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Beth Rogozinski

True to the industry name, many multimedia professionals initially found entry to the field through expertise in a specific media, through fluency in the once-cutting edge technologies of photography, film, video and audio. For Beth Rogozinski, her career in multimedia actually began in the film studies department of San Francisco State University. As a film student, Beth was faced with the challenge of making films from limited means, attempting to maintain access to equipment in a department that was being downsized through budget cuts. This paucity of resources along with her theoretical concerns regarding audience participation first led her to explore alternative solutions for media expression. Inspired by prophetic theatre critics and filmmakers like Bertold Brecht and Jean Luc Godard, she was intrigued by the prospect of simulating interactivity through film. These interests and circumstances led her towards multimedia. Her first multimedia project, called San Francisco Night Life, was a video laser-disc program designed in Hypercard, one of the first multimedia authoring tools.
While at SFSU, Beth had been a student of Robert Bell. A long-time member of the avant-garde, Bell had participated in the making of Andy Warhol's first film. With an eye once again towards the margins of the future, Bell endeavored to establish a new program for multimedia courses at SFSU, and he invited Beth to help him in the process.
The program, now known as the San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies program, the largest program of its kind in the world, actually had humble beginnings in the Tape 1 Conference. According to Beth, the success of the conference, which featured interactive game and cutting edge film and special effects professionals was lacking only in follow through. The conference, a once only event, created an enthusiasm and educational energy which the organizers wanted to sustain. The multimedia studies program began as one course called Electronic Music in Interactive Multimedia in the summer of 1992. Only one year later there were between 60-70 classes, and currently there are 136 classes now available through the multimedia certificate program, with over 2,000 students enrolled.
In addition to her role is creating and teaching in the multimedia studies program, Beth has her own consulting company, Systrum Media. Her commitment to education, however, has continued to guide her projects. She is currently working with a group of Marin professionals on a new model for multimedia education called Digiquest. The roots for Digiquest were planted in 1990, when a group of people decided to make available a production office where they could offer cheap evening access to multimedia tools for people from the community who could not afford classes. Beth started with DigiQuest, then called The New Media Learning Center, in 1994.
"Our goals are to widely disseminate the skills needed to compete in today's workplace, to give voice to the under represented and to create better and more mindful communicators and consumers." The DigiQuest Learning Center Missions Statement. The mission of Digiquest is driven by the belief that "everyone will be using media technology in the next 5-10 years." Concerned that people do not get left out of the digital media revolution, Beth and the Digiquest program provide a segue between new media businesses like Broderbund and Lucasfilms, and the community groups of the north bay area. Officially, DigiQuest is a school, although not in the conventional sense of the word. Instead, Beth and her partners at DigiQuest see themselves as an adjunct to other schools, offering programs that integrate multimedia education into the traditional school curriculum. All of the programs reflect the project-based educational pedagogy that is the central to the DigiQuest philosophy. In 4 target Marin schools next semester, the DigiQuest K-5 program will introduce media technology as a component of art or science classes. For middle schools, DigiQuest offers afterschool programs in which students build multimedia projects. On of three high school programs, called the Regional Occupation Program, is geared towards providing high school students and young adults real world job training and places them in internships with some of the most reknown media technology companies in the area. The focus of ROP is to teach students how to use not only the tools of multimedia, but also the issues of working with content and design in the multimedia context.
In both Bay Area and International high schools, DigiQuest's Visionary Stampede helps students create digital pieces that are concerned with kid's issues. The current theme is envisioning what schools of the future will be like. At the end of the program cycle, the student projects are assembled and published on CD ROM, available through Mindscape. For those beyond high school age, the Digiquest educational mission continues with a program for seniors. In the Senior Programs, Beth notes that, contrary to stereotypes, it is the senior men who are wary of technology, and most of the senior student body is comprised of women. To round out the curriculum, DigiQuest also offers adult classes. In keeping with the holistic approach to teaching, each class is meant to be a mini-certificate program, offering hardware skills combined with the skills to work with media and content. Beth prophesies that plain pixel pushers , like the ranks of inkers employed at Disney who simply color animation cells all day long, will be a future form of cheap manual labor. According to Beth, there are three major components of interactive multimedia: design, content, and technology, none of which operate in a vacuum. The comprehensive quality of the DigiQuest courses, a curriculum that encompasses not only hardware and software, but the skills to work with content and design, ultimately provides the difference between a job and a career.
The community-oriented mission of DigiQuest voices a new perspective and new concerns in the midst of the unmitigated fanfare and attendant hoopla that is typical of new media hype these days. In contrast to the corporate prospects on the ramped-up Information Superhighway, the efforts of DigiQuest bring new media back down to the ground, defining multimedia as public access tools for communication and personal expression. And DigiQuest is not alone in their mission. Beyond the North Bay Area, there are similar community based projects dedicated to providing community access to digital tools. In Oakland, the Rotunda Project is scheduled to open in 1997, and in East Palo Alto, the Plugged In program trains inner city kids how to use technology.
In addition to describing her latest projects at DigiQuest, Beth also addressed the concerns of women who are making their way into the multimedia field. Beth offers a number strategies, beyond taking classes, that help pave the path to a career in multimedia. Utilize free resources! There a dozens of free magazines, like New Media, MicroPublishing News and Interactive Age, which contain a wealth of information about new technologies and events in multimedia. Trade Shows, like the recently held MacWorld, also provide inexpensive opportunities to check out the latest hardware and software, and give a good sense of what kind of work people are doing. Beth also suggests volunteering on projects as a great way to get your name in the credits. "Your resume is just a piece of paper in the digital world," Beth explains, and finished products that you had a hand in creating are the most persuasive proof of experience and skills. In addition to pursuing a career in multimedia, Beth suggests a workaround: consider ways to bring multimedia into your career. Corporate marketing, interactive advertising, computer-based training, online-documentation and multimedia databases are all applications that bring multimedia into non-media based businesses.
Perhaps most important, Beth calls attention to the fact that once they have established a career in multimedia, most women assume the roles of designers, production artists, and project managers. Far fewer women own their own companies. And it is the those women who do reach the upper echelons of management, explains Beth, who are most needed by aspiring women as mentors and educators. The need for positive role models, for young girls and grown women alike, is a key motivating factor for Beth as the Director of the DigitQuest educational program. And Beth Rogozinski has without question become an inspirational role model in her own right, both in her commitment to the cause of public access to digital tools, her enthusiastic dedication to digital education, and in her vision for what multimedia can be.

Beth Rogozinski

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