Weird and Sticky

Surprisingly (to me anyway) the DMA course in all its sections and varieties seems to have achieved lift-off quickly. After only a week and a half of courses and homework, I feel as though a great deal has been accomplished.

• We basically completed the work on the Liberal and Fine Arts that I wanted to accomplish, and I did a quick (and again unanticipated) summary of this in class on Thursday (for sections 02 ad 03) and Friday (for section 01). Here's a link to the summary presentation slides.
  
  
• We have also done a reasonable amount of transition work/play from thinking about the Liberal and Fine Arts to thinking about Media Studies and digital media (which are the areas into which we are now turning our attention). In particular our work/play on and in conversation --which was the main theme of our work on the Liberal and Fine Arts-- makes a beautiful segue to talking about the internet. Several students mentioned that in some ways more conversation now occurs online than face-to-face, and also mentioned that in texting and IMing there is often some time taken to compose a thought; this is seen in partial contrast to face-to-face conversation, which strikes some as utterly instantaneous (no time or space for forethought). Very interesting this! We'll be talking more about online communication and related topics next week.
  
  
• We've also done a fair amount of transition work/play to thinking about digital-storytelling. By watching the Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives movie --which is a classic example of a "meaningful first-person narrative" told in digital media-- we got to pay close attention to an example of the genre. Next week we'll look at additional examples. I'm hoping that this has enabled folks to begin at least thinking about possible stories they would want to tell.

So it's really been quite a start IMO --which is a very good thing because we will need additional time to learn the needed technical-skills which will accompany the continued development of our conversational-skills when we move into writing and producing our digital-stories (things like setting up a website for work purposes, learning to use audio and video tools, etc.).

I'm now anticipating that we will move through the Media Studies materials in relatively short order, much as we did with the Liberal and Fine Arts materials, and again this opens up some interesting options. One of the things that came out of our conversations today and yesterday about conversation --noted above and also in response to the question "What are the ingredients or elements of a good conversation?"-- was that this may be a very fun set of DMA sections to jump into online communication with, in class and as possible homework, and compare it to face-to-face conversation.

I'm in the process of generating a kind of master-list of elements identified by all of the sections as crucial to good conversation. This will be an interesting list, and will range from items such as mutual respect to a more open-ended sense of just specifying the basics or foundations (talkers willing to listen and listeners willing to talk) and seeing what happens. This alerts me to the complexity/chaos element or dimension of conversation: in some ways part of what makes conversation such a good thing is that we're not really sure where it will go. This is part of its creative charge. I may show the complexity video clip in class to support and illustrate this point.

Next week we get to talk about Marshall McLuhan and electricity. Conversation and electricity have a lot in common (or so I will propose). Both connect things, and both have an unexpected and often-unnoticed element of 'stickyness' or 'glue' to them. I'll have to find the resource I have on the glue function in electricity. Hopefully the conversations we will have on the luminaries of Media Studies will play well.

Speaking of play, I mentioned in a couple of sections that a couple of years ago I made and posted a short video of me juggling while talking about my early experience of UNCSA. For those interested, here's a link to the video.