New Media

MEA One Day Conference

National Media Museum, Bradford

Saturday 2nd February 2008

Delegates at the MEA’s February conference attended a number of talks and workshops focusing on teaching new media.

In his keynote speech to the conference, Dr Julian McDougall talked about issues for media teachers arising from the introduction of new technologies.

By highlighting the fact students rarely watch television in the traditional sense, he raised the question of whether teaching media through key concepts and textual analysis is still relevant. Are there any distinct ‘media institutions' in the era of convergence? And most importantly, is there such a thing as 'audience' in this postmodern 'we media' age?

Dr McDougall suggested there is a middle ground between "year zero" and holding back the tide, towards a 'pedagogy of the inexpert' for Media Studies. The central idea is that students should spend more time doing ethnographic (as far as is possible in the time constraints) reseach work with people who use the media and attach meaning to it, and less time treating cultural products as 'texts'. View Dr MacDougall’s Powerpoint here.

Tom Woolley, curator of new media at host venue the National Media Museum in Bradford, spoke to delegates about the museum’s ambitious plans for an internet gallery, which will chart the development of the internet from its early origins and look at how the world wide web has changed the way people interact with each other.

Workshops at the conference focused on how to incorporate new media into everyday teaching practice (incidentally, the relevance of using the term “new media” as opposed to just “media” was questioned in a world in which none of the technologies are “new” to our students). Barney Oram, Nick Potamitis and Pete Fraser from Long Road Sixth Form College demonstrated the way in which the college uses blogs, YouTube and other internet resources with media and film students. Nick Lacey ran a second workshop looking at the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom. To view Nick’s presentation as a QuickTime movie, click here. Dr Julian McDougall also ran a workshop on teaching computer games, using Grand Theft Auto as an example text.