Media and Film Studies

How The South Island Alumni

support learning in Media and Film Studies!

By Iain Williamson (Head of Film/Media Studies 2004-Present)

Firstly, a warm welcome to any of our alumni reading this article. Those of you taught by me in recent years will know that I have become increasingly interested in how alumni can help inform the learning process. Over time I have come to realize that actually there is tremendous potential for a reciprocal relationship in how and what we learn.

Let me explain by first saying that digital learning technologies, (as I am sure you are all already aware through use of social networking sites like Facebook and My Space) allow us all to easily and meaningfully stay in contact. Two years ago I set up http://sisfilm.ning.com/, which is part of the ning network system. At the time, I was interested in using the forum, blog, video and photos options offered by the site so as existing students could debate and give feedback on key learning areas covered in class. However, it quickly became obvious that alumni students could make telling contributions to the site, uploading a range of their own films, photographs and musical scores from University and responding to ideas posted by students in discussion threads, subsequently elevating the level of discussion and engaging the gifted and talented students within the subject area.

Secondly, our departmental wiki, constructed primarily by our very own Kieran Ryan (http://sismedia.wetpaint.com/) has offered further online opportunities for collaboration. We currently have University based pages of the wiki in which our alumni are invited to comment on their experiences of actually sitting courses in target universities relating to film, media and communication studies. Our current crop of Y12 students can contact alumni for advice, whilst our alumni can also upload their own comments, links etc onto the wiki as way of introduction to the university.

Thirdly, the increase importance of bookmarking has led the department to start using diigo (See http://www.diigo.com/ to join) whereby we can highlight and add sticky notes to any article found browsing the web. This in turn can be used by alumni members of diggo who can engage in conversations over web articles…all bookmarks are centrally fed back into our media portal (http://www.netvibes.com/nepaliain#General) on netvibes, which allows our current students to learn from these highlighted articles and contribute to the debate if they so choose.