Social Justice Classes, Technology & Scholarship

As a professor in a Digital Filmamking department I have frequently taught social justice skills to my production classes – asking them to incorporate topics about class, gendered and racial equity into their work.  However, when I teach classes with more of an academic transfer focus, I find it hard to come up with assignments that would allow my students to use technology to create a project without having a significant part of the class centered around teaching students to appropriately use that technology (without formal instruction on how to use a video camera I frequently find that students bring me final films that are too long and tend to not be shot on a tripod, etc.).  So, for a workshop or session during THATCamp, I’d really like to brainstorm ideas with other professors or those interested in teaching, how we can implement different technologies (without just saying with no formal instruction – make a video! Create a website!) in our social justice-centered classes so that students are encouraged to think beyond the reading/writing paradigm for their research projects, but know how to properly, on a basic level, implement the technological tools they are using.  In other words, an exploration of different and simplistic technological tools that instructors can introduce in their classrooms so students can create work that demonstrates their understanding of a concept using that tool as much as it demonstrates a basic technological proficiency itself (and so I don’t have to watch any more sea-sick inducing student videos).