USC faculty members Steven Anderson and Virginia Kuhn were awarded the Provost’s Prize for Teaching With Technology at a conference held on May 5 at the Radisson Hotel.

Anderson is the director of USC’s Ph.D. program in media arts and practice and assistant professor of interactive media at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Kuhn is the associate director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and research assistant professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

The Provost’s Prize and conference were established in 2007 by Provost C. L. Max Nikias to recognize faculty excellence and to create a forum for USC faculty members to share new and emerging technology used in teaching and learning with their colleagues and the larger university community.

Jean Morrison, vice provost for academic affairs and graduate programs, presented this year’s prize. “Through their innovative use of technology in their courses, these faculty members have enhanced our students’ experiences,” Morrison said.

Anderson was recognized for three USC academic programs that make innovative uses of media and technology in the classroom: Multimedia in the Core and Multimedia across the College; Honors in Multimedia Scholarship; and the Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. program.

The Multimedia in the Core program has integrated media-based authoring into more than 80 courses at USC College during the past three years, contributing to the education of more than 2,000 students. Honors in Multimedia Scholarship integrates a range of authoring tools and platforms into a student’s course of study. The Media Arts program is one of only a handful nationwide that aim to foster the development of the next generation of media and technology-enhanced scholarship.

Anderson also has developed Critical Commons, an online media sharing tool that facilitates the sharing, annotating and curating of media for classroom teaching.

Kuhn was acknowledged for creating a new course in the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program titled “The Praxis of New Media,” which investigates the close interrelationships among technology, semiotics and culture in order to form a solid foundation for scholarly authoring. The course’s main goal is to provide students from diverse backgrounds with a critical understanding of how to create and interpret media.

This year, Kuhn’s course centered on the original documentary film Iraqi Doctors: On the Front Lines of Medicine. Students learned to use sound, images and database materials to construct new endings — and new meanings — for a partially completed documentary about doctors in wartime Iraq.

The Teaching With Technology conference, which highlighted innovative research and teaching practices, was sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Information Technology Services, the Technology Enhanced Learning Faculty Advisory Committee, the Office of Research Advancement and the Center for Scholarly Technology.

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