Graham Robinson

This page is pretty out of date. However for the sake of time my old ‘pro’ page is here.

My name is Graham Robinson and I am a media technologist at the University of
Southampton.

I work for the eLanguages project, a joint effort with 5 other universities, to make online learning courses.

We are the lead partner and are responsible for overseeing our own and the
other universities developers to make sure that we make a course of worldwide
standard. If any media / multimedia is needed then I am responsible for making
it and making it work.

Working as part of a small team we make academics work turn into rich, interactive
webpages that can be used online on the internet. Currently the material is
placed onto blackboard (an online learning environment).

I am a recent Media Technology graduate of the University of Lincoln where
I gained a first class degree and worked with many local and national companies
to get the experience that I have needed.

Before going to university I went to a college that most English people find
unpronounceable, Coleg Glan Hafren. There I gained a BTEC in Media Production
at a distinction level, the highest level for BTEC. In the final year of that
course I also gained an A-Level in Film Studies.

While at the University of Southampton I was recently asked to help with technical
support at the Modern Languages department. My responsibilities were plentiful
but included building computers, administering networks and local computers
as well as working with academics to explain some of the complexities of computers
and their software.

I decided to become a Media Technologist because I didn’t feel it would be
worthwhile to do a degree in a subject I already knew about so instead expanded
my knowledge into a more computerised and engineering field instead of production.

The course is structured to learn not just about how to make media but why
it does it. For example at one point my job was to webcast a TV program to
the students’ computers on our campus but in other subjects at the time we
were learning about how narrow and broadband internet works at a physics level
and how lossless and lossy compression is put into video files to make MPEGs.

One of my specialist subjects is photography. I have been taking pictures
since I was 14 and worked for Jessops Cardiff/Bristol for 4 years from 1999-2003.
From my courses and my own study I have gained knowledge of designer products
such as
* Dreamweaver
and Frontpage
* Flash and
Director
* Freehand
and Illustrator
* Fireworks
and Photoshop
* Premiere
and Auditions (formally known as Cool Edit Pro 2)

Office and Data products such as
* Office 97,
2000, 2002, 2003
* MySQL and
SQL
* Actionscript
and Javascript

Creatively I have worked with/in
* Analogue
and Digital camera studios
* Analogue
and Digital video editing suites
* Television
studio setups
* Radio studios

In my current work I
* Create and
edit web pages to a professional standard
* Check employers
work conforms to accessibility standards
* Create interactive
learning material using Flash and Dreamweaver
* Create,
edit and produce video and audio for use in teaching English as a foreign language
over the internet
* Work with
a team to produce learning objects that work in a pedagogical way

During assignments I have also had the delight of working on the following
projects
* DVD Extra
- Beta Testing - Using the newest interactive DVD software to produce quizzes,
games and other interactive elements quickly and cheaply. This is supposedly
the future of DVD software and I was one of the first people to use it outside
of the company.
* BBC-i -
Kingston Interactive Television - Filmed, edited and produced two short videos
for the BBC’s interactive service in Hull
* Jessops
- Interactive CD - My final year project was to make a promotional CD for Jessops’
Business to Business department
* South Wales
Police - Script - A script that I wrote won an anti-burglary competition and
was produced and distributed to at-risk houses in Cardiff about how to help
against burglary