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tags: report
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# Graham O'Toole: Media & Design Fellow in Celtic


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** Graham did to get ready to support projects in Celtic
* The **courses** Graham supported this year
* The **departmental support** Graham 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.

Graham joined codeLab and has been building a front-end crowdsourcing website where users could, whenever they come across a place name in an Irish text, enter particular kinds of metadata (e.g., the name, the coordinates, if they can map it where it is, and the manuscript source or text source edition where they saw that name). Then, using an API either through Google Maps or another software, the place would be mapped using the coordinates the user enters.

### 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

### Celtic 185: Transatlantic Celts: Narratives of Loss and Belonging

Celtic 185 is a class about diaspora in America and the Caribbean and South America, pre-Atlantic Patagonia, from Wales mostly, but also Ireland and Scotland. Graham helped students in this course who were working on Storymaps projects, teaching them about basic and advanced functionality in Storymaps that could help them map significant sites.

## Department Support

### Multimodal Communications Workshop Series for Graduate Students

Graham is offered a series of workshops that introduced graduate students in the Celtic department to media forms and tools for making in those media that further the possibilities of academic communication in their field. Graham s graduate students in his department useful tools for managing data, the basics of web development for making websites, and the types of alternative forms that they might want to teach students to make (e.g., video essays, podcasts). Graham also discussed integrated discussion of AI into these workshops, helping graduate students think about the moments when AI might be useful--for instance in supporting students making multimodal projects.