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How To Use Medium In The Classroom

Whether you use it for a group project, or solicit your students to submit assignments through its interface, Medium can be a great addition to your academic toolbox. With its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, Medium pushes the focus to content creation rather than form, simplifying the publishing process if compared with traditional blogging platforms.

Amongst other things, Medium gives you the ability to:

  1. Receive prompt and punctual feedback from the public at large, or from anyone you share a published story or a draft with;
  2. Publish an unlisted story to share only with your peers or students for a more focused exchange of ideas;
  3. Encourage collaborative annotations and relevant comments from your peers or students, by way of an assignment or relevant discussion;
  4. Create a unique tag to catalog all of your course’s work and easily find posts created by students;
  5. Create a publication, in lieu of a tag, to collect all of your students’ work. Publications can group stories together by many authors, managed by one or several editors. 
  6. Follow specific authors and/or collections that can be relevant to the course (instructor’s profile, guest lecturers’, students’, or even a specific topic);

Although a lot of this can be done in seemingly more private ways through a shared Google Doc by using the comment feature, Medium’s interface privileges a multimedia output and looks less static than word-processing softwares do. Medium’s layout makes readers’ comments relevant to specific sections of your text without visually interfering in it.

Medium's Publication interface
Medium’s Publication interface

While Medium’s global interface centers on streams, individual stories and their authors, we suggest managing a course by using Publication. 

Create a publication for your course, customize it, and add students as authors or editors (depending on how much publishing autonomy you’d like to give them). This is especially useful if you would like your students’ work to be accessible to the public (just be mindful of FERPA), as Medium has the potential to reach cross-over audiences, even across Twitter (i.e., users who follow the publication as well as users who follow its individual authors). For more information about Publications and tips to perfect it, click here. 

See this article on Medium.

Social Theory and Curatorial Practice

by Eugenia Kisin
Spring 2017

Caring about Curating

What is a curator? From the Latin curare, which means both “to cure” and “to care for,” curators are people who make choices about how to display things—and sometimes the things called art—for others. Both “caring” and “curing” are integral to this work, as “caring” involves considerable expertise to establish what is worth caring about; the work of assemblage may also be remedial, jolting us out of previous understandings through unexpected juxtapositions. And, like all public forms of display, curatorial projects are always constrained by time, space, money, and also by murkier questions of what one can reasonably expect of an audience—how to best ensure that they also care.

In my “Social Theory and Curatorial Practice” seminar at Gallatin, I wanted my students to experiment within this role in practical and theoretical terms: assembling, displaying, and making an argument with some of the things that are important to them. Through consultations with Jenny Kijowski, Gallatin’s Educational Technologist, a final Digital Humanities assignment for the seminar was born: a digital curatorial project in which students would develop a curatorial statement, didactic label texts, and a digital gallery showcasing 4-6 digital objects—expansively delineated in the assignment as “original works (yours) or preexisting things,” to make room for students’ diverse creative practices. Predictably, the openness of the assignment resulted in a wide variety of projects and mediums: audio tracks arranged over an interactive map of Manhattan to articulate the singer’s attachments to place; hand-written dance scores paired with their interpretation in performance to ask about the circulation of ephemeral works; a series of Etsy wishlists curated to reveal different aspects of the curator’s racial and gender identity over time in relation to consumer capitalism. Over the second half of the semester, students critiqued their galleries in groups, and wrote reflections on the process.

On the technical end, Jenny trained students in NYU’s Web Publishing platform, which the majority decided to use to create their galleries. This was an important part of the process, as contemporary imaginings of the role of the curator often use the language of “digital content curation.” I wanted to integrate knowledge of this work and the technical skills it requires with a critique of why curation has gone from a somewhat arcane practice associated with the figure of a white-gloved art specialist to something that is increasingly framed as a marketable skill in the digital world; Jenny’s workshop gave students the tools to develop both their digital skills and critical language for talking about new forms of curation online.

Many students’ projects were thematically ambitious, using artworks as original sources in innovative ways. In his gallery Pluriversal Currents, Patrick Bova (Gallatin 2018) brought together work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to explore the meaning of “decolonial aesthetics” beyond its recent ubiquitous status in the global art world. Drawing on artists’ land- and water-based practices of decolonization, Patrick showed how this understanding and its ecological stakes sit in tension with the institutional definitions and spaces of the art world. In her project Revisited, Ana Lopes (Global Liberal Studies 2018) staged a digital rearrangement of works from a well-known 2004 exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York called MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Ana’s criticism of the 2004 exhibition hinged on what she interpreted as a decontextualization Latin American and Caribbean works, which were celebrated only in relation to a narrative of Western modernity that results, in her words, in “a social and political sterilization of their histories.” Both of these projects, and many others, used techniques of assemblage in the digital gallery to ask art historical questions that could not have been arrived at merely seeing reproductions of the works in books or exhibition catalogs.

“...their digital galleries had provoked them to re-imagine their subject...”

In their self-evaluations, students reflected on what they had learned and what they would change about their projects if time and resources permitted, and often noted that the project had opened up further questions; rather than serving as an exhaustive statement on the given theme, their digital galleries had provoked them to re-imagine their subject, and given them new perspectives on the limits and possibilities of their emerging curatorial authority: a power to care and, perhaps, to cure.  

Writing for the Screen II

Selma Thompson
Spring 2017

Professor Thompson’s Spring course, “Writing for the Screen II,” helps students develop their screenplays. Students who are admitted to the course must apply by submitting a screenplay draft that will be developed throughout the course of the semester.

The course is structured so that students take turns each week for a table read of their respective screenplay drafts, getting feedback from their peers, as well as from the instructor. As noted on the syllabus, in-class discussions revolve around “structure; flow; set-ups and pay-offs; character arcs; length; natural-sounding dialogue; ways to make the script more active; image-systems and maximizing the script’s visual potential.”

Using NYU’s Web Publishing platform as the main course’s website, one student each week would assign a screenplay of a current movie for the class to read. All students would then post their reactions to the assigned screenplay, analyzing its structure and highlighting three examples of effective choices made by the screenwriter. Prof. Thompson also used Web Publishing to give students feedback on their weekly reaction posts.

Students responded well to the use of digital technology in their course. In our survey, one of Prof. Thompson’s students said the following about Web Publishing: “It was a very convenient and easy way to interact with the professor and students outside of the classroom and discuss,” concluding that “technology can play an immensely helpful role in the classroom, particularly in creative and artistic courses like Writing for the Screen II.”