In the 2010 Fall semester, Brandon Jackson (pictured below), a senior at the iSchool, learned new skills in digital content creation. He and his other team members used these skills when collaborating with a local community organization to address their information needs. He describes the experience of exploring digital media with no previous background and no idea of what it meant to become involved in a "service learning" course.
"I enrolled into the IST 400 class not knowing much about a service learning course or how it would be as the semester progressed. As the weeks went by and I started developing core digital media skills and learning the most efficient ways for digital media to be produced. I developed an interest and I wanted to take what I learned further. It worked out great because the skills I recently acquired and developed were put to use right away in helping a local organization in Syracuse. My group chose the Brady Faith Center of Syracuse who needed a video that could document the story of Father Brady from those who knew him personally so his story would live on throughout generations."
Brandon's Fall 2010 team picked up with the Brady Faith Center (BFC) where the Spring 2010 BFC team left off. The previous team had constructed the organization's first web site and the Fall team developed new content for the site. The site includes a content managerment system that allows Colleen McAllister, BFC board member tasked with maintaining the site, to easily keep the site updated and fresh. For the fall semester, Director Kevin Frank felt there was a need to preserve the memory of Father Brady for the community. As for his overall experience working with the BFC, Brandon says, "The satisfaction I gained from helping an organization in need was fulfilling and I hope to help others in the same way."
Marketing his Experience to Acquire an Internship at the Center for Digital Literay
This semester, Brandon used the experience above and the new knowledge he acquired to gain an internship experience working with Professor Marilyn Arnone and Professor Ruth Small at the Center for Digital Literacy (CDL). He and two other iSchool students who also attended the class, Michael Andrew and Yan Huang, are also working with CDL on a project that Dr. Ruth Small created; the project documents the process innovators and inventors go through while working on their innovations. The edited videos and full transcripts of adult, young adult, and child inventors will be showcased on the CDL web site in May. Team members will also close caption each video and collaboratively design the web page layout for the project.
