“Educating young people, particularly those who going into the field of journalism and mass communication, is about equipping them not just with skills that will help them in their first jobs but equipping them also with skills that will span a long career that will wind and navigate and change along the way."
After three years of research and development for Professor Garfield’s 21st Century Digital Literacy Project, EMDD Director Dr. Jennifer Palilonis led a presentation in October at the World Conference on E-Learning. The presentation focused on the first round of research results on the usability, user experience, concept design, and content for a new and improved Professor Garfield website. Co-authored with EMDD graduate Tiffany Watt, the paper titled “Professor Garfield’s 21st Century Digital Literacy Project: Supporting K-5 Teachers in the Digital Literacy Instructional Efforts” introduces a novel digital literacy instructional website that leverages the popularity of one of the world’s most well-known and beloved cartoon characters to deliver an age-appropriate, standards-based, cross-curricular digital literacy curriculum.
The Professor Garfield website is scalable, providing opportunities for EMDD students, and ultimately, for teachers across the country to contribute new digital literacy exercises and lessons that can be integrated into this framework. Professor Garfield’s 21st Century Digital Literacy Project is the result of a partnership between the Center for EMDD, the Professor Garfield Foundation and Garfield creator Jim Davis to develop a comprehensive online curriculum that supports K-5 teachers and students in their digital literacy teaching and learning.
In Spring of 2018, the EMDD team completed a beta version of the Professor Garfield website, the latest step toward the ultimate goal for this project: to become a world leader in digital literacy education.
To develop the format and content for the Professor Garfield’s digital literacy curriculum, Dr. Palilonis led a team of EMDD graduate students in an extensive research phase in which students explored preeminent literature on digital literacy pedagogy, state-of-the-art technology in digital literacy instruction, and conducted empathy research with K-5 teachers at Burris Laboratory School and three Chicago Public Schools. They also engaged in a series of collaborative brainstorming sessions with elementary education pre-service teachers at Ball State. Through these sessions, the team identified and designed a number of digital literacy activities for grades K-5 intended to address core digital literacy skills and developed for cross-curricular format.
Research presented at the World Conference on E-Learning represents the first in a series of studies that aim to explore the efficacy of the Professor Garfield approach to digital literacy instruction. Dr. Palilonis is currently leading a research team that includes Burris Laboratory School teacher Stefanie Onieal that explores to what extent the Professor Garfield offerings improve students’ learning related to digital literacy. Dr. Palilonis’ EMDD research team is also exploring grants and other funding opportunities that will allow us to develop a sustainability plan for additional site development and maintenance.
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
My journey to the EMDD program was full of ups and downs, but here’s the short version.
I graduated in May of 2016 with my bachelor’s in sociology from Ball State, with a minor in peace studies and conflict resolution. It wasn’t until graduating that I realized I didn’t want to pursue research, diplomacy, or teaching for my career. After applying to jobs for months, and to the United Nation as a last-ditch effort, I sent in my visa application to live in New Zealand and work on a farm. With my travel plans all squared away, my would-be host canceled on me last minute, and I was left jobless, directionless, and New Zealand-less.
So I decided to go in a different direction. I started looking into graduate school. I looked everywhere from Vancouver, to New York, to Dublin. I didn’t find anything, and the couple of programs I was quasi-interested in were way too expensive. This was now late fall of 2016, and I was tired of feeling stuck. I looked into a few programs through Ball State, but none of them really resonated with me. As I was nearing the end of my internal rope, I was telling a good friend of mine how nothing seemed to be working out and I wasn’t sure what to do next. She told me she had a friend in this new program called Emerging Media Design & Development, and that I should Skype her about it.
After our conversation, I was sold. I had no idea a program like this existed. One that seemed to fit so many of my interests. I applied as soon as I was able to get my materials together.
I will always see 2017 as a year of change for me. I was accepted to EMDD, I got a wonderful graduate assistantship, and I started working at a brewery.
I still say that going back to school was one of the best decisions I will ever make. I love that I get to work with people with different interests, skills, and backgrounds. People who are passionate, tenacious, and empathetic.
And the cherry on top? I feel like I’m actually using my sociology degree. I’m the Research Director for the Water Quality Indiana team project where my principle tasks include similar-case research, demographics, and survey design and distribution. For my creative project, I’m using transmedia storytelling to investigate and understand how breweries deal with inclusivity and empathy with the hopes of creating a space where people can discuss and understand the differences that exist between people.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going next, but I feel more confident than I’ve ever felt.
(Shouts out to Alyssa and Aiste: I would not be in the program if it were not for them.)
Christina Valdez graduated from the EMDD program in May of 2019. She's currently living her best life brewing craft beer in the humble town of Muncie, IN.
To end the semester, second-year students in the master’s degree program at the Center for Emerging Media Design & Development had the chance to show off their project work at two showcases, one on-campus and another at Ball State’s Indianapolis Center.
These students worked in teams on four different projects, three of which were continuing efforts from the previous year. The project focus areas varied from education to sports storytelling to entertainment.
Members of the community and project partners were invited to the open house-style events to talk with students and interact with their work, including an augmented reality experience, photo booth and website demos. For on-campus EMDD students the second year is spent entirely on one project, collaborating with fellow students to solve a problem for a real-world client. This year’s clients were the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Professor Garfield Foundation, Circle of Blue and Motor MVB.
The projects provide valuable experience for students to apply their knowledge in design thinking, transmedia storytelling and human-computer interaction, including user experience and user interface design. Working in teams toward a goal also helps develop soft skills and provides an opportunity to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams, an environment that prepares EMDD students for almost any career path.
It’s a great feeling when an email hits your inbox that you’ve been accepted to a conference. The Motor MVB project team was thrilled to receive two such emails for the 2018 Broadcast Education Association Conference, where the team presented a poster and panel discussion.
Since the summer, I’ve led a team of Emerging Media Design & Development graduate students working with Motor MVB–a nonprofit philanthropic effort to increase awareness and participation in boys’ and men’s volleyball–on a communication plan that includes a social media campaign, original journalistic storytelling and an alternate reality game. We are all in our second year of the program and finishing up our final semester with a trip to Las Vegas.
But the conference, and the preparation for it, are about more than just spending a few days in warmer weather (although that will be nice, too.) Our team has learned a lot and grown together throughout the process of considering our project’s importance for learning and scholarship, writing a paper, and communicating our work in a visual poster format.
For the conference, my team organized a panel titled, “Grow Online Engagement with Sports Narratives and Interactive Experiences: ARGS, Social Media, and Original Storytelling.” Panelists (in addition to myself) are
Our team was also accepted into the Research-in-Progress digital poster division. The title of this presentation is “Social Media Storytelling: Building a Brand and Engaging Sports Fans.” This poster will explain how our team used an audience-centered approach to create our social media effort. This poster will also explain the framework we created to engage athletes and the audience in the creation of storytelling content, which uses traditional and nontraditional storytelling methods and platforms.
Not only does presenting at conferences like BEA help promote the Center for EMDD, but it also serves as an opportunity for me and my team to gain knowledge and skills during workshops and sessions as well as connect with other experts working in these disciplines. This experience is definitely something that will be on my resume as I’m looking for a job post-graduation. Building and managing this project has been a really beneficial experience; however, landing not one but two spots at a conference takes that experience to another level, showing that our work is recognized as influential and important by experts in the field.
This post was written by second-year EMDD student Kylie Leonard.
Kylie Leonard is a 2017 graduate of EMDD. She currently works as a course developer for 2U in Washington, D.C.
Remix the Symphony is a transmedia experience that encourages new audience members to engage with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s Lilly Classical Series through live events and digital content. It was developed as part of EMDD’s research and creative project labs. As producer, I led my team through a year of ethnographic research, academic research, and user testing to develop an experience that would engage a younger audience new to the ISO and classical music.
In January 2017, Remix the Symphony launched. This semester, we are concentrating on producing content that makes it easy for our audience to personally connect to classical music and to connect classical music to contemporary music they already love. The idea of remixing is threaded throughout everything we do. When we first started developing the project, we knew we wanted to do a Remix Contest, where we would invite musicians to remix music that the ISO is playing in their current season. However, as my team did more user testing, we discovered that everyone wanted a way to connect classical music to their personal style of art, not just musicians. This was the inspiration behind our Remix Nights.
For our Remix Nights, we partnered with two local arts organizations, The Geeky Press and Cat Head Press, to host events where artists of all disciplines could remix classical music in their own style. With the help of a live DJ who played music that will be featured at upcoming ISO concerts, we made a space that felt much closer to a party than anything else. At our first night with The Geeky Press, we invited writers to create flash fiction, poetry, or collages inspired by a playlist of classical music. At our night with Cat Head Press, we concentrated on visual art. The pieces that were created at each Remix Night will be featured in content that we’ll release throughout the month of March, which means that an even wider audience will be able to see how people from the Indy community interpreted classical music.
WFYI produced a piece about our first Remix Night with The Geeky Press. You can listen to it starting at 17:17.
