During the past year, Ball State’s administration has really pushed “emerging media” and “immersion experiences” around like they were the key to surviving this dismal economic recession. And that they may be…
The president and the administration, unfortunately, do not know a lot about what is really “emerging” though, so this pushes almost anything that isn’t a lecture class into one of the two categories very quickly, thus watering down the idea of emerging technologies and media.
A prime example of this comes from the iMedia course that recently presented its work to a crowd at the Center for Media Design (an institute within the university that does research for paying clients such as Nielsen). I went into this presentation hoping the students were being taught how to create iPhone applications and such. This is the wave of the future… this is what employers are looking for. Instead, I was very disappointed to learn they had created three Web sites that were sized for smart phones.The reason for this? So that the application could be used on an iPhone, Blackberry and Droid at the same time.
I understand this issue. However, maybe the class should have been developing software to create applications for all three operating systems instead of just making a Web site that doesn’t even resize itself when you look at it on a computer. If the class had successfully built software for this purpose, the university could have purchased a patent on it and made some big bucks, fixing the budget crisis we are facing at the moment.
In the meantime, even if they had separating the class into three teams— one to build an application for each major OS— I think the students would have been better off than they were at the end of this semester. On top of that, the clients— The Star Press and the businesses of Muncie— would have also been better off. These Web sites are not going to get them very far before people wonder why they can’t access it without going into Safari on their iPhone.
What makes this worse is that the teachers are just going to continue to do another semester like this past one, finishing the Web applications they started.
Hopefully the College of Communication, Information and Media will wise up in upcoming years and require more out of their emerging media classes. Doing this will bring in more funds and send out better graduates.