadband devices may well be the most inexpensive and practical solution to using short movies or film excerpts in any classroom. As a complement to cultural or language issues, their efficiency in engaging the students in discussions is not to be overlooked. Outside the classroom, students themselves spontaneously go on Internet to find bits of information on any topic. When they do presentations, they are no longer written on scraps of paper, but often done in Powerpoint format, the images and video-clips of which are mostly imported from Internet. There is a wide variety of press articles, news websites, government websites, foreign TV channels, literary journals, video-clips from YouTube or Dailymotion, online books, museum websites with a wealth of images and interactive tours to choose from. The topics could be for example the polemics on the Islamic veil in France, women in Algeria, the Naida rock movement in Morocco, or social unrest in the French banlieues … Students can even produce their own video-clips if they so choose, providing it is not illegal. The classroom becomes a place in which everyone can find or create his/her own video-clip. The implications are numerous and give the teaching of these classes a fresher look on the past, present and future.
	What’s Context Got to Do with It? Char Simons Understanding the backstory of how a piece of traditional or non-traditional media came to be, who birthed it, why and how is critical to using any type of media in the classroom. Films, shorts, video clips, YouTube segments, news sites, performance art, international media, think-tank sponsored sites, photography exhibits, interactive museum tours, etc. all share a manipulation of ideas, facts and images in order to frame and promote compelling storytelling, capture our attention and influence public (and policy-makers’) opinion. As educators, we may choose media pieces for classroom use based on our evaluation of relevancy to course objectives and curriculum. We may also use other criteria to understand a piece’s “legitimacy” or lack thereof, such as research into a writer’s or producer’s background, the broader historical or contemporary political, social or geographical context at the time of production, ideology or philosophy of the production company or organization a piece is affiliated with, and funding sources of a project. New media, such as YouTube, may present additional challenges in evaluating content and context. Such vital context-setting research need not be limited to educators – it can also be a dynamic and integral student-centered activity in the classroom, promoting critical reasoning, research and public speaking skills, and even faculty-student partnership in curriculum design. This presentation will include workshop ideas, research methods and strategies for evaluating media pieces for classroom use.

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