Positions available: 3

CineWorlding is a newly developing digital cinema production method for educational film. While traditional educational approaches to film have relied strictly on documentary media, cineworlding inverts this method and asks educators and students to be producers of their own films. Through the production process students and educators learn how to make their own educational resources centering the lives of students and the future of their community as the curriculum. A series of free tutorials have been produced at MacEwan University and the next step is to create a website to house and expand these tutorials. This project, therefore, will design a website that will:

1. Establish a virtual home for CineWorlding tutorial videos;

2. Provide extra how-to content that goes into more detail for some of the technical aspects of digital cinema production;

3. Provide a bibliography for teachers and program designers so that they can communicate the importance of CineWorlding to school administrators and funding bodies;

4. Provide a collection of essays and links to books about CineWorlding;

5. Provide examples of CineWorlding films;

6. Provide access to the CineWorlding film festival.

Teachers and students increasingly recognize the opportunities that digital media affords. Students engage in digital media, through social media, as a regular part of their lives. Teachers are often frustrated with the amount of time students are engrossed in social media and too often see technology as an enemy of learning. This is due, in part, to the way technology and technological production has been framed in western philosophy, and the narratives of technological utopianism and technological determinism that have resulted. Technological utopianism is the belief that technological innovation only brings along positive outcomes and that society, and the planet, will be saved by technology. Technological determinism, takes an opposite view, seeing technology, and especially entertainment media, as generally negative. Recently, Bernard Stiegler has argued that technology needs to be viewed differently, as central to what it means to be human. CineWorlding is developed on this new view and is building a media pedagogy that will provide students with an opportunity to see that digital media technology has both positive and negative components and that schooling that seeks to understand media technology will help students prepare for their futures with a balanced view of what media technology introduces in society. To get there requires a digital media pedagogy, and therefore CineWorlding.

The project will develop in three individual stages with a shared fourth stage:

1. website design
2. content writing
3. social media development
4. editing (all team members contribute)

Communications students will be hired to design and populate an interactive website that will lead students and teachers through the processes of digital cinema production. By the end of the 18 30 minute instructional videos, students and teachers will be well-positioned to make and share their own educational films, will have, through this experience, come face to face with the opportunities and challenges of digital cinema production and will be able to critically evaluate the media that they experience. It is my belief that critical capacity comes as the result of producing media, not from abstract analysis of media.

Dr. Michael B MacDonald will be supervising the students.