Steve Rothkopf: Dormland Security

This class was very different than other classes I've taken in the past, mainly resulting from the fact that it is such a do-it-yourself, independent type of learning. The course truly treated us like adults. This is what I expected college to be like. I think Thom always had a way of making the class interesting and fun, mainly because he was so open to new and bizarre ideas. The class was also well constructed, I think, in that it used many different mediums to instruct. i.e. we had to do book reports, we took in-class quizzes, we blogged, and constructed web pages, and we planned campaigns. I do think, though, that we could have spent some more time on some topics, mainly constructing web pages. I understand that building web pages is difficult to learn in a short period of time and that there are entire courses devoted to this subject, but I think more handouts and concrete direction would have been very beneficial. I, for one, forget much about what we learned about web sites, simply because Thom went so fast in explaining it, and we didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.

As far as the campaigns go, we found that much of what we did with Dormland Security was successful. Video turned out to be a very important medium for us, and worked very well. We also found that by incorporating other campaigns in our video, we could create a web connecting all the campaigns and therefore promote all of them by promoting one. Regarding our video, we initially planned to make it comedic in the slap-stick, Saturday Night Live type of style. We found though, that this might be over-the-top and less funny than if we made the humor more subtle. We also learned about the importance of lighting and properly-placed cue cards while filming. We initially planned on having a person or persons as our logo, or mascot, for Dormland Security. We played around with the idea of making a superhero team who protected dorm rooms from theft. However we found that this superhero idea created too much juxtaposition with the news video theme. Therefore we decided on a more subtle, plainer logo of black and white lettering.