Class Format

Film & Digital Media 20C of Spring 2010 consists of two 1 hour and 45 minute lectures and one 1 hour section per week.

Before Lecture
The TA Dustin is known to be lurking around the communication building about an hour or so before lecture begins, his mass of curly hair serving as a reminder to students who need to know if class is about to start. Also, students tend to gather in the hallway about 30 minutes before class, usually doing reading or talking. A good time to quickly chat about ideas you had from the reading or things you didn't understand. However, Professor Kelley announced that the lecturer who has class before has complained about 20C students disruptively opening the door to Studio C in anticipation of 20C.

Lecture Agenda
Usually the lectures start out with an agenda/announcements and then the lecture.

One such announcement was made by student Daniel Kagan, about this project, on May 4.

Lecture
Lectures follow Professor Kelley's slides, which can be found on her site. They often focus on the reading, providing a reinforcement of key issues. She also demos projects that are relevant to the topic of the week, such as tactical media, crowdsourcing, etc. These demonstrations were on the midterm, so it is advisable not to skip lecture.

One such demo, with Josh McVeigh-Schultz of The Synaptic Crowd: Vox Pop Experiments, fell victim to what Professor Kelley referred to as "the Demo Effect." In essence, the demo was fraught with unfortunate technical failures, and therefore was not successfully representative of the project.

To demo this project on your own, visit McVeigh-Schultz's (a DANM graduate) site.

Somewhat informal, discussion seems to be encouraged. However, it is most acceptably facilitated through the raising of a hand, not mumbling under the breath, or shouting out loud.

"Backseat browsing" is discouraged, as ten people telling one person where to click tends to be overwhelming. Professor Kelley has said herself that one can become overwhelmed under these circumstances.

Professor Kelley opened the class at the beginning of the quarter by stating that she is always willing to engage in dialogue about women in the digital media field, acknowledging that the text for class has very few contributions from female thinkers, as well as the absence of females in the class in comparison to males.

She has also opened dialogue about the student, faculty and staff protests throughout UC campuses against fee hikes and privitization of the UC system.

Additionally, she is always open for "fan-girling Marcel Duchamp."

Section
Sections are mandatory for this course. If you miss three meetings, you earn a fail; that and the burning sting of Lindsay Kelley's ire.

Sections meet in Porter Computer Lab on Friday. The teaching assistants are Dustin O'Hara and Andrew Pascoe, both graduate students in the Digital Arts/New Media MFA program. While the two teaching assistants seem like the perfect duo for a buddy-comedy-college-road-trip-film where the two main characters learn a lot about each other and about themselves, they self-admittedly,"disagree on just about everything, but are still able to engage in productive, philosophical conversations" - though they usually end up talking about how Andrew thinks he's smarter than Schopenhauer.

Dustin's sections usually consist of a brief group meeting in the beginning to discuss what we're going to focus on, and then we dissolve into smaller groups or work on our own. It is very useful to have done at least some of the reading, as it allows at least one knowledgeable person for one reading to be placed in a group.