MultimediaCommProf

Perhaps what I love more than anything else about my job at McPherson College is that I am allowed to teach so many things. Although my advanced degrees are in English, with an emphasis on 19th-century American lit, I get to teach web design, journalism, multimedia storytelling, editing, and creative writing in addition to American literature and the rest of the standard fare that makes up the teaching loads of most English department tenants. My first passion was journalism (literature didn’t really take hold of me until I was sophomore in college), and I’ve always loved design—a field in which I am entirely self-taught—so I get to do a variety of things that I enjoy and that challenge me.

It’s times like this, at the beginning of a semester when I’m teaching a subject such as multimedia storytelling, which literally changes day to day, that I regret that I have so many disparate fields to keep up with. I pick up this blog after a two-year hiatus, recognize how little I’ve actually been able to engage with the field of multimedia storytelling, and feel a touch of regret that I have so many rapidly changing subjects to keep up with that I’m never genuinely caught up and on top of any one of them. Then I think that if I were a specialist in only one or two narrow fields, I’d likely be at a research institution, teaching the same courses every year if not every semester. B-o-r-i-n-g.

Even if I’m unable to keep up with the newest tools and trends in multimedia storytelling, I welcome the challenge of trying. This blog is a place where I can document and share what I learn. Since I’ve made blogging about multimedia a formal requirement for my students this semester, I hope to make this blog a more regular part of that learning process.

Here’s to good intentions!