n the course of my past six years as a graduate and undergraduate instructor, I have taught students ranging across a broad spectrum of skills and backgrounds. At New York University I worked with graduate students in several M.A./PhD. programs (Media, Culture and Communication, Performance Studies, Hemispheric Institute) who were exceptionally talented and motivated. While they came from various parts of the world (Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, India, U.S) they did not need to be convinced of the pedagogical or intellectual value of making their materials available online through interactive, multimedia formats. Working with them, my challenge was to help them find visual and interactive equivalents for their scholarly projects. A study of Rumba for example could have a dynamic and interactive musical component. When I started working on these projects with them in 2001/2002 it wasn’t clear to even the most imaginative graduate students what the potentialities of a web component might be. At the time, fortunately I was studying in ITP (NYU’s groundbreaking interactive media graduate department) where our mandate was precisely to imagine the many interconnections between the arts and new digital technology. Teaching graduate students in more traditional humanities departments offered me the extraordinary opportunity of working closely with emerging scholars whose projects pushed me to create multimedia web cuadernos (digital casebooks).
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/web-cuaderno
In 2003 I was invited to teach a group of graduate students in Mexico who were doing ethnographic research but had no experience with digital media such as digital cameras, video, or Internet. The project I was assigned, to teach them to document and create a website featuring the different aspects of the day of the dead celebration, was an extraordinary form of digital media boot camp. In one week of fourteen-hour days working exclusively in Spanish I taught them the fundamentals of digital media. From discussions ranging from binary to bitmap to software and methods of implementation, the course culminated in a collective website.
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/cuaderno/diademuertos/sitio/index.html
During that experience, I realized for the first time what it meant to work with students for whom cameras, video equipment and web access and presence is not an automatic given. I began to view my role as an instructor as more than a transmitter of skill and knowledge. By teaching them how to create their own materials and websites, I able to offer them the ability to communicate, and express their knowledge, research and creativity in an evolving and dynamic international stage.
It was this interest in expanding a student’s world by teaching them digital technologies that led me to accept a full-time faculty position at Katharine Gibbs’ Digital Media Department. Over the course of my five years at Gibbs, I have had the pleasure of working with hundreds of students, many who have exceptional talent and determination but lack extensive experience with digital technologies. My ability to offer them a voice and a venue to express themselves and to further their skills and build confidence has been invaluable to me. Throughout my time at Gibbs, it has been my philosophy that in order to prepare students for the demands and responsibilities of the workplace, they must learn to be more than passive recipients of knowledge. My job is to train students to question, analyze, and learn the principles, practices, and technologies that define modern communication. Digital technologies can help democratize education, and I want to continue to be a part of that process.
