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tags: mdf-report
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# Amelia Linsky: Media & Design Fellow in RLL


Media & Design Fellows provide direct support to specific courses, helping students develop and complete multimodal assignments. MDFs also host workshops in multimodal communication, multimodal storytelling, and presentation techniques. They also provide general support to their departments by developing resources and hosting events that support multimodal scholarship.

In this report, you can read about:
* The **training with the Learning Lab** Amelia did to get ready to support projects in Slavic
* The **courses** Amelia supported this term
* The **departmental support** Amelia provided this term

## Learning Lab Training


During MDF orientation in August and throughout the bi-weekly fall MDF meetings, Amelia learned:
* how to **design activities, prototype assignments, and create resources** that help students in the particular courses they are supporting.
* a set of **multimodal pedagogy and instructional design best practices** and ways of connecting it to their discipline
* **the affordances of different media** and what students gain, intellectually and analytically, by engaging with those media forms

To get ready to support RLL courses, the **tools** that Amelia specialized in included:
* **cameras, lights, the green screen, and other filmmaking tools** that we use to illustrate cinematic principles and formal choices during filmmaking workshops
* **Final Cut Pro**, a video editing tool used for video essays and other film projects
* **Canva**, a web-based graphic design and layout tool
* **DIY filmmaking practices**, including shooting video with a smart phone

## Course Support

### French 10: Beginning French I: Cross-Cultural Encounters in French

In this course, students made portfolios that documented their learning, using the digital tool Canva. To support this course:
* Amelia held **workshops** to introduce students to Canva and the fundamentals of shot composition to help them compose videos for their Canva sites.
* Amelia created a Canva **resource** that guided students step-by-step through the process of designing their portfolios.

As students learned how to use graphic design and produce quality videos, they prepared to do the kind of multimodal communication that is increasingly common across domains while furthering their language skills in French.

### French 10 and French 11: Paris in Virtual Reality

Amelia supported students’ recordings at the end of the term by being on-site at the Learning Lab during their recording sessions.

### French 40: The Contemporary Francophone World Through Cinema

In this course, students practice their language skills by making short films about their identity as French speakers in a global Francophone context. To support this course, Amelia:
* hosted a **workshop** about filmmaking techniques and encouraged students to consider how formal choices shaped the film’s narrative and the way a subject was perceived.
* Amelia also created a **resource** that students could reference as they made their film projects; the resource included tutorials about recording intentionally composed footage using phones and step-by-step video editing instructions.

### Portuguese Filmmaking Workshop

Hosting a filmmaking **workshop** about composition and lighting, Amelia supported students’ final film projects in:

- **Portuguese 10: Beginning Portuguese I: From Cambridge to Copacabana**
- **Portuguese 11S: More SAMBA, less Salsa!**
- **Portuguese 40: Images of Brazil through Contemporary Cinema**

This workshop helped students learn how to recreate shots from films, advertisements, and other video forms they had studied in their courses (or that they had otherwise encountered as consumers of media). Amelia led students through a series of interactive exercises where they practiced different filming techniques and considered how these articulated narrative meaning. Amelia also designed a **resource** with tips for editing in backgrounds (for students who recorded in front of a green screen), as well as more standard video editing tips and tutorials.

## Department Support

### RLL Language Program webpage content development

Amelia has been helping the RLL Language Program faculty develop content for a new website. Amelia has been consulting with the faculty about the types of materials they might want to have given their teaching and research, **gathering this content, and proposing organizational strategies**. This project will help promote language learning at Harvard and enable language instructors and students from other universities to learn about the Language Program.