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Keep Up with the Albright Lions; Visit AlbrightAthletics.com The Albright College Athletics Department has launched a new web site, AlbrightAthletics.com. The new site provides Albright Lions fans with features such as a weekly electronic newsletter, text messaging of score updates, RSS feeds, month-by-month calendars, digital media guides, live stats and statistical play-by-plays of entire home games for football, field hockey, baseball, softball, soccer and basketball. |
Want to share your Albright experience? The Admission Office is currently seeking alumni volunteers eager to share their passion for Albright! Parents & Alumni Seeking Students (PASS) is an alumni group dedicated to recruiting students. PASS volunteers represent Albright at college fairs, phone admitted students, and attend on- and off-campus events across the country. If you are interested in sharing your Albright College experiences with prospective students, please contact Jared Epler ’09 in the Admission Office at 800-252-1856 or jepler@alb.edu. |
Social Media Takes Center Stage with Fish Out of Water
photo: Matt Lester When Jeff Lentz, artist in residence, and Cocol Bernal, theatre lecturer, wrote their original play You Are Here last year, they got together in Lentz’s office in the Center for the Arts and discussed themes, plot points and characters. This year, as they set out to create another original play, Fish Out of Water, they had the same discussions, only this time they had an audience. Using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Lentz and Bernal created Fish Out of Water in the open so students and others could have a front-row seat to see the writing, set design and construction of the play being created in real time. Matt Kopans, director of the Center for the Arts, brought the social media idea to Lentz and Bernal’s attention after witnessing an impressive brainstorming session between the two artists. “Audiences are always interested in finding out how the finished product came to be,” Kopans said. Talk-Back sessions held after many Domino Players productions are popular. With social media, the public is given insight into the play beforehand, rather than after. While they familiarized themselves with the social media sites, Lentz and Bernal began by exchanging ideas through e-mail and later moved to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, where videos of set design discussions were posted. Using their Twitter posts, or “tweets,” Lentz and Bernal expressed ideas for the set, characters and dialogue. Followers of @JeffLentz and @CocolBernal could catch the back and forth action as Lentz would suggest one line and Bernal would follow with a response or a whole paragraph of dialogue – and vice versa. While Twitter is where the dialogue took its form, Facebook and YouTube were where viewers could see the design process for the set, photos of past plays, and actor confessionals after and during the play’s production. Creating the play in this way also made it possible for Lentz and Bernal to interact with their followers. Fish Out of Water, which was performed by the Domino Players in October, is about traveling. Lentz and Bernal used the social media platform for feedback, accepting funny, exciting and dramatic travel stories from students and friends. “People can have a new identity when traveling. You can pretend to be whomever you want to be,” Bernal said, adding that the play goes into why people travel, what happens when people travel, and the emotions that evolve when people are in unfamiliar places. For Lentz and Bernal, learning the popular technology took some time, but it was worth it. This is “the right vocab to reach them [students],” said Bernal, who, with Lentz, said they will use social media again when creating another play. Lentz added that a book on their creative process using the posts like a travel log may also be a possibility. |
