Friday, September 25, 2009

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.
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Monday, September 21, 2009

Gossip Column?

Calling this 'Instructor's Blog' is maybe a mistake. If I called it a gossip column I'd probably get more readers. I mean, did you SEE what so and so wore to class today???

Then again, there is something to be said for truth-in-advertising. This really isn't a gossip column I guess, after all. But things jumped off very nicely in Section 01 today in terms of the conversation.

The seemingly consensus choice seemed to be to talk about the parallel universes concept. Interestingly, the desire seemed to be to talk about the concept, not the movie -- very heartening, this. I was then further heartened to see the conversation sizzle and pop first of all with lots of examples related to the parallel universes idea, which I will try to list below:
The conversation generated three areas of focus or strange attractors:

1) the parallel universes idea, which implies a sort of radical compartmentalization -- any decision creates a split that creates two universes. There was some discussion about what would constitute a 'decision' in this regard, the possibility of infinite universes, intersecting universes, being able to peer or peek into one universe from another, relationship of this to multiple personas and other possible everyday forms of parallelism.

2) the everything is interrelated or interbeing idea, which implies a radical connectedness of all things. I found it very interesting that the conversation generated this strand.

3) the observer involvement idea, which holds that when we look 'out there' at the universe(s) we ourselves are inevitably 'in the picture.'

But more importantly, DID YOU SEE what so and so wore to class today?!!

On Wednesday section 01 will start with the question of what ethics and morality might look like if the parallel universes idea turned out to be true. The last 25 minutes of the Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives movie will also be shown in class.

All of this work has potential bearing on the conception and production of digital stories later in the term. We had some discussion about what autobiography, or a play, etc. would look like if it were informed by the idea of parallel universes.

A quick note also that today's conversation illustrated a point raised on the first day of class; namely, students come to college now with information already in hand, and the skills to find additional information on their own. Most of the information today in class was delivered by students, in this case in the form of ideas and thoughts related to parallel universes, and also in the form of related works.

The last bit for now: I think the first video-attendance-movie-experiment worked out well. I normally am not able to learn everyone's name until around mid-term (abysmal, I know, but there it is) and so having the video will help me for sure with that, and I hope it will help others as well, in knowing who's who in class.

Okay the very last bit: so the conversation today turns to quantum mechanics. Let's imagine how this might play out in the olden days. If this came up in a class discussion, someone with a whole lot of initiative and extra time (meaning no one :) might go to the library and look this topic up, check out a book, or maybe even think of taking a course someday on the topic (and then probably decide not to unless they were a Physics major because the class would likely be very technical). But today, if a topic like quantum mechanics sticks with us, all we have to do is turn around, log in, and get a fairly good variety of information and perspectives, some of which might be technical, some of it generally accessible to non-scientists.
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