Reflecting on the fall 2009 term

Egads. What a great term this was. A friend of mine once described talking with a friend of his who was a blues guitarist. He went to watch him perform, and noticed that he did not seem to pay much attention to his guitar-playing while he played. He mentioned this perception to his friend after the show, and his friend concurred. He said when he had gotten to a point where he didn't have to think much about playing the guitar, this meant that he was able to start thinking about the audience, which in turn meant that he had begun his career as a performer.

Something like this happened to me this term as a teacher. It's actually been gradual, as I have gotten more and more accustomed to working with first-year students at this very unique institution, but this term the trend went all the way through to a phase-change. Previously I was having to pay quite a bit of attention to the course materials, assignments, etc. in order to see what was working, what was not working, how to assess the students' work, how to make changes in the right places and for the right reasons, how to make sense of the school as a context, etc.

This year I still think about and work on those things, but when I go into class those types of things are in the background and I am there to do one thing and one thing only: to be with the students. This produced great delight for me, and I think it's quite analogous to the guitar-player and his becoming a performer: for the first time I was able to do the technical parts of teaching fairly easily, and I could therefore focus on and enjoy interacting with the audience. I guess, if the analogy holds, this means I've began my career as a teacher this term, even though I've technically been teaching for quite some time (part-time prior to three years ago, full-time for the past three years).

The syllabus for this term's course is online in website-form at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma20092110/

A highlight for me is the course description, because it reveals a major part of how I resolved some of the technical issues of teaching in a Liberal Arts department at a Fine Arts institution. This is online at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma20092110/description

There were many examples of good student work this term -- in conversation and in the making and telling of digital-stories. The previous post in this blog recounts one of the strikingly good conversational moments. Here are links to just a few of the many good examples of digital-stories (a more complete collection will be posted on the ongoing student-work showcase website): Rachel's story, Erik's story, Samm's story, and Nick's story. I'm beginning to do some initial research into ways to hook up an exchange of digital-stories with an art college somewhere in a different culture.

My ongoing contra-Cartesian approach of paying attention to the physical environs of the classroom as much as the synaptic/conceptual content continues to bear fruit. This term I subtracted three computers from the room (leaving a total of 25, which is still a very ample number for the space and the class), I added a set of wooden benches for flexible seating, and added a table in one part of the room with no computers and enough room around it for moving the wooden benches in and just talking. The only things on this table were wooden building blocks, and it was amazing how well these worked to facilitate conversation. By the way, conversation was the main theme of the course, so none of the physical arrangements made to facilitate just talking were in any way separate from course goals.

Ah, I'd be remiss to not mention that I did direct instruction re: conversation, which included introducing a taxonomy of transactional, transformative, and transcendent varieties of conversation. This was the explicitly Liberal Arts (L.A.) part of the course. Part two was focused on applying the L.A. skills of conversation to consideration of a selected group of 'luminaries' in the L.A. field of Media Studies (including Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Mimi Ito, and a few others).

Part three of the course was all about digital-storytelling, but this had been prepped and staged from the first day of class, when I introduced my own digital-story about a favorite professor of mine who exemplified the Liberal Arts for me. So in telling this story I got to introduce an example of a digital-story and also do the Liberal Arts instruction that I wanted to do. The professor in question, W.B. Macomber, was the person who introduced me to the idea that the real gold in education was to be found in conversation. I also introduced other content-ful examples of digital-stories early on in the term. One by Mark Everett (an indie rock musician of some note) who that talks about his famous-physicist father, Hugh Everett, and his groundbreaking concept of parallel universes. This topic had a lot of traction. People really enjoyed talking about it.

The only changes I am going to make for next term are to tighten up the format of the digital-stories project. The tightening up will take three forms. First, I will open up multiple tracks to completion. i.e., some people work better starting with images and adding storyline. Others are quite comfortable writing first and adding pictures. Second, I will specify a single production algorithm from beginning to end, in order to avoid some of the confusion that occurred when I allowed people to do their audio and video production work on their own equipment. Third, I will do more direct instruction on storytelling. This term was my first time through on this assignment, and I am not a storyteller, so I did my best to introduce what the Center for Digital Storytelling has to offer re: storytelling (which is quite good as source material). But next term I will be introducing a video interview I did with Julian Semilian on editing (which is a huge part of storytelling) and I hope to get some other expert help as well. I have a couple of contacts to work this angle.

I'm also developing websites for four elective courses which should fill out the offerings in the field of Media Studies now that DMA has become fairly stable as a foundation. These additional course websites (I have one in progress for a Theory and Practice of New Media Art course that I will be teaching in the spring term) will be something I share with students in the DMA course (I'll share all of the websites, even though the courses won't be offered immediately, in order to let students know about some directions that they might be able to build on if they are interested in the field of Media Studies.

All in all this was an amazingly good term for me, and I get to give a presentation called Play Language like a Musical Instrument about the course, digital-storytelling, and Liberal Arts education, at the Lilly Conference on College Teaching in February. This will be great fun, and I am certain to get interesting feedback because this is an audience of folks who are keenly interested in undergraduate education.