Media Practice in the Humanities Classroom

While there is good reason to be suspicious of the enthusiastic rush to integrate technology into the classroom, we in the humanities should embrace the opportunity it presents for media literacy and critical cultural inquiry

‘Searching for District 9 in the Archives: archaeology of a transmedia Campaign’

Film marketing materials have conventionally been regarded as both ephemera and ephemeral but in a digital environment they have become increasingly significant colonising the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. Indeed the distinctions between promotion and content have become so blurred that, arguably, marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, raising questions about the cultural value of such ephemera. This project set out to examine what transmedia contributes to the narrative ecology of the film and took the award winning campaign designed by the marketing agency, Trigger for Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) as a starting point. But the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after the project began, the site disappeared. This paper will give an account of a media archaeological excavation to find for District 9’s web campaign. During the search archival sites encountered included institutions set up with the aim of preservation such as the Internet Archive, commercial archives such as the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of web 2.0 archives – a personal blog, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this, the paper will then reflect on what the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this research project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as the film transmediation.Non peer reviewe

Short-term and long-term benefits as determinants of the training behaviour of companies

"This paper adopts an economic perspective for an investigation of the correlation between cost-benefit aspects and company decisions regarding training. A differentiation is drawn between the basic decision about whether a company should provide its own training and the stipulation of the number of trainees. The basis of the data used is information on the cost-benefit aspects of training from a survey conducted by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training in 2001, the information being supplied by companies which provide training and companies which do not provide training. It becomes apparent that cost-benefit aspects are highly significant in both phases of the company training decision. Possible starting points for vocational education and training policy primarily emerge from encouraging additional companies to provide training rather than from increasing the number of training places at companies already providing training, however. In overall terms, longer-term benefits appear to be accorded more importance than short-term cost aspects." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) Additional Information Kurzfassung (deutsch) Executive summary (English)Ausbildungsverhalten - Determinanten, Betrieb, Ausbildungsbetrieb, Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse, Ausbildungskosten, betriebliche Berufsausbildung - Nutzen, betriebliche Berufsausbildung, Bildungsökonomie, Bildungsinvestitionen, Bildungsertrag, Personalpolitik