| The
long anticipated renovation of Kent State University's Franklin
Hall is finally finished.
Even as JMC students and faculty began
making Franklin Hall their new home, electrical contractors
were putting the finishing touches on the 20,000 sq. ft
high-tech addition to the building.
The addition to the 81-year-old Franklin
Hall houses a fully equipped HD television production
studio, a 150-seat interactive auditorium and lecture
hall, and a converged student media newsroom.
Dozens of mulitmedia-capable classrooms
open onto the muted gray hallways, equipped with rows
of shiny new Macs, camcorders, podcast stations and digital
projectors, all linked through a central network.
In the two-story open foyer of Franklin
Hall an array of plasma video screens covers two walls,
wired to broadcast live content originating anywhere in
the building.
Opposite, a modest display cabinet
holds a few artifacts from previous generations of KSU
journalism students: old typewriters, scrapbooks, a wooden
linotype case.
The glass-enclosed Hirsch Lab overlooks this mini-museum.
Down the hall a two story glass think-tank serves as
a conference room.
Along the way a window illuminates metal racks looped
with a few of the 65 miles of yellow CAT-5 wire used to
interconnect the building.
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SPECIAL REPORT
This is a special multimedia report
on the at-last-completed Franklin Hall. It was created
by the Collaborative Online Producing Class. Content
Providers were Jeff St. Clair, Jen Guerrieri, Kristen
Russo, Tim Magaw, Bryan Wroten, Kim Graves, Katie
Roupe, Tyrel Linkhorn and Evan Bailey; Designer
was Lauren Buckosh; Professor is Fred Endres. |
Transparency is built into Franklin Hall.
And so are the ideas of flexibility, interactivity,
convergence and collaboration.
At the new JMC, they're not just teaching concepts, they're part of the physical structure.
On this site you'll find six examples
of how Franklin Hall is an extension of how Kent JMC approaches
teaching and learning for the 21st century:
•Converged
Newsroom
•Gannett
Collaborative Classroom
•TV2
Studio and Broadcast Control Room
•Carl
E. Hirsch Media Convergence Laboratory
•FirstEnergy
Interactive Auditorium
•Digital
Editing Suites
Welcome to a new era in journalism education at Kent State University.
--Jeff St.Clair, for The Co-Lab
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