The Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) team includes expert practitioners with experience in classroom and online teaching, multi-modal course design, product and media development, and educational research. This expertise allows the TLL to support the holistic development of learning experiences and assets, from discovery to debrief. In our Staff Spotlight blog series, we are interviewing the TLL staff about the career trajectory that brought them to HGSE, and what they’ve been working on lately.
What is it about multimedia work generally that compels you?
It's just exciting. It's fun. It's creative. I really love when you can show and not tell. I'm also really interested in story. I come into this role having been a media producer at Harvard for quite a while, but my actual formative educational training that got me into the multimedia realm was in music as a Songwriting major at Berklee College of Music. Along with that, lots and lots of solo and live band performance in my past. A rigorous education in studio production, studio recording, audio editing, those types of things, and that, thankfully, has parlayed really nicely into developing further skills in the multimedia realm. Prior to my education in music, I was an English major at a liberal arts college in Colorado. So again, the stories, whether it's songwriting, or whether it's English or creative writing, whether it's multimedia production, storytelling really is the lynchpin among all of those things that I’ve geared my life to sort of revolve around in one way, shape or form or another. Multimedia is just a really exciting and fun way to be able to render storytelling effectively.
What have you been working on lately?
Right now we are wrapping up a pretty large scope project for a Fall II OEL (Online Master's in Education Leadership) course called Real Talk with Tim McCarthy, which involves about twenty videos that that we are producing, four of which are kind of flipped classroom lectures, and fifteen are public speaking tips, tricks, and takeaways that Tim McCarthy is offering to students as supplemental resources for students to explore.
How does your approach to storytelling vary across modalities? What stories are you telling with video vs. photography vs. audio/music?
Well, I wouldn't necessarily call those things mutually exclusive, in any way. And that's what's great about multimedia is that you have this wonderful synthesis of many of those different elements all together in one package. So humorously enough, in the Real Talk videos that we are producing (Real Talk: The Art and Practice of Brave Communication is the full name of the course), we are actually using a song called ‘Brave’ by Sara Bareilles as part of the musical branding for the course. It's a sweet and uplifting and empowering song, and so we're actually leveraging that (with permission of course) in the intro and outro music for all the videos. It's fun and inspiring, and really undergirds kind of the passion and the overarching theme for the course which is to really step into your best and strongest self, particularly in your persona as a public speaker -- to really step up and be brave in terms of how you communicate. So that's a wonderful kind of dovetailing of the music, combined with video of Tim masterfully delivering his content, alongside graphical elements we developed to punctuate Tim’s subject matter, all for the purpose of creating a more complete and satisfying video for learners, which hopefully bolsters the learners’ interest and enthusiasm for the course material.
What would your dream project be as a Media Producer?
Good question. Subject matter is really important to me. If it’s something that is really impactful and moving, perhaps that is concerned with activism, talking about inclusion, talking about equity, talking about challenges that people are experiencing in their lives and in the educational domain or ecosystem, and subject matter that is focused on trying to improve peoples’ lives. That's what's really moving to me, that gives me goose bumps when I’m in a shoot, or gets me teared up when I’m editing a video. You know, to hear a faculty member speak really passionately about that type of subject matter is an element that makes for an ideal video project for me; which is thankfully a lot of the content that I’ve been exposed to here at HGSE.
 | Real Talk Structure and Sequence Video | 81.03 MB |