Slightly last minute here, but if anyone is interested in hearing about an alternative assessment technique in media/urban studies, I have just the thing for you. Tomorrow (1 March 2017) I will be giving a 4pm talk at Birkbeck’s Centre for Transformative Practice in Learning and Teaching, around the ‘urban media inventory’ assessment that I have been developing in recent years, as part of my module The Mediated City.

The talk will have a little bit of conceptual backdrop (though I will hopefully talk about this aspect more at the RGS-IBG in August, pending acceptance). Largely, though, it will be more practical, on-the-ground reflections about trying to teach and assess media studies in a slightly more, well, geographical way.

The abstract for the talk is below. If you’d like to come, you should register at the Eventbrite page for the seminar.

Thinking Media through the City
Dr Scott Rodgers, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck

This seminar offers some reflections on The Mediated City, an undergraduate module that encourages students to think about ‘media’ through their experiences of urban environments and urban living. The main focus of the seminar will be an alternative assessment which has been under development in recent years. Throughout the module, students build a blog-based compilation of ‘urban media’ examples that include text, photos, audio, video, maps and other elements. Particularly when they make use of mobile media technologies and techniques, students are effectively being asked to gather up the city and bring it back into the class setting for discussion and elaboration. We will consider the potentials and challenges of this learning method and assessment, and its connections with recent debates that suggest pedagogy should move both beyond the classroom setting and beyond representational knowledge narrowly conceived.