Digital Binder Entry # 7. Consider how the pre to post design process in creating media artifacts can enhance student learning across educational domains, subjects and real-life application. Provide 3 brief examples of ideas for how you could use creative media production for specific educational activities.

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I have already discussed the activity involving video making and video editing as one of the three Final Project ideas (Please go to Digital Binder Entry #2 for my writing on this idea). I think the benefit of this activity is such that students can no longer be passive recipients of knowledge. They can cross the critical threshold of learning and even become creators of knowledge. There is a lot of change that must inevitably occur in the minds of students during the pre- and post-production phases of video making.

The camera work, video editing and mock CBC news that students can produce in the school are not a simple task to perform. Yet, highly motivated students can go through the whole process and get fully exposed to how knowledge is produced and communicated. The whole video making process involved in story gathering (pre-production), interviewing, editing (post-production), and broadcasting (publishing) is also an excellent project for an up-close understanding of how technology is connected to knowledge and its creation as well as to the development of point of view and bias.

I used to make video, documentary and news in Vancouver in my 20s and 30s and, in those days, I was able to deepen my understanding of how I viewed Canada and how Canadians viewed immigrants like me. Also, I was able to get a close look at the bias of mainstream Canadian media as they portray immigrants and Asians, and vice versa. I realized that there are always two sides to the same story, and it really depends on how you take the camera to the street and how you control the angle of the camera to depict the story.

CBC, a Canadian public broadcaster, is still making an effort to show two sides of the same story and to be as fair and justified as possible in order to maintain a vibrant democracy in Canadian public. In today’s class, Benoit talked about Baudrillard and simulacra, and how Las Vegas has everything that the world has. I was curious about the philosopher Baudrillard, so I googled him and found out a quote from him: When somebody in the audience asked him who he really was, he answered, “I am the simulacrum of myself” (Baudrillard on Tour, 2005, New Yorker). He said that it is really hard to tell art from reality and that we are living in a hyper-real world. As Benoit pointed out in class today, there is a lot of “incestuous amplification” of misinformation because we do not crosscheck information laterally. Therefore, our effort to teach our students to do critical thinking about the media and simulacra is all the more important. And I believe that today’s classroom activity involving the camera and video editing software was a trial version of what we might want to do with our students in the classroom in the future. A similar project carried out by students will give them the opportunity to think about fake news and our politically polarized world. By the time they carry out a video making and video publishing project the way I propose it here, they will have developed skills to navigate the world of media and to stay better informed.