• Goals and Theoretical Framework

• Project Stages

• The Future

• Benefits
  Pedagogy and Assessment

• Creating the Mobile Experience
  and why the GPS didn't work in this phase

Creating and Analyzing
Menlo MediaScape: Phase 1

Goals and Theoretical Framework

This project shares goals with digital storytelling and community-based media scaping:

• Use media technologies as tools for
  • community building
    • develop a community’s stories – and history
    • link a community back to its stories
  • creating stories from the grassroots that matter
    • transcendence, transformation, resistance
  • personal change / societal change
    • people telling their stories
    • people hearing the stories

A larger theoretical and practical framework can be found in the study of alternative, grassroots, community-based media:

• Using media to facilitate communication and understanding between and among people
  • usually non-commercial / non-corporate
  • often produced by non-professionals
  • examples:
    • “underground” newspapers
    • public access cable tv
    • “Link” (Direct TV) and “Free Speech TV” (Dish)
    • community-based radio
    • web-based citizen journalism
    • community technology movement
  • Additional information
    • "The Praxis of Access: Access and Global Activism"
      by John W. Higgins, Community Media Review,
      Summer 2004

Project Stages

The stages involved thus far in the project:

• Research
  • Menlo College History
  • select stories
• Production
• write the script
• produce media stories from script
• Post Production
• change the media stories into format used for hand-held and the web
• re-edit media stories
• Programming: Mobile Menlo
• Learn the GPS-based software to create Mobile Menlo
• Program the hand-held device
• Sync the GPS coordinates of Menlo College with the GPS
  hand-held device
• Programming: Menlo MediaScape
  • Adapt media stories to web-based map
• Testing
  • adapting media / programming
  • re-testing

The Future

Upcoming phases in the project:

• Additional research
  • collect oral histories
• Add layers of stories, sounds, visuals
• Technical
  • refine media stories
  • refine web site
  • refine the hand-held issues
    • GPS coordinates
    • integrate software with GPS hand-held
  • software update: May 2007
    • will work on all “smart phones”
      • based on Windows Mobile OS

Some of the benefits related to pedagogy and assessment provided by the project::

• Experiential learning
  • pedagogy: practice before theory
  • fun!
• Service learning
• pedagogy: service to the community
• fun!
• Assessment -- portfolio
• Evidence of student learning
• together with Menlo College
  student projects: digital storytelling and other projects

Creating the Mobile Experience

A few of the steps involved in the technical creation of the mobile portion of the project:

• Locate an appropriate GPS-based map that utilizes UTM coordinates
  • UTM = Universal Transverse Mercator
  • different system than latitude / longitude
• Crop map to fit active geographical area
• Apply GPS coordinates of the Menlo campus to the map
• Set up hot-spots at specific coordinates on the map
• when walk into hot-spot, media event is triggered on the hand-held

Well, that's the theory anyway -- getting all this to happen is quite laborious, with repeated testing, analysis, troubleshooting, re-testing. As it turned on in Spring 2007, the coordinates were off -- so the GPS portion did not work on the Menlo campus. But, analysis concluded that someone about a mile away with the right equipment might be picking up the Menlo MediaScape signal and stories.

In the meantime, the M-Scape software update of May 2007 has greatly simplified the programming and compilation process -- so check back in late Fall 2007 for updates to Menlo MediaScape!