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tags: report
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# Julia Sharpe: Media & Design Fellow in AFVS


Media & Design Fellows support innovative course development, partnering with faculty and Learning Lab staff to design a variety of digital tools, course materials and content, and assignments for undergraduate courses and their departments. MDFs design interactive, technically complex learning experiences for students that help them grasp the affordances of different media, and they develop workshops and other forms of guidance that help students succeed in using new media to convey their ideas and demonstrate subject-matter expertise.

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

## Learning Lab Training

### Labs/Working Groups


To prepare to support courses and to develop their multimodal pedagogy, MDFs join a "lab". In these labs, MDFs learn the media skills that they need to complete their projects. They undertake an initial learning project that teaches them the core competencies required for their departmental projects.

Julia joined codeLab to develop her skills in web development. Julia learned some of the basics of javascript so that she could build a Next.js app connected to an Airtable database (or backend). Julia wanted to learn these skills to support her projects in AFVS, which include finding ways to display student work on the web.

### Pedagogical Training

Throughout the year, MDFs develop their multimodal pedagogy, learning during orientation and at biweekly MDF meetings:
* how to design activities, prototype assignments, and create resources that help students in the particular courses they are supporting.
* how to develop their own style of multimodal pedagogy as they think through the specific media that align with their discipline’s methods and means of analyzing data.
* the affordances of different media and what students gain, intellectually and analytically, by engaging with those media forms

## Course Support


### AFVS 99 Workshop: Tools for Documenting, Archiving and Sharing Creative Practices

The documentation workshop for AFVS students will give students the tools to:
* document their working process and studio practice
* use lighting and cameras to document work
* document completed work for applications and website content (professional materials)
* develop a key set of themes that contexualize their work

This workshop series covered theories and examples of process documentation as well as key practices for DIY documentation of works. The goal of the workshop is for each student to have developed their own system of documentation by the workshops' end. The workshops will be geared towards concentrators and thesis students, but also any student who thinks about making art professionally.

## Department Support

### Open Studios Web Gallery Prototype

Julia prototyped a web gallery that students participating in AFVS Open Studios could use to submit examples of their studio work and that could be tagged according to the course where they made this work. Julia also explored the range of options that the department could use to host the media that would populate this site. Julia's hope is that this gallery could eventually also be connected to initiatives in the department to connect current students and recent graduates to the broader AFVS alumni network, for instance by designing the site so that it's a secure place for alumni to see what current students are making and to connect with them.