The Edward A. Walsh Digital Media Lab

The Edward A. Walsh Digital Media Lab was conceived in the early 1990’s as a pedagogical response to the revolutionary changes that were beginning in publishing, education, media management, media production and finance. We believed that undergraduates—Communication and Media Studies students in particular—would soon live and work in a world transformed by new information technologies.

The Walsh facility was designed as a laboratory to teach the skills necessary for the evolving industries. Of greater importance, it was designed to model the new digital, networked information environments which are becoming the infrastructure of global finance, publishing, entertainment, education and politics. It was our hope that The Lab would help us prepare students for effective citizenship in the next millennium and provide an education adequate to the tasks of shaping and administering the world they will inherit

The Lab was designed and formally proposed in 1993 by the current director and jointly funded by departmental alumni and the University. Construction began in 1996. Later that year, the facility was networked, furnished and partially equipped. Curricular design was begun by a number of faculty in 1996 and resulted in five new courses and a number of existing courses being restructured to take advantage of the facility. In the fall of 1997, The Edward A. Walsh Digital Media Lab opened.

In its first semester, The Lab hosted six full-time course sections, a few courses on a part-time basis, graduate and undergraduate projects and tutorials and faculty research.

Use of The Lab has increased each semester. In only its second year of operation, The Lab is hosting 18 course sections representing approximately three hundred and fifty students. These courses range from basic media production, (digital audio, video, multimedia), to journalism, web design and communication ethics.

Additional graduate and undergraduate courses schedule classes and projects on a part-time basis. Tutorials, projects and research are also ongoing. Since the fall of 1997, fourteen different courses—eleven undergraduate and three graduate courses--have been, and will continue to be, taught full-time in the Walsh Lab. (See attached list of courses offered). The Walsh Lab also hosts the Black Media Foundation’s summer journalism workshop and numerous activities of other schools and departments. New lab-based courses are scheduled to be offered next semester.

Welcome to the Edward A. Walsh Digital Media Lab!

Edward Wachtel,
Director