Undergraduate Independent Study

Hey All,

A pleasure meeting you today. I am looing forward to seeing how the semester will unfold.

Any help recruiting undergrad will be much appreciated. It looks like i have 3-4 folks already, so just a few more will be great.

Here is what I have sent to those who have made inquiries:

Thank you for your interest in this project.

Currently I am co-teaching a graduate level Public Health course which involves using technology to tell stories about health and social justice. Essentially, we are using a process called Digital Story Telling. Digital Story Telling involves individual and group processes for creating stories, editing them, developing a plan for how to proceed, recording voice, using images, and so forth. It is a very powerful process, and a lot of fun.

To get a better sense of what the grad students are doing, you can check out the course blog at https://websites.umass.edu/pubh690f/. Undergrad participation will involve being part of the second part of the class, that is, after Spring Break. Undergrads will get trained in this process, and will create digital stories that will be personal stories related to some sort of college health issue (individual choice). There will be two things / products you will produce: a digital story and a reflection paper. In addition, we plan to have some sort of presentation of all the stories (some of the grads will be working with off campus communities) at the end of the semester. Finally, there will probably be two meetings prior to break just to get things rolling a little.

I am uncertain of exactly how many credits this will be, but I am hoping for three. Two would be the minimum. We will need to take care of registration prior to the end of drop/add.

I hope that helps. If you have other questions, please do not hesitate to ask at this email or call at 577-5133.

Thanks,

Tom Schiff

If you find folks who are are interested, please have them call or email me.