Melanie McBride is a Toronto-based writer, consultant and educator specialising in participatory educational new media.
Drawing on her academic, web and pedagogical background as an English and communications specialist, Melanie has produced content for award-winning web and interactive projects with The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Trapeze Media, Learning Agents, Phantom Compass, Mystus Interactus Exhibits and distinguished museums in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Of note, her stories for the CBC Archives project have been repurposed for use in Canadian classrooms and cited in Wikipedia, Historica and various educational websites.
As an early adopter to web culture, tools and trends, Melanie is a passionate advocate for digital democracy, open source solutions and social media and participatory culture. She writes about these and other things at Howard Rheingold’s Smartmobs, Mindjack Magazine and here in her blog.
In addition to her work in new media, Melanie served as an associate editor for Alphabet City Media’s Lost in the Archives [DAP] and Subtitles: On the foreignness of film [MIT Press], led creative writing workshops and published short fiction.
Currently
Melanie currently works as a professional new media writer and consultant and teaches courses in new media content production at the Centre for Creative Communications, Centennial College in Toronto. She recently joined the Phantom Compass team as their youth educational consultant. Melanie is a featured presenter for Magazines Canada’s Web Weekend conferences (Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver, Edmonton).
Upcoming:
Melanie is presenting a talk on blogging and social media for MagNet conference in June.
Interests
Participatory and social media, online life and culture, emergent technology, digital democracy, social justice, collaborative and differentiated learning, classroom2.0, multiple literacies, gaming, critical pedagogy, paradigm shifting, distance running
Networking
Connection with other makers, observers and paradigm shifters exploring the margins of web 2.0 social and participatory media.
Other:
My running community Runner’s High on Twitter
My running “micro-magazine” Runner’s High on Tumblr
