Music, Poetry and Reflection: A Night for Esha Momeni

An Iranian opera singer, a poet and other musicians will perform this Friday (Jan. 23)  at USC’s United Universal Church at an event focusing on our graduate student, Esha Momeni, who is still unable to leave Iran.

Esha, a dual US-Iranian citizen, was initially arrested and jailed in October for videotaping interviews with members of the Campaign for Equality.  She was released from jail in November but never given back her passports.  Last week the Iranian government “officially” announced Esha is under a travel ban.

The event’s performers include:

Shahla Sarokhani, who studied music in Tehran and Vienna, was with the Opera House in Tehran, and has performed in Austria, Italy, Switzerland and the US.

Sahba Motallei, a graduate of Tehran Conservatory and member of the Iranian National Orchestra,  who was awarded best tar player four years in a row by the Iranian Music Festival.

Ziba Shirazi, a poet and musician, who combines Persian folk music with American jazz and other forms in her work.

Fariborz Azizi, Master musician.

See the Facebook Event Page for more info.

From the For Esha blog:

We, as friends of Esha, students and faculty of CSUN, members of the Million Signatures Campaign in Southern California, academics and fellow artists, are delighted and honored to invite you to an evening event that seeks to highlight Esha’s continued restriction under a travel ban.

We would like to acknowledge the unity displayed to secure her release and to highlight what can be accomplished when we join hands and work together with a common purpose and unified goal.

Please feel free to bring family and friends. We look forward to seeing you there.

Time: 8:00 pm (Doors open at 7:30 pm)

Date: Friday January 23, 2009

Admission: Free

Place:

United University Church

University of Southern California

817 West 34th Street

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0751

Hello Dolly: Test Tube Journalism

This fall I threw out the book on our sophomore-junior level writing class, Journalism 310 Writing, Reporting & Ethics III. Literally.

After months of departmental discussions, major purchases of backpack journalism equipment, a week-long convergence bootcamp, and a university Beck grant, I completely re-imagined what was once a feature writing class.  J310 became a test tube for multimedia journalism unlike anything I’ve taught before.

The results?  Students  shot and edited video, wrote reviews for Yelp, created Google Maps, and even tried their hands at live blogging.   They used WordPress blogs as the sites for the content they produced, and signed up for YouTube accounts to post video.  (This tag cloud gives a sense of what we covered, or you can visit the class site or blog for more specifics. To see what students produced, visit their individual blogs.)

I’ve just gotten back the anonymous student reviews (thank you, J310ers for your many kind comments), and wanted to share some of their critiques:

“I was under the impression this would be an intensive writing class not a Web 2.0 class . . . In fact, the writing we have done seems supplemental to technology.” This is a key issue facing all print journalists — technology is taking away from the basics of reporting and writing.   To what extent should that be happening in student journalism classes as well?

“I needed further explanation on how to use these tools.” While writing skills vary in journo classes, the variation in tech skills seems greater to me, and thus presents a thornier problem.  Some students wanted minimal explanation and then an opportunity to dive in; others wanted more guidance.  Perhaps more emphasis on peer mentoring?

“Would have liked a more solid syllabus that mapped out assignments better.” Because the class was new, I wasn’t entirely sure how much we could cover, so the syllabus was a bit vague.  I revised it as the semester went along but it still needs fleshing out.

Faculty perspectives

The curriculum committee also surveyed faculty this semester about their use of new media and their thoughts about incorporating such tools.

Faculty are teaching:  Soundslides, Garageband, iMovie/Windows Movie Maker, blogging, wikis, Twitter, RSS, Firefox plugin architecture, social bookmarking, website creation, HTML, CSS.  Examples of student work:

Student-produced PR VNR (De Veaux)

J110 News Spotting blog (Charles)

J210 blog (Bowen)

Scene Magazine (Shapiro)

El Nuevo Sol (Benavides)

Faculty comments:

Basic Internet skills need to be taught earlier in the program vs. No online skills until the 300 level (whoa, how do we reconcile those lines of thought?)

Problems include “giving up certain assignments in favor of the multimedia projects.”

Students need to spend extra time learning the tools early in the semester, so they don’t scramble to do so with their final, major assignments.

Inconsistency in departmental software;  mainly Mac labs but mainly PC-owning students.

Taking my J310 students’ comments and those from faculty into account, the issues are the same:

• What’s our emphasis as we incorporate new skills with traditional ones?  How do we keep up-to-date without forgetting our roots?

• When and at which levels do we incorporate new technology skills?
• Professors need to calibrate how much more time will be needed to teach these new forms journalism, and whether traditional ways of explaining still work.

Waiting for Esha

Strange times when your department is plastered with pleas for one of your own students to be freed, but that was the kind of fall semester we had.

After the Iranian government first said our graduate student, Esha Momeni, was free to leave Iran, then wouldn’t give her back her passports, one of my colleagues lamented that we were experiencing our own transnational version of  “Waiting for Godot Esha.”

As the new year begins at the College of Arts, Media and Communication, we’re still wondering if Esha, who was previously jailed for working on her master’s thesis about the Campaign for Equality, will be back for spring semester at the end of the month.