“My life has been ruled by music,” says John Tubbs, a multimedia communications specialist in Information Technology Communication Services (ITCS) in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. A professional bass player since the age of 15, Tubbs plays blues, jazz, bluegrass and folk. After earning a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Wisconsin, Tubbs worked in Wisconsin schools as a technology coordinator and later as a free-lance consultant while pursuing a full-time musical career. He joined the staff at Illinois in 1997 as a Web designer and moved to the multimedia specialist appointment in 1998, an 80 percent appointment that also allows him to pursue his musical interests.
What does your job entail?
I’m the interface between a whole wealth of media technology people and educators. I do multimedia production work such as preparation of online video and audio, mastering it and mounting it on servers.
I also do a fair amount of content creation. I just finished an online grad course for which we shot 20 hours of video of a professor lecturing, developing computer models and running them on his computer. He couldn’t just freely lecture as he’s used to doing; it had to fit into a Web model that students could grab onto and progress through independently.
What are the challenges of developing a Web-based course?
Environments and room settings are probably the biggest challenge. We go out with standard video cameras and microphones and capture instruction where it happens, where the instructor is comfortable. When possible, we try to bring them into the studio, but sometimes it’s not appropriate, especially if we want to capture student interaction.
We tend to go out on a limb and work without a net. The craziest thing we’ve done lately was broadcasting the dedication of the new ACES library live in streaming video. The tent was 500 feet from any building, so we set up a battery-powered wireless network that beamed our production like a live TV news broadcast, except over the ethernet.
We are breaking ground in technology, as well as politically, because there aren’t any rules about compensation, media rights and other things authors should be concerned with. I’m very committed to teacher enhancement rather than teacher replacement when it comes to tying technology to education.
What’s your favorite part of what you do?
My favorite part is never doing something the same way twice. For every project we’re not just planning content and its presentation, we’re also planning new ways of gathering the information, assembling, editing and distributing it.
ITCS is great because it’s a merger of so many different groups – Web designers, graphic designers, radio people, editorial staff and people who do video – who bring so much expertise to the table.
What kinds of projects are you working on right now?
The big one is an interactive media database that’s being co-developed by a professor in the College of ACES and McGraw-Hill. An instructor will be able to tap into the database, select a very specific age-group of people and aspects of their development, and come up with video, photos and expert interviews they can incorporate into a media-rich lecture.
Right now I’m also duplicating CDs of the Spanish-language radio show that we produce here every week, Nuevos Horizontes (New Horizons). We do a lot of small CD-duplication projects, typically about 1,000 CDs a month, for customers across campus. We’re about to release a “greatest hits” CD that contains the best of our culture programs.
What are the most important skills or qualities for your job?
Inquisitive diligence and a lack of fear of the unknown because my primary collaborator and I are on our own. There is no tech support for what we do because it’s cutting edge.
Tell me about your musical interests.
I do about 110 performances a year. My two main groups are the Virtues and the Impalas. I play fairly frequently with the Jeff Helgesen Quartet and other jazz groups. I have my own trio, the JT3. Prior to moving here, from Madison, Wisc., I was playing full-time in different bands, including Paul Black and the Flip Kings, which had a record contract with House of Blues Music Company. Our record, “King Dollar,” hit No. 17 on the blues charts in 1996.
Playing upright bass is a very, very physical activity, so I need to keep my upper body in shape.
