` Teaching | Jeremy Gilbert : Design Thinker, Professor and Multimedia Journalist - Part 2

Posts Tagged ‘Teaching’

Our First Loves: True Multimedia Confessions

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Twelve Medill undergraduates learning about interactive design were challenged to make a multimedia storytelling Website about something they felt passionately about. To my surprise and that of my co-instructor, Susan Mango Curtis, the subject they felt passionately about was… love.

The students used audio, video, photography and animation to tell stories of peoples’ first loves. Our First Loves is filled with stories like someone’s love of John Travolta, Spaghetti or ‘the boy next door.’ Users of the site are encouraged to rate each story (‘crinkle my nose,’ ‘want to cry’ or ‘want to create an e-dating profile’) and to tell their own stories.

Our First Loves

News Mixer: Making Commenting More Civil

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

In Fall Quarter of 2008, six Medill students in a class I co-directed with Rich Gordon built a prototype for new ways of commenting on news stories called News Mixer. Working with the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a newspaper in eastern Iowa, the team spent 11 weeks conceiving, designing and building open source tools to improve online dialogue.

The final product was built in the open-source web framework Django, uses Facebook Connect for registration and is available on Google Code for your use. The project went on to win an award from AEJMC’s 2008 Best of the Web and be a finalist for a 2008 ONA award. The two journalists-coders, Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark have gone on to found the Chicago Tribune’s News Application Team.

med_newsmixer