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# Recent MDF Projects at the Learning Lab

### History 1206 Reinterpretation of Paris '68 Workshop:


A current MDF, who is based in History, facilitated a "Reinterpretation of a Paris '68 Poster or Photograph" workshop in support of Professor Mary Lewis's course, "Empire, Nation, and Immigration in France since 1870." This assignment asked students to "update" a historical work of political art for a contemporary audience, referring to contemporary political movements and issues in a visually compelling and legible manner. Below are some examples of student work, including a reinterpretation of historical protest imagery that addresses the gilets jaunes ("yellow vests") movement. To complete this assignment, students needed support in design principles and graphic design tools like Adobe Illustrator, which an MDF provides.

### Exploring Deep History with Virtual Galleries
During the fall 2021 term, Professors Daniel Small and Matt Liebmann assigned students a virtual galleries assignment in GENED 1044: Deep History. Our MDF, who is based in History and studies medieval archaeology, facilitated this innovative assignment by hosting the course’s students in the Learning Lab for tutorials in 2D and 3D modeling tools that could be used to create these virtual galleries. Deep history, as a concept, describes the entire human past. Therefore, student galleries were curated to explore the question of how humans have created and used objects over a vast expanse of time and geographical space. To enable students to showcase and analyze their chosen objects for an imagined museum audience, Claire introduced students to tools that would allow them to both create a virtual gallery experience and the objects themselves.

### Multimedia Workshops for Students

Our MDF based in EALC brought Professor Michael Puett's GENED 1091: Classical Chinese Political and Ethical Theory course to the Learning Lab for a multimedia workshop that supports their final projects. This MDF planned and hosted a multimedia workshop for the course, showing students the tools they could use in their creative projects. Stations were set up where students could explore 2D illustration (both virtual and digital), 3D modeling (both virtual and digital), capturing and staging performance, and video editing.

### Chinese Illustrations Database

During the fall semester, one of our MDFs worked on a database that records basic information about illustrations from an eighteenth-century Chinese novel. This MDF's goal is to create an easy-to-use data collection of these illustrations, because key data about these illustrations is often scattered and difficult to access. This database aggregates key information about the illustrations and allows students to classify, describe, analyze, or tag the illustrations. The structure and content of this database could be adapted for a range of courses, especially those that want to encourage students to classify, annotate, and close-read visual or text-based materials.

### Podcasting Workshop Series

One of our MDFs from Romance Languages and Literatures has developed a podcast workshop for Professor Adriana Gutiérrez’s Spanish 50: Creative Writing and Performance course. This podcasting workshop brought students into the Learning Lab space to create podcast episodes about the course materials. Students received instruction in sound capture and editing, as well as the basics of podcast structure/form.

### Essay Film Workshop Series
One of our MDFs has developed a series of Essay Film workshops, designing a series of scaffolding exercises that are now being used to teach students how to create films essays in AFVS70, The Art of Film with Professor Laura Frahm. Working with a group of Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs) as user-testers, this MDF's essay film workshops introduced students to the basics of video essay composition and editing. Each week, the MDF gave the LLUFs a specific task to complete, and once the group gathered, they discussed each student's film-essay-in-progress. This approach to the assignment encouraged the students to draft the film essay in a manner analogous to drafting any academic essay. Wesley's workshops also foregrounded the importance of feedback and revision to the film essay composition process.