Media Lit 16 final project

As an admissions officer at Rhode Island College I'm in charge of recruiting a diverse freshman class. The most important tool to recruit students is the admissions information session. As the person in charge of special tours, and information sessions i am responsible for a great majority of the presentations for students. Most of the students that I come in contact with are first generation college students. My job is a lot different than some of my other colleagues because the population has no foundation of knowledge for the way that the American higher education system works.





My presentation usually ends up covering a lot of things from personal stories to basic tenets about the college application process. If you are really Involved in multicultural recruiting you understand that it's not about convincing a student to come to your school it's about getting them to go to any school that will make them happy. It is about lessening the achievement gap through giving the students the information to attend a four year school and to also graduate. Words are my biggest tool.





Before I entered this class I would have seen myself as a techno-constructivist however in reality I was more of a techno-traditionalist who didn't really take advantage of technology within the aspects of my job. I would show up to presentations and use myself as the canvas I really hated using presentation software or even software that helps you organize your work life. This class has really made me think about the ways in which I could be using technology in a much more effective way and not just a way to distract myself from being productive at my job.





The first thing I really focused on was organizing my technology and really thinking of way to be organized in ways that did not involve paper. In my work, because of the amount of travel that I do in the fall and spring, my phone is my biggest resource. I downloaded a couple of apps that have really assisted me in accomplishing things that I am struggling (me being the unorganized person that I am) I downloaded an app Called Office Lens which is a digital phone scanner that really helps in taking pictures of documents, it fixes the image and puts it into pdf form. The second app I downloaded was google keep. Google Keep is apart of the google family of apps and it helps me make digital to do list for various different tasks. I have already begun to use them daily and have noticed a change in how many things I actually get accomplished.


I decided to try and learn the Prezi online software because just like the different templates within Prezi getting to college is a journey to a destination unlike the stagnant PowerPoint presentations. The prezi with all of its movements and customization really feels like a journey. Once you learn how to use the different shapes of the slides it becomes easier to understand. You can even do a slide within a slide which is a really cool feature that Prezi possesses.





My first goal with a presentation to first generation college students is to make them be able to read critically everything that admisisons officers say to them (including myself) and to understand all of higher education’s marketing. One way in which I do that, I take one of our marketing brochures and gives the students 30 seconds to look it over. Usually the brochures have pictures of students studying and posing, and then I ask them what is the purpose of this publication. I then ask them if they have ever taken a picture like the ones in that brochure.They usually respond with no and then I tell them that the brochure is a way of getting you to come to that particular school but that in reality no one ever poses like that. I affirm that school is about fit and imagination and that they should visit the campus and really see if they can see themselves going.


Before this class I would use a prezi designed by one of my other co-workers and to be honest the former prezi looks like it was designed for a non- first generation audience and that always bothered me. It felt to much like a sales presentation and although my job is to get the students to come to RIC, my why is not centered around a sales pitch it is centered around getting the students to find their own why's. We push these set of values on our students, we tell them that they have to go to college that it is something that needs to be done no questions asked. We don't help these students find their why and we make it seem as if college is not a place where discovery happen where self awareness and intellectual curiosity develop. In my presentation I try to make them wonder, and most importantly remember. I use a picture of my father now and the supermarket where he worked.










To try to give the student an image that I too have walked some similar shoes and that it is possible to attain an education and look like them and myself. I believe that students learn through stories, that we are story-telling beasts and I think that’s what we remember the most from people. I think that my story and the visuals will really help bring everything home.

The flight from conversation and the Anti Teaching

Today's reading post two very different ideas in the way that the modern world is going.

In Sherry Turkle's op ed in the New York Times she explores America's changing landscape both physically and emotional. In her research she believes that  our mobile devices not only "change what we do but they change what we are" and that we have become accustomed a new way of being alone together and that this shift has made us a more individualistic society and changed our focus to become a society of one. "Humans relationships are rich they are messy and demanding we have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology." this article functions as a sort of audit on the challenges of navigating a technological world. It argues that we learn alot in conversation and that we try to compensate by saying that little bits of conversation of social media or email add up to the complexities of a physical conversation.

Michael Wesch has a much different approach to the new technological world. He believes that the problem is not technology but its the the tenets of education in this country. He believes that education is so outdated and that we need to break the basic mold of our classroom. He even describes his form of education as "Anti Education" and that as educators we put the blame on the student and not on the educational system as a whole. We say things like some "students are just not cut out for school, he says "if we replace the world school with learning, that the sentence becomes a sort of educators blasphemy. He talks about his video he created with data from 131 participants as a sort of audit of our educational system.

This I believe

I believe that education in at-risk communities should cultivate the imagination as without imagining nothing outside of your current situation is possible.

I believe that the way that we fund education creates cycles of poverty and violence in inner city neighborhoods.

I believe that if educational policy isn’t shaped by teacher’s and not just government officials then our educational system will eventually burst.

For my final project I plan on working on the Prezi presentation since it is a type of presentation style that I have never created for myself. We currently use a Prezi when we do presentation but it hasn’t been updated in a while and I never created one for myself I have been using a Prezi that was created by one of my coworkers.

My presentation is so completely different than the average admissions presentation because of the population that I recruit. I recruit mostly at-risk students from background very similar to mine. I usually tell a story about my dad and the word opportunity and I feel that with visual aid and pictures of my father and words on the screen I could make the story a bit more powerful.

Although I’m leaning towards the Prezi.

I am still considering Endnote. Endnote is a source gathering resource. It compiles sources and articles and cites them for you. I feel that I am lacking the modern capacity to compile and organize information. Manila folders and desk drawers don’t do it for me anymore. I usually end up with a folder of stuff that I can’t find when I actually need. I feel that end note could really help me compile data to potentially write a Doctoral thesis in a couple of years.