Class Thoughts

Dear readers, this blog is for the Advanced Storytelling class at Carleton University students. This following report shares my thoughts from and recommendations for the class.

When thinking of the title, "Advanced Storytelling" you may expect the class would focus on teaching story and character development and ways to captivate and educate an audience through stories. This class being paired with a story-based program  like Journalism deepened my expectations about the course's content. Instead it was much different.

During our first class, it became clear that the course’s title was deceiving and that I would not be learning what I came there to learn. Trying to keep an open-mind I stayed with the class - it was only 6 weeks after all.

My program's title is "Interactive Multimedia and Design" and it consists of half code and half computer based design. It is a four-year University program and by the end of third year we are capable of producing a wide range of pieces. As we have had a lot of exposure to various forms of media by this point in our program, we know what we like and what we don't like. In my program, senior students choose what projects they would like to pursue. In this class, there was no choice and the project was assigned.  We were forced to do web based project.

There were other people in the class who had great expertise in web, and even earned a living from it. Now I am grateful person and often don't complain about other people's abilities, but  as a student with limited web experience, I was put at a disadvantage when being judged against students who've focused all of their efforts, projects, and work on web-design since the beginning of the program. The groups who produced the best projects in the class were composed of people who had done web design professionally. This was the most significant and stress producing downfall for this class.

Looking back, I would allow the student's to produce a project in whatever medium they choose, it would simply be a requirement to have both a design and journalism portion. Trying to remain enthusiastic and engaged  with the class, I tried to learn as much from the Journalism students and Kanina (our professor) as I could.

What they knew and what they were doing interested me much more than building another website. As an extrovert in a program full of introverts, it was fun to see the more extroverted journalism students going out and talking to strangers to learn more about them and their history. I even went with one to a karaoke night, hosted by a ‘drag queen’ in Chinatown.  I observed how the journalism students asked creative questions to elicit great responses. Although that night was fun as is, we stayed there for four hours in hopes to get information but the drag queen just asked us to Facebook her in the morning instead. In regards to the class, I learned most about Journalism from Kanina and the other students, instead of ‘Advanced Storytelling.’

Being in a collaborative environment is very important. It expands your knowledge immensely about the world around you. The only downfall is that sometimes you are going to be learning things you already know. In this class, I already knew about 75% of the information I was exposed to both in and out of the classroom. For a student who is paying $790 dollars for 6-week class that is a hard pill to swallow.

I imagine it would take a great deal of effort and organization to get a collaborative class to execute well. It seems that for what the profs wanted to achieve, it hit the mark. Yet, for me I leave feeling a bit frustrated, but glad I took the class. These comments above are simply suggestions to make the class more appealing to an IMD student.