Okay, it was a short week --only two days of class meetings-- but I thought this week was a good start to the term. I'm excited about the direction the DMA class is taking, and glad to see that everyone seems open to the process-oriented nature of the plans I have set out. Of course I wonder if the plan will work --but ultimately I value the adventure aspects of teaching anyway, even if I sometimes have to endure some uncertainty associated with trying new things, so I'm willing to take the bad along with the good.
So anyway, this week we started a conversation about the medium of life, the Liberal and Fine Arts, Media Studies and digital media, and digital-storytelling.
The first part of the course will involve working on the Liberal Arts conversational skills of thinking, talking, and reading --with a particular emphasis on talking. The middle part of the course will involve talking about the field of Media Studies and digital media. Interspersed throughout these first two parts of the course will be readings about digital storytelling and examples of digital-stories (from the Center for Digital Storytelling and other sources). The third part of the course will be entirely focused on the fourth Liberal Arts skill --writing-- which in our case will mean 'writing' in a variety of media (text, image, audio, and video).
Throughout the term I will provide progress reports on: 1) learning the skills of the Liberal Arts, 2) familiarizing ourselves with key figures and principles in Media Studies, and 3) using digital media for highly creative and intellectual purposes. At the end of each week I will try to do a brief retrospective at where we've been along with a prospective view of where we're going.
For this week:
-- language itself (again in particular the conversational use of language) was introduced as the creative medium-of-choice for Liberal Artists. I mentioned that Liberal Artists play language like a musical instrument. In the coming week I will want to expand on this a bit to intersect with the concept of play as it relates to Fine Arts 'playing' of music, acting in 'plays', etc.
--I also mentioned (as noted above) that thinking, talking, reading, and writing are the skills of the Liberal Artists. In one section I also touched on the idea that higher education alludes to the vertical axis of learning, and as such points towards a need to develop deep understanding as well as higher learning.
--I hope to have conveyed a sense of the Liberal Arts as a skills-based, creative arena, not just a place where folks accumulate information and knowledge.
--We talked a bit about how formal education tends to take kids who are already skilled at talking and then promptly tells them to shut up (and sit still, of course). In the coming week I will want to expand on this by introducing the Katamari concept/metaphor/way-of-learning (dynamic and naturally glued, like with gravity-glue), complexity theory (in particular as it relates to conversation), and recent cognitive science research studies which strongly assert that the only way people learn is by building on what they already know (the scientific aspect of neural networks). With regard to conversation I also want to introduce my favorite quotes on this subject, and I think I want to have a conversation based on the question "What does it take to have a good conversation?" And, to explore perspectives on Macomber's point that everyone can talk about their brother-in-law but can't find anything to say in class. I mean is it possible that classroom conversations just haven't been conceptualized properly and practiced enough, or is it indeed the case that we have learned too well to sit still and shut up?
--With regard to the key figures and principles of Media Studies, I mentioned the need to friend
Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan in one of the sections, but this was just barely a start on this. Likely in week three or four we'll be talking about this area in depth.
--With regard to digital-storytelling I mentioned in a couple of sections that I agreed with Jordan Kerner that the cultural-youngers are in part being groomed to be the next generation of storytellers, and we began to look at an example of a digital-story in homework (the Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives movie, which is a fairly complex digital-story I would say and probably beyond what most of us will do with our stories, but a good example of the genre nonetheless). In the coming week we'll finish watching the 'Parallels' movie, and also look at a few examples from the Center for Digital Storytelling website. Either next week or the one after I want us to begin reading about digital-storytelling by assigning parts of the Digital Storytelling Cookbook that the CDS puts out.
