Presentations: Digital Media and Society

I was recently invited to speak about Digital Media and Digital Society at a Learning Day for IT teachers in Christchurch in anticipation of the new Digital Technology standards being released this month. It was a great day and I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to speak with classroom teachers again.

This is a brief overview of the talks and the notes that went with them.

Digital Media

The new standards are for Level 1 so this presentation was focused on the skills that, in my opinion, are relevant to Year 11 students and how they can be built on in Year 12 and 13. These skills include: Image Manipulation, Web, Print, Motion graphics, 3D Modelling; and provide a wide scope for schools to develop courses that incorporate the Digital Media strand. The sessions included two tutorials that covered Inkscape (an open source vector illustration application) and Blender (an open source 3D modelling appliation).

The presentation is made available in S5 format for reference and the tutorials are available as PDF.

Digital Society

This presentation was a more general look at some of the key issues related to the Digital world with the aim of providing teachers with topics that can be used in class.

• Privacy: social networks, surveillance society, mobile devices
• Copyright: then & now, attribution, digital ownership
• Licensing: proprietary, open source, EULAs
• Industry Issues: software patents, ACTA, "Intellectual Property"
• Technology Choices: freedom, education, lock-in, file formats

At Egressive we are proud to be able to support education in an ongoing way and appreciate the opportunity to be involved in days like this.