Imaging Lab Curriculum Gets a Boost from Unexpected Sources
While fans of Halo and World of Warcraft would certainly appreciate the work we do here in the Imaging Lab, I don’t usually look for validation from our English teachers, who generally lament that too much time is spent by students playing video games. But this month, we got a strong endorsement from, of all sources, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
In their statement entitled “Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies,”the NCTE Executive Committee promote many of the skills and ideas we work on in our technology courses. The statement declares that “twenty-first century readers and writers need to:
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and
cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
So if you find it somewhat surprising to find English teachers promoting multimedia technology, what about a publication that promotes Imaging Lab classes as a viable economic investment for future employment? In the past, many of my students who showed interest in continuing their Imaging Lab studies were counseled by parents and other adults to “choose something more practical, at least as a backup.” But in this month’sPrinceton Review, careers in Digital Media are touted as lucrative and numerous. “Opportunities in these areas are on the rise as new media and technologies are being developed,” claim the authors. They go on to cite a statistic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, stating that “employment opportunities in motion picture and video production are expected to rise about 17 percent industry-wide by 2014.”
On the list of the 10 hottest careers in this field mentioned in the article, five of the top six are directly related to animation or video skills we introduce in Imaging Lab courses. Consider our Electronic Arts courses, which teach 3D modeling and animation: “At the moment, there are only about 94,000 multimedia artists and animators in the country--and demand for industry professionals is on the rise, expected to increase by 40 percent in the next decade.” But these are competitive fields, and the article takes care to state that admission to four-year college programs in digital media are “intensely competitive.” All the more reason to get a leg-up on the hundreds of thousands of high school students who don’t have an Imaging Lab in their school!
