UNIVERSITY INVOLVEMENT
I took a day trip to Edinboro, just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania's third largest city. Dean Terry Smith explained that once he saw the digital storytelling workshop in Berkeley, he got permission to shift his focus from helping build capacity in local non-profits to setting up a small multimedia lab at the university with a digital video camera, workstation with Adobe Premiere (or equivalent), scanner, and microphone. At Edinboro University there are more than 900 art students (graphic arts and design) and 450 students in speech communications. These groups reacted very positively to the digital storytelling training session of Dana Atchley. Smith thought this application showed that the boundaries of photography, video, animation, and cinema are blurring. Because Kellogg was promoting digital storytelling and paid for sessions at Edinboro this helped it make an even great impact on the students and faculty. I asked if there was much interdisciplinary projects, but Smith said the departments do not work across boundaries because those endeavors are seen an impure, watered down, and not conforming to standards within a discipline. They continue to work with non-profits, helping them with web design and multimedia production, and a new grant will investigate the convergence or blurring of the different arts.
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