Mediatrics

Getting serious?

2011-12-19T05:37:00.001-08:00

Title: Critical Themes in Media Studies--Open Call for Proposals Date:
2012-01-15
Description: The graduate students of the Department of Media
Studies and Film at The New School are pleased to announce a call for papers and projects to the 12th annual Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference, taking place April 13-14,2012 in New York City.
The Media Studies Department at the New School, a ...
Contact: criticalthemes@gmail.com
URL: criticalthemes.net
Announcement ID: 190168
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=190168

Title: Teaching Digital Media special issue of Transformations:
The Journal of Inclusive Pedagogy and Scholarship
Description: Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship
and Pedagogy, a journal that invites college teachers to take
pedagogy seriously as a topic of scholarly writing, announces
the publication of a special issue, Teaching Digital Media,
Mary McAleer Balkun, Guest Editor. The issue showcases the wor
...
Contact: transformations@njcu.edu
URL: web.njcu.edu/sites/transformations
Announcement ID: 189872
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=189872

Title: Critical Information: Mapping the Intersection of Art and
Technology
Location: New York
Date: 2011-12-03
Description: CRITICAL INFORMATION: MAPPING THE INTERSECTION OF ART
AND TECHNOLOGY A GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE SATURDAY, DECEMBER
3, 2011 SPECTACLES OF DISINTEGRATION KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY NOTED
WRITER AND SCHOLAR McKENZIE WARK Conference Panels: 10:00am
3:30pm 132 West 21 Street, 7th floor, New York City Keynote
...
Contact: criticial.information.sva@gmail.com
URL: www.criticalinformationsva.com/schedule-2
Announcement ID: 189864
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=189864

Title: CFP: Virtual Identities and Self Promotion Area for the
PCA/ACA National Conference
Location: Massachusetts
Date: 2012-04-11
Description: CALL FOR PAPERS FOR VIRTUAL IDENTITIES AND SELF
PROMOTION AREA AT THE PCA/ACA 2012 National Conference Boston
2012 April 11-14 Virtual Identities and Self Promotion aims to
examine, explore and critically engage with the issues
surrounding creating a sense of self in online environments. We
invite s ...
Contact: consilje@lewisu.edu
Announcement ID: 189774
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=189774

DMA redesigned for 2011-2012

2011-09-29T03:31:00.000-07:00

This year I once again reshuffled the deck, moving towards a form for the DMA course that ties it more firmly into the first-year experience by enhancing the composition-studies aspect of it (so that it complements the English composition courses first-year students take). Early indications are that the redesign is working.

In addition to the move to formalize a first-year experience for students, several changes in context are affecting and improving the course. For the first time there is some official collaboration going on between instructors/disciplines in the Undergraduate Academic Program to establish an electronic portfolio system for students. The experiment is starting with first-year students, who are creating online portfolios using Google Sites and adding artifacts to their sites from the DMA course and also their English composition courses.

UNCSA is also getting tooled up administratively to offer courses online starting in the summer of 2012, and this too is affecting the DMA course design, moving it towards a form that will play well over the internet. The design has been tightened up by making units-of-study and weekly agendas that are more discreet and modular than they have been in the past.

The number of face-to-face meetings has been reduced by 50% in order to accommodate more students in the course sections now that we are on a two-semester rather than tri-mester system. This has assisted the move to an online form, and has also improved the pedagogical aspects in some ways. I have found myself crafting tight meeting agendas which make the most of face-to-face time, and crafting online presentations as part of the content resources for the course. In a curricular sense this 'hybridizing' of the course also makes sense given that I want students to learn how to work online as well as they socialize online, and practicing their online work skills is a good way to do this.

I have the honor this term of two colleagues sitting in on different sections of the course. Joe Mills, an English instructor, and Margaret Mertz, director of the Kenan Institute for the Arts, are each offering valuable feedback and involvement. Thanks to Margaret I also had a visit and chat with members of the Kenan Institute's board of directors about the course and its role in the program and School.

Finally, in a contextual sense, my own practice is officially expanding into offering electives. I am now full-time teaching rather than 2/3 teaching and 1/3 technology consulting. This has enabled me to devote time to framing and developing electives that build on the foundations of the DMA course. This term I am offering Theory and Practice of New Media Art (NMA) and all indications are that this course is working well. Next term I will be offering an elective based on Marshall McLuhan's work. Some of the special projects that I have tried to work into the DMA course --i.e., the focus on contemporary journalism and Wikileaks, the focus on the global village and Montagnards, the focus on digital storytelling, etc.-- can now be selectively developed into electives.

Lots of good and interesting developments.

Anthropology, Journalism, Documentary, and Videography

2011-05-14T07:07:00.000-07:00

The items listed in the title to this post are the emerging touchstones for the ongoing development of the DMA course. As a result, on the technical side of things, I am going headlong into video, including some fun work making mashup pieces. Find below one I made on the topic of uncanny home (this topic was posed as a prompt in a Make group I am participating in.

Uncanny Home from Bob King on Vimeo.

Global Village Revisited: spring term-project 2011

2011-04-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

After two weeks of preparatory/organizational work --involving sharing and discussing background materials in Anthropology and Media Studies, becoming familiar with this term's theme (which intersects McLuhan and Montagnards along the lines of Global Village Revisited), and establishing our workflow routines-- we are, as of today, officially under way.

It seems official today because we had our first direct interaction between participants in DMA this term and members of the Montagnard Dega community living in the Greensboro NC area. On the UNCSA end of the Skype call, we introduced ourselves and talked with two Montagnard Dega women, both of whom were engaging, kind, and delightfully honest and forthright. My friend and colleague of 15+ years, Andrew Young, did a masterful job of introducing the Montagnard Dega women to us, and facilitating our interaction with them.

We asked questions ranging from what they missed about their home culture in Vietnam, how it came to be that they settled in Greensboro NC. We also asked Andrew Young how he came to be interested in Montagnard Dega culture. In each instance the responses were enlightening and informative.

In the wake of this meeting I found myself energized and full of ideas. The responses to our questions seemed to hint at directions for us to explore that would be much different, and much more interesting, than writing reports about the history of the Montagnards, the music, etc. This is not to say these pursuits are uninteresting. They are in fact very interesting. Rather it is to say that in the context of an outside-in or autobiographical variant of anthropology, which we are inventing/reinventing in this course, we can include history and so forth much more meaningfully if these things have a personal/interpersonal entry point, and a trajectory more closely allied to social networking.

Here is a sample of the ideas that came to me (in email format, either email written to me, or in response to email I received) that resulted from our Skype-based videoconference:

First, a couple of links to wonderful resources were sent to me by Aaron Ross:

http://blog.ted.com/2010/10/20/meet-jr/

http://the99percent.com/articles/7008/JR-on-Art-Experimentation-and-Keeping-Your-Freedom

My response to Aaron:

Aaron, thanks so much for this share. We could do a copy-cat (okay, an homage :) to this guy's brilliant strategy and put images of Montagnards in our environment. You've probably seen the free software tools that allow an uploaded image to be gridded out in 8.5 X 11 for easy printing with a regular printer, so we would be able to do this basically cost-free. Lots to think about. Thanks again! Bob

A relay to Andrew Young:

Andrew, the student who asked about your path shared a couple of great links with me (see above). There are free software programs out there we could use to make giant posters using standard 8.5 X 11 paper, which would make it possible to do something like what is depicted in the video. These are the kinds of things that, as you mentioned, young artists bring to the table.

A further thought sent to Andrew Young:

A couple of years ago I worked with students on digital-storytelling projects. The Center for Digital Storytelling was my source for this.

Basically, their model is to bring in groups of folks for two-day work sessions, during which time they (the organization's staff) would help each person script and edit a short personal narrative, speak and record it, and make a short video (using still images or sometimes images and short clips) that would use their spoken-word audio recording as the video voiceover. Now that I think about it, the CDS process started with with the gathering and selecting images part, since they discovered these often sparked memories and storytelling. The heavy-lifting in the process swirled around writing and editing the story scripts. Their goal was to boil the narratives down to the bone.

When I did this with students I just adapted the model to my circumstances, spreading the work out over several weeks rather than doing a two-day intensive experience, and each person had to script, tell, and produce their own story.

I think it could be interesting to start with the photo project (get large images of Montagnards made and installed in the UNCSA environment). This would give a digital-skills angle to image work, and also would give a particular cast and rationale to the ethnographic field work students might do.

Then we could work on digital storytelling projects (which for me would cover audio and video skills). The images, and the digital stories, could then be self-published on your blog or wherever, and used to get some notice by the organizations and/or granting agencies you guys are in contact with and/or need to produce reportage for. Possibly UNCSA becomes a co-signer on a future grant application? Lots of possibilities up here in the blue sky.

Anyway, we could use the media lab classroom I teach in as the place to do the production aspect of the stories. The media lab space is deserted in the afternoons, and only my sections meet in the room in the mornings, so we'd pretty much have it available 9-5 every day. Weekends are also available. Voice and video recording could be done wherever by whomever.

I guess I'm thinking some of the Montagnards might enjoy and benefit from working directly with my students on projects such as these. Rather than standing around awkwardly wondering what to say when they meet, they could simply get down and do some work together. Sort of like cooking and eating a meal, only more extended in time and with a different focus.

We could talk about how this might play out --we could pair up a small group of students with a Montagnard to work on his or her story. We could also pair them one to one, and each person could help the other with their story, etc. --using whatever combination of email, skype, meetings in the media lab, etc., to carry the projects forward.

Here's an example of a digital story that is posted on the Center for Digital Storytelling website: http://www.storycenter.org/stories/index.php?cat=8

Re: meal+music event, the house across the street from my building is called Academic House (I might have pointed this out when you were here?), and it comprises a reasonable place to have a gathering (we have our faculty meetings there, etc.) and it also has a kitchen, a deck/porch (for possible music-playing and listening), and it's a space we control so it would be easy to schedule it. I spoke to the dean about looking for a space with a kitchen, and he suggested we just use the AH, so it's already approved. So we may have a solution to the 'where' question as regards the shared meal and music event.

Studio-model teaching and brain-based learning

2011-03-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

I've been undergoing contract-renewal review, including some pretty intense scrutiny and criticism of studio-based teaching. Much of the criticism swirled around the fact that I often have music playing in the studio while we're working. I responded to this criticism initially with research on studio-based teachers which found that, without exception, such teachers took on a "DJ" role as part of their work. The interesting part was that this selecting of music was not found to be random or willy-nilly in the least. Rather it was a carefully considered part of the environment, done with sensitivity and intentionality. In some ways, this seems to me to support the notion that emotional indicators are much more important in teaching than is usually recognized. I see things like music as contributing to the affective domain or side of the classroom, and I think we are just in the beginning phases of getting some good research on the importance of affect and its role in how the brain works.

Anyway, re: the criticism of my playing of music was pointed towards the idea that it would be distracting to the students. First of all I do ask folks to let me know if if is giving them problems. Second of all it's likely a stretch to think that young people will be distracted by it. Third of all I am not even asking students to read or pay attention to a lecture while they are in class. They are working on media projects. They are doing studio-based and studio-type work while in class. I ask them to read on their own for homework. Whether they do this to music or not is up to them. I certainly can't control it.

But this flagging of music as distracting connects also to a more serious line of criticism now being broadly directed against the use of digital media. This is the line now being developed by folks like Nicholas Carr, and popularized in books including The Shallows. It's out there, and it's the latest in a line of critique that is, well, pretty shallow.

So I was glad to see a program on NPR reporting on a study done in France that took a different tack on the whole issue of multi-tasking and distraction. In my view, as is the case with much science, it provides a start at interjecting common sense into this debate.

The researchers found the brain actually is set up much like a parallel processor, with what the author calls "two frontal lobes" which I assume means two distinct sides, since most pictures and verbal descriptions refer to the frontal lobe as a singular structure. Anyway, according to the researchers the brain has two frontal lobes (or one frontal lobe with two distinct sides), which makes it possible for humans to pursue up to two things at once by assigning a different task to each lobe or side. Subject to interpretation is whether or not this is a good thing.

My general approach is to stay with the descriptive part of the science. The study, in my interpretation, just seem to say that the brain has two lobes or sides that in fact work together --either separately or 'in parallel', or as a team or 'serially'-- in carrying out the complex work of the brain. This would seem to be the news the scientific study put out there for interpretation.

Two lobes are better than one, it would seem, based on the French study: the dual structure of the brain enables it to assign resources selectively and proportionally to working on one or two tasks at a time. Presumably, if a given task, goal, or situation is perceived by the brain as having an extremely high reward associated with it, it allocates a preponderance of its resources --drawing on the available resources of both of its frontal lobes, even-- to that task. Conversely, if a situation is perceived by the brain as having two complementary goals, perhaps with complementary/synergistic and mutually inclusive high rewards (i.e., one affect-oriented goal and one cognitive-oriented goal), then it works on both tasks and goals at once, and should.

If the brain had only one frontal lobe, or a one-sided one, it would presumably have to process everything serially, one single task after another single task, or first an affect-oriented goal, then a cognitive-oriented goal, and so forth. The result would be a less complex brain, a less efficient brain, and ultimately, I guess, a brain that would be different from a human brain.

Along this line of interpretation, education structured around the exclusive use of serial-processing might be thought of as inhumane (arguably the Puritans tried this), as might education structured around exclusive parallel-processing (the possible tyranny of the open classroom comes to mind in this regard). It would seem to me that 'brain based education' would involve learning how to apply and/or blend parallel and serial processing, just as flexibly and intelligently as the brain itself seems to do. Humans seem to be learning all the time, sometimes one thing at a time, sometimes two things at a time. So, some activities or courses might appropriately feature serial processing, other activities might appropriately feature parallel processing.

However, the study reports, the brain is simply overloaded by three tasks or three goals at once, because it only has two frontal lobes (or two sides to its one frontal lobe) to work with. In many instances the brain does well to divide its resources to make progress on two goals at once; in other instances the brain does well to combine its resources to focus on one task. Not an either-or, in other words, in my interpretation.

My hope would be the more research along the lines of the French study will be done. It seems to me that it's very rare that the human brain is doing only one thing at a time. In the laboratory setting described in the study, a second task was "introduced" to subjects. But outside of the laboratory, it seems likely to me that much of the time the brain is doing two things, and the article I think suggests that's usually fine, and self-regulated by the brain itself. I do think we need to be more complex and nuanced in discussing things like multi-tasking and distraction. What if multi-tasking and distractability turn out to be adaptive and important? I think it's more a matter of finding a balance between doing one thing at a time, and doing two.

In the DMA course I think I put into effect a good balance. I combine activities of singular focus with activities of dual focus, and I think I do a good job of creating a good mix for learning.

Studio-model pedagogy: adding critique to the mix

2011-03-06T13:01:00.000-08:00

I've been working to institute studio-model pedagogy in the context of the Digital Media for the Artist course for quite a while. In fact I started with that idea in the fall of 2006, my first term teaching at UNCSA, but I ran into numerous roadblocks that had little to do with the model and much to do with me coming to know my audience and context. Now that I have some aspects of those critical factors better accounted for in my design, the studio-model is clicking.

It was my own experience with the studio-model as a visual art student that keyed it in for me. The atmosphere and structure of studio art classes was something I really enjoyed. People were motivated and going about their work. Instructors would give an occasional presentation or demonstration for the whole-class, but otherwise they circulated about the studio, pausing to look at and/or comment on the efforts of individuals. In sum, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and also learning a great deal. This is what I sought to re-create as an atmosphere or ethos in the DMA course.

The situation presented some differences that were somewhat troublesome. First, the DMA course is required, hence people are not always motivated to take the course. So I have to work pretty hard to: 1) make it as interesting as possible, and 2) structure it so folks who are not motivated (and even ones who are) do not end up with structure-hunger; given that the environment of UNCSA is in general highly scheduled; chill--space can easily be interpreted as fill-in-with-something-else space).

Second, more than an occasional presentation is needed to get the content across to students (in short there is more to teaching a course like DMA --in terms of needing to introduce conceptual and procedural content-- than there is in teaching studio art courses).

BUT having said that, there are striking similarities as well. The person-at-their-easel is fairly comparable to the person-at-their-computer. By definition, both environments invite hands-on and project-driven approaches. So, I have done whatever I can in the way of aligning the physical space with the studio ethos, playing the role of DJ in providing suitable background music (which virtually almost all studio-based teachers report they do), and keeping the atmosphere open yet structured.

In talking with a colleague recently, though, I realized I was missing a major opportunity to add conversation into the pedagogical mix. I am a huge fan of conversation-based pedagogy, yet the studio-model seems to not invite it; project-based learning seems to be a much better fit. Yet in my recollections of studio-based environments as a learner, there was always informal conversation during class (which I allow and encourage in DMA as well) AND there was also semi-formal conversation at the end of each session around putting the day's work on display and having a discussion-based critique. The instructor would offer feedback, sometimes on individual pieces, sometimes re: group characteristics (i.e., everyone needs to work on texture, etc.), and students would enter into the conversation. It was also a very powerful indirect teaching to simply see one's own work next to other's who were working on the same assignment. I mean a lot of metacognitive, self-evaluative work took place in that space without the teacher having to say anything.

So this is my aim for next term and beyond is to introduce critique into my studio-matrix in DMA, by projecting and talking about different pieces of student work-in-progress. I think this represents the last piece of the puzzle for me. It solves problems related evaluation, communication, and structure. I now comment on the blogs that students create to address the homework aspects of DMA by reading, so they get feedback on their conceptual work and on their completed media projects, but by instituting critique I will be able to comment on the in-studio work students do, and their in-progress work on their media projects. I will of course continue to enjoy the banter and fun of spending time in-studio with them.

Looking beyond DMA (to other virtual worlds)

2011-02-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

I frequently think about the contextual or program aspects of DMA. For example, I wonder where, if anywhere, the DMA course fits into the context of the Undergraduate Academic Program (which is the equivalent of an abbreviated Liberal Arts portion of the BFA degree students work towards at UNCSA). That's one type of questioning I do --but don't get the wrong idea. This is not an existential, angst-filled line of questioning, it's an enjoyable part of my reflective process, and it feeds my design and re-design process.

As noted in the previous post on this blog, which focuses on the work of Andrea Lunsford, and in other posts where I recount aspects of what I'm doing with the course, I have assembled a cluster of provisional answers to the above pleasantly existential line of self-questioning. The cluster boils down to this:

I basically see DMA as a composition course devoted to helping students advance their skills in reading/decoding/interpreting and writing/encoding/creating in a variety of media including but not limited to text. At its base, I see DMA as a 21st century composition course which teaches and combines the skills and tools of the theoretician, rhetorician and technician.

I also do a different, futuristic type of questioning. Assuming DMA and media studies could one day become a focus, area-concentration, or minor for some students at our institution, what advanced-level courses would build well on it? Along these lines I am always on the lookout for clues to how folks are building successfully on the foundations of a rhetoric-based approach to education (that's the Lunsford piece) to capture and advance some of the insights and knowledge-product options new-media makes available to all of us.

Several new-media related electives have been offered at our school, including a course on Generative Art (co-taught with my esteemed colleague Dean Wilcox), another one entitled Theory and Practice of New Media Art (which I offered solo), and one currently underway called Virtual Worlds (also co-taught with Dean Wilcox).

At the recent NC Symposium on Teaching Writing I met a pack of people with clues about the future --even about the possible future of our own Virtual Worlds elective, in that they mentioned ideas, references, and software with potential to augment our VW course next time it's offered. The panel of presenters (whose varied perspectives are represented below in audio recordings) focused attention around the title Virtual Worlds: Pedagogies of Play.

Their perspectives vary nicely from theory-centered looks at virtual worlds to technically-centered looks. I would underscore, though, that all of the presenters blended theory and technology --which also underscores Tom Boellstorff's notion in Coming of Age in Second Life that we are in an age of techne, an age in which thought and technology are conjoined.

The symposium sessions were not being recorded or archived, so I made my own 'bootleg' audio recordings (using a first-gen, now-antique iPod with a microphone attachment) of the presentations. The recordings, each preceded by a short annotation, are embedded below.

Stephanie Boluk insightfully and provocatively traces the historical arc of the Little Red Riding Hood story from early oral beginnings to a recent computer game treatment:

Patrick LeMieux describes a fascinating array of game genres emerging in non-commercial, artistic, and/or DIY sectors, and says a bit about tools/platforms that students can use to create their own examples:

Patrick Jagoda focuses in a very astute and engaging way on the intellectual capacities that professors can help students build, in order to help them optimize their now-direct and pervasive involvement in the production and sharing of media-infused knowledge-products:

Victoria Szabo insightfully describes the critical skills students need in order to engage in media decoding and encoding with maximum awareness and impact, and uses examples from a series or cluster of courses devoted to the history of virtual worlds:

A question and answer session includes yours truly asking about the possibility that while professors may aim for things like transdisciplinarity, students may be inhabiting post-cognitive universes, characterized more by affective markers:

On track, on target, on page with Andrea Lunsford

2011-02-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

This year's NC Symposium on Teaching Writing --held at NC State and entitled Shifting Platforms: New Media, Emerging Literacies, & the Writing Teacher-- is a welcome sign that the rhet/comp community (which has been for me a source of inspiration and pedagogical ideas and insights for many years) continues to lead the way on the teaching+media front.

I have a quizzical relationship to writing, even though I love learning and the play of ideas. So I've long been in search of new paradigms of writing. I could write well enough to get good grades in school and that sort of thing. Yet I never wrote with enjoyment until email came along and caused me to realize that my longstanding lack of enjoyment re: writing was bound-up with the solitary, non-conversational way it had been framed for me in school. It was the situational grammar, the discursive formation, the setting or framing, that put me at cross-purposes with writing. So it was a revelation for me that writing could be conversational and enjoyable.

W. B. Macomber

My favorite professor in my undergraduate years at U.C. Santa Barbara was William Macomber. He presaged my eventual embrace of conversational writing when he told us that if we really wanted to learn how to write we should fall in love with someone who lives far away, and if we really wanted to learn how to talk we should fall in love with someone who lives close by. That's what I call teachin'. This was in 1971, when I was a freshman in college, and it was quite a few years before the widespread dispersion and adoption of electronically-based conversational writing practices in society. Yet some, like Macomber, got the news early and started promoting a different view of the practices and purposes of academic writing.

Within schools in general, though, the requirement that all writing must be solitary was pretty easily enforced by 1) the allied grammatical stricture of isolating students via individualized assessment/grading, and 2) the lack of alternative forms of writing practice either inside or outside of schools. The situation may be significantly different now, in that it seems to be becoming more difficult to maintain the isolationist grammar given that electronic media has proliferated alternative types of writing, and given that students have mastered these alternatives in many instances outside of school and prior to starting college. In this regard I was delighted that Ms. Lunsford addressed the need for changes in institutional grammar --in particular the need to re-think the emphasis on the individual-- along with changes in the way new media is perceived and used, in her talk at the symposium.

Anyway, to complete this loop, I came to the realization that writing could be an enjoyable, powerful engine of learning by collaborating with an English rhet/comp student when I was doing my doctoral work. I was at the time a doc student in the social and philosophical foundations of Education. My collaborator and I carried on an extended conversation in writing via email on topics of mutual interest, and each of us ended up using the edited transcript of our conversation as the centerpiece of our two, separate and differently framed, dissertations --one in English, one in Education. It was this interdisciplinary collaboration that clued me in to the great work being done re: teaching+media in the rhet/comp community, and to the potential of conversational writing to add important dimensions to learning. Both dissertations were approved BTW, and degrees granted, in 1995.

Andrea Lunsford

Andrea Lunsford's keynote address --entitled The Role of Rhetoric and (New Media) Writing in 21st Century Universities-- focused on: 1) re-framing the notion of 'writing' to include involvement with mediums other than text, 2) shifting the focus of such writing towards "making things happen in the world", and 3) maintaining a commonsensical and also arch case for the value of rhetoric-based education. These are all premises that underpin the DMA course, and bolster my ongoing development as a teacher. It's the second item --making things happen in the world-- that I think resonates with the social, conversational writing that I have advocated for some time. In writing conversationally there is a real audience, real perspectives are transformed, and this in turn affects how we live and learn in the real world.

Lunsford is a Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford. More importantly in my scheme of things, she is the real deal --meaning she practices everything she professes. As such, her keynote was insightful and inspiring, and full of good examples. As might be expected, her presentation was also exquisitely balanced in its rhetorical appeal and delivery.

She first became one of my heroes when she clearly stated her support for the idea that student writing --including texting and everything else-- is indeed WRITING, and should for this very reason be accorded the highest respect. Many were the times that I shook my head as teachers, who were my audience in workshops I used to give re: how to use the internet, would say that they could not get students to write because they (the students) were too busy texting, messaging, and emailing one another.

I knew these teachers meant that texting and so forth were not the same as writing essays, but still it gave me pause, I mean real pause, because they did not seem to hear themselves actually saying that students had no time or motivation for writing because they were writing too much. And, gulp, sometimes, all to often really, these types of comments were coming from teachers of writing. So it was a joy to discover that Andrea, a bona fide English teacher at a top drawer university, was insisting that when people are writing they are writing. Let us now be thankful for small things I guess :)

I've had several students write, unprompted, in blogs and so forth that they, too, are delighted to know that Andrea, an adult and English teacher, actually thinks they are bringing important skills and dispositions to the act of writing. Note, though, Lunsford is absolutely certain students need to be able to leverage and extend their abilities in a variety of ways while they are in college, for example by learning how to develop and communicate a stepwise, complex argument (premises, propositions, support, conclusion, etc.) and to do so within a recognizable arc that includes a beginning, middle, and end.

In my estimation Lunsford is side-by-side with Mimi Ito on these kinds of issues --not only in POV, but also in doing the research to back up the POV. Like Ito, Lunsford has for years been involved in careful longitudinal study of youth involvement with media --in Lunsford's case the focus is on student writing, in class and outside of school, and on the myriad ways in which the notion of writing is expanding right before our very eyes (or, with a nod to Derrida, expanding in the eyes of our pupils). It's time to stop bashing student culture, students' new ways of learning, and their writing. It's time to open our own eyes and expand our ways of seeing. Lunsford states this clearly and unequivocally. It is time to understand and build on what's going on, time to get on with it. YES!

So, it was a wonderful experience of convergence, confirmation, and new learning for me to hear Ms. Lunsford talk about the aims, grammars, forms, and nitty-gritty practices of education, and the need to align such matters with the magnificent give and take of the NOW. This is the kind of alignment I am seeking all the time in the DMA course.

So, here's my conclusion. I think everybody should listen to Andrea Lunsford, plain and simple, just like that. Accordingly, I recorded her talk and it can be heard via the embedded media player below. Enjoy!

Self-assessing my work as a course designer

2010-10-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

I am really liking the re-designed DMA course. As noted in previous posts, what I've tried to do is DO some of the key things that I've only been able to talk about in previous years --and thus far I think I've been successful. It is quite a bit of work to "build the airplane while it is flying" but so far it seems worth the effort to have re-designed the course, even though I have had to unfold or unfurl the design on a week-by-week basis.

One of the new things is to ask participants to do some self-assessment. This weekend is the first practice with this. I created a rubric, in the form of a fill-in form, that is based on conversations we had in class and online about what constitutes a good blog. And I've now asked participants to use the rubric as an armature or job-aid to assist them in assessing their work as "bloggers". They will use this form again at mid-term.

I'm taking this opportunity in parallel to assess my own work as a course designer, and I will re-assess at mid-term as well. What I'm going to do for starters is just go through the list of course goals and objectives and comment on them re: how I think we are doing in meeting the goals set for the course. Since the goals and objectives may not capture everything that I would want to happen in the course, I will also offer a closing comment on elements of the course that may exist outside of the goals-and-objectives framework (which of course means that I may need to bring these 'outsiders' into the list of goals-and-objectives for next time). Here goes.

There are five goals for the course, so I will comment on each in its turn, and refer to specific objectives associated with each goal in my commentary.

Goal 1: Learners will enhance their 21st century thinking skills

Objective 1.1: Learners will be able to advance their thinking skills via practice, referenced to an assessment rubric, evidenced in online blog postings, and done in response to the five key/essential questions for the course.

Objective 1.2: Learners will be able to categorize their thinking as transactional, transformational, or transcendent, by using these terms appropriately in reflective blog postings.

Assessment commentary: The blogs have turned out to be the centerpiece of the course, so I feel pretty sure thinking is being practiced via engagement in online writing (which I consider to be a 21st century way to approach both thinking and writing, primarily because it is active). Also, I've used the terms cited in 1.2 fairly extensively, so I think learners have at least been given a good chance to assimilate them into their own vocabulary and use them.

Goal 2: Learners will improve their 21st century talking skills

Objective 2.1: Learners will be able to advance their talking skills via practice, referenced to an assessment rubric, evidenced in online discussion forum exchanges, and done in response to the five key/essential questions for the course.

Objective 2.2: Learners will be able to work conversationally, online and F2F, in in small groups, as evidenced in their ability to carry out a variety of assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Assessment commentary: I have not yet finalized the discussion forum rubric but I have the data to assemble it (again its based on learners' ideas as to what constitutes a good conversation, which I gathered via discussion). Also, for now discussion forum work has had a somewhat less important role than blogging, so I figured it was better to start with the blogging rubric. Plus, overload can be a risk: two self-assessment tasks at one time may have been a bit much. A different timing will also enable a separate practice. Other than that, I think there have been many opportunities for conversation-based collaborative work, and as usual learners at UNCSA, who are often involved in collaborative activity all the time in their arts area, are quite adept at it.

Goal 3: Learners will hone their 21st century expert-perspective gathering skills

Objective 3.1: Learners will be able to choose from and appropriately use a variety of search engines to gather expert perspectives from the open-web, evidenced in research citations that identify search tools and website sources, and done in response to the five key/essential questions of the course.

Objective 3.2: Learners will be able to choose from and appropriately use expert perspectives including including those of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich, Sherry Turkle, Marcos Novak, Donna Haraway, George Lakoff, Bruce Mazlish, and Mimi Ito, as evidenced in research citations that identify sources.

Objective 3.3: Learners will be able to access, choose from, and appropriately use online library databases to gather expert perspectives, as evidenced in research citations that identify sources.

Objective 3.4: Learners will be able to differentiate among high, medium, and low reliability/confidence sources on the open-web, as evidenced in research citations that include source identification and assignment of level referenced to an evaluative filter.

Objective 3.5: Learners will be able to save, tag, and retrieve bookmarks from Delicious, as evidenced in research citations that identify platforms.

Assessment commentary: Participants have been introduced to prominent Media Studies theorists and have been encouraged to refer to these theorists in blog and discussion forum posts. We have not yet worked with "a variety" of search engines --at least not a wide variety. We have talked about the difference between Google-style search engines, which cast a broad net, and StumbleUpon-style search engines, which in effect allow users to 'educate' and refine searching at the front end of the process so to speak. So we've begun to introduce variety. We've accessed the online Lexis database that our campus library provides access to, so again we have a start on meeting this objective. And we have used Delicious bookmarks to tag and store research finds. We have not yet talked about ways to evaluate web sources, nor how to properly cite internet resources, so these objectives remain untouched at this point in the term.

Goal 4: Learners will develop their 21st century knowledge constructing skills

Objective 4.1: Learners will be able to enact 21st century literacy, evidenced in the assembly of information and perspectives into knowledge-products, done in a variety of media (text, image, audio, and video), in ways that are relevant and responsive to the five key/essential questions of the course.

Objective 4.2: Learners will be able to use the term ‘cloud computing’ appropriately, in relation to the advent of an era in which intellectual and creative work will transpire as easily online as socializing does, in blog and online discussion postings.

Objective 4.3: Learners will be able to work effectively and appropriately in the Moodle learning management software work environment, as evidenced in their ability to carry out a variety of assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Objective 4.4: Learners will able to use the Google Apps environment (including iGoogle, Sites, and Docs) as evidenced in their ability to carry out assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Objective 4.5: Learners will be able to perform a variety of image creation and editing tasks using Photoshop Elements and other web-based image tools, as evidenced in their ability to carry out assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Objective 4.6: Learners will be able to create and edit audio content using Audacity, Garageband, and other web-based audio tools, as evidenced in their ability to carry out a variety of assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Objective 4.7: Learners will be able to create and edit video content using iMovie, as evidenced in their ability to carry out a variety of assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Objective 4.8: Learners will be able to create avatars and attend meetings in a UNCSA online classroom within Second Life, as evidenced in their ability to carry out a variety of assigned tasks in a timely fashion.

Assessment commentary: We have completed one challenge cycle at this point in the term, and have successfully IMO explored the use of image-collage as a way to explore themes in a non-linguistic manner, in response to our first essential question. 'Cloud computing' has been introduced in relation to Delicious bookmarks, and has been mentioned several times in other contexts as well (i.e., in talking about Google Apps). We've also used Moodle fairly extensively already, and Photoshop Elements has been worked with as well. We have not yet begun our involvement in audio and video learning, nor have we ventured into Second Life yet.

Goal 5: Learners will extend their 21st century reflecting (and assessing) skills

Objective 5.1: Learners will be able to reflect on, manage, and assess their group and individual learning processes, as evidenced in reflective writing done as part of completing challenge cycles on key/essential questions.

Objective 5.2: Learners will be able to take part in the construction and use of rubrics to self-assess the quality of blog posts, discussion forum posts, and other work products.

Assessment commentary: Learners have already taken part in the co-construction of rubrics for self-assessment, and are presently doing their first self assessment.

OVERALL ASSESSMENT COMMENTARY AND LETTER-GRADE

This has been a good term thus far in my estimation. I feel that 'the mood in the room' is great, the spirit of exploration is strong, and participants are being very considerate of one another. All of this is more important to me than matters of content. If learners complete this course successfully and are open to learning more, and wanting to learn more, or even just more likely to be in such states because they've had a positive experience, then I'm satisfied that a big part of my overall goal for the course is met. This is not to say that relaying content and skills is unimportant, it's more to say that I think these things hinge on the affective elements.

In terms of meeting the course goals, I think significant progress has been made --to the extent that I feel we're actually ahead right now of where I would have thought we might be. Room for improvement exists particularly in the area of providing individual feedback. This has been difficult for me to do given all of the in-course design work I am doing. Yet I also feel that I have been very responsive to discussions, and with general feedback. For example I posted summary comments in the first online discussion forum that I think were fairly extensive and responsive to what participants were bringing to the conversation. In the syllabus I have signed on for providing individual comments as part of mid-term proceedings, so this present gap will begin to get addressed soon.

Overall I'd assign myself a letter-grade of A for the first challenge cycle. I hope I can keep up with things as the new challenge cycles unfold. Having gone through the first cycle, I can see that the form will change in subtle ways (i.e., I am introducing the second cycle with a short reading rather than an assignment to just think about the given essential question). This may be a case where the structure/form can indeed kind of recede or fade to a more background position or layer as we all become more familiar with it.

Final draft of course design (for now)

2010-09-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Things are hoppin' I'm excited about the design of the new course, and about some recent related re-discoveries. Here's the text of an email I sent out to colleagues:

A friend sent me a link (included below) to a video of a TED presentation by Sugata Mitra. I think this video poses --in easy-to-grasp, concrete terms-- a critical question about the scale or type of change that new-media occasions for education. I sometimes wonder (okay I often wonder :) whether or not we are for the most part responding out-of-scale (e.g., making minor adjustments when the changes we are responding to are major). How would we be thinking about curriculum reform, classroom space, the new library, where we'd like to be in ten years, and so forth if we took what Mitra is doing and applied it to our context? http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html I would love to have a conversation on our campus community about this, and possibly even frame a bit of it as research. I'm thinking I may submit something to the ARTStem project-grant program to see if we could get some funding for it. Anyone else interested in exploring this?

Several years ago I co-wrote a piece about an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional pedagogical experiment I engaged in. The piece is called University to Diversity: The Story of 2 Live Class. In it I state the same conclusion that Mitra arrives at in the linked-to piece above; namely, learning is an emergent phenomenon resulting from self-organizing systems. If systems are damped and disturbed (in other words not allowed to self-organize) then teachers (I could be provocative and say dictators :) have to step in. In many ways teachers as actors create a need for themselves/ourselves by impeding the self-organizational capacities humans in interaction have.

The same colleague that pointed me to the Mitra TED talk, put it this way:

I don't think the important variable is "how many computers" but rather
"how can we get kids engaged with other kids over an interesting
learning task." In the clip he had fewer computers than children, but
the key was that he gave them an interesting task, the technology to
accomplish that task, allowed/encouraged them to talk with each other
and he got out of the way. We tell kids to sit down and don't talk, then
we precede to tell them a bunch of stuff we think they should know in a
form that all but makes it unknowable to them while we punish them if
they talk with each other. And we call this "education."

You have a lot if not all his ideas in practice in your classroom. You
don't have 25 students sitting quietly in rows all facing you and
writing down what you say that might be on the quiz. You have them
sitting in small groups and facing at different angles. I guess you must
have turned the podium into kindling or maybe some art project by now,
but it is not in front of the room. You allow and expect the students to
talk during class. Success comes not from the number of computers but,
as always, from the pedagogy employed.

It was interesting for me to see his success and to remember that we
should trust the kids to learn. The only real question is "Can students
learn when they are being taught?" As long as they are not taught, I am
sure they learn well.

E is for Ethos: Bringing it All Back Home

2010-08-15T06:06:00.000-07:00

My last post was in June, and during July DMA course re-design, and the related exploration of Moodle and so forth, have been simmering on a back burner. I've been continuing my experimentation with Moodle and Macintosh, continuing to build an additional Google Sites content-site for the course (a software-studies field guide site), and continuing to play with video-cast or vodcast style presentations (useful in particular for the online version of the course due to roll out in 2011). But mainly --and this is my translation of what it means in this case to have something on the "back burner"-- I've been working on the ethos of the course. It's one of the pleasures of summer to step back and reflect on the spirit or feel of the course, its holistic/essential aspect, and to make sure that it is as relevant as it can be to its context, audience, and times.

This is what I mean by working on the ethos of the course. It may seem odd to think of a course as having an ethos (I mean usually we think of ethos as the property of speakers or audience) but I do see courses as "having a life of their own" in important ways. Parker Palmer writes about 'putting the subject matter in the center of the room' when teaching, in such a way that neither the students nor the instructor own it. In this way the subject itself becomes a party to, or participant in, the conversation --in much the same way that the physical classroom (or online classroom) becomes a participant or actor. So in some ways "the course" is a kind of virtual being. In any case, it's in these ways that I think a course can be said to have an essential holistic, a spirit, or an ethos. Interestingly, Julian Semilian remarked in an interview I did with him that when he considers becoming involved in a film project the first question he asks is "What is the spirit of the thing?"

Thinking about the DMA course on this level is not only pleasurable but crucial for me, because I think ethos sets the innermost/synaptic stage for the play of teaching and learning. Each year I try to improve on the feel of the course, and I think I've made reasonable progress. The redesign of the physical space over the first four years has helped the feel quite a bit. The development of the curriculum to explicitly include and intertwine liberal arts skills, media studies knowledge, and new-media/technology projects, has improved the feel quite a bit as well. This year's task is primarily pedagogical. I'm not starting from ground zero on this thankfully, yet I have significant work ahead of me to get the pedagogical aspect of the course to fully resonate with the feel of the room and the feel of the curriculum.

Institutions also have lives of their own, no? So part of my job in this regard is to create a resonant or synergistic relationship between the ethos of the DMA course and the ethos of UNCSA as a professional school. Here's my framework: I regard the essence or ethos of professional education as multi-level understanding. A professional needs to understand and operate within their field on all of its levels --technical, procedural, and conceptual. A professional school is thus a complex context that runs continual risks of: 1) lapsing into a trade school if technical and procedural aspects are over-emphasized, or 2) becoming a theory-driven hot-house plant if conceptual aspects are overdone. A professional school runs into even deeper trouble if it has no purchase on people's emotions or affective domains. So, I want the ethos of the DMA course to be open, welcoming, challenging, and relevant. And I want it to combine the technical, procedural, and conceptual aspects of digital media in a way that is optimally relevant to emerging professionals in the arts. All of the designs I've implemented have referenced this goal. The new design is no exception, yet it nonetheless represents a kind of sea-change in terms of further shifting the pedagogy further towards an explicitly learner-centered model.

NOTE: learner-centered pedagogy is something I have done successfully in the context of teaching graduate-level and undergraduate-level courses elsewhere, but I have found the UNCSA context to be particularly challenging in this regard due to numbers of students enrolled in the DMA course, and the first-year student audience for the course (I have relied on multiple-choice quizzes rather than dialog/conversation due to the automatic grading (via the use of Blackboard or, now, Moodle) and the odd/ironic comfort level that quizzes provide for first-year students who are in many cases just emerging from the test-based environments typical K-12). I think it's time to move beyond MC quizzes now, and started this move last year. Again this year is a major ramp-up or sea-change --I guess it's appropriate that I am starting my fifth year, having seen the students I had in my first year graduate last year.

BUT, I am as guilty as can be of "teaching about" learner-driven education more so than enacting it, and the new design attempts to rectify this understandable yet undeniable hypocrisy. Part of my design process this year has thus been to come out of denial on this point: I simply do not know how to take the final steps to design and operate learner-driven courses that are effective, and manageable from an evaluation/grading standpoint. So my work is cut out for me. I know I want to infuse the course with more peer-based communication and small-group work/projects, for example. But I don't know how to do this in a way that provides enough structure and individual accountability to ensure that students will engage the content with adequate feedback from myself and their peers. There it is.

Thankfully there are now some foundational touchstones in the education landscape that I can work with to build this new learner-centered model of practice.
The Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES), which is built into Moodle, is one touchstone. It provides a concrete way for instructors such as myself to perform reality-checks with students as to whether or not a particular online lesson or unit contains adequate learner-centered provisions:

The COLLES survey comprises an economical 24 statements grouped into six scales, each of which helps us address a key question about the quality of the on-line learning environment:

Relevance
How relevant is on-line learning to students' professional practices?

Reflection
Does on-line learning stimulate students' critical reflective thinking?

Interactivity
To what extent do students engage on-line in rich educative dialogue?

Tutor Support
How well do tutors enable students to participate in on-line learning?

Peer Support
Is sensitive and encouraging support provided on-line by fellow students?

Interpretation
Do students and tutors make good sense of each other's on-line communications?

More...COLLES website

Another useful touchstone is the well-known Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. This set of principles is oriented towards course design and evaluation more so than lesson design and evaluation:

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,
2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
3. encourages active learning,
4. gives prompt feedback,
5. emphasizes time on task,
6. communicates high expectations, and
7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

More...Seven Principles website

Another useful touchstone for those of us trying to re-design our practices to be more learner-centered is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This tool is designed for institutions to use to gauge their learner-centered provisions, but can be easily adapted by instructors such as myself to scaffold our moves to learner-centered instructional praxis:

1. Level of academic challenge
Challenging intellectual and creative work is central to student learning and collegiate quality. Components of academic challenge include the nature and amount of assigned academic work, complexity of cognitive tasks presented to students, and standards faculty members use to evaluate student performance.
Sample Questions: How much reading and writing do students do? --In the first year? --In required general education courses? --In the major field in which you are interested? What is the nature of assignments in various courses and majors? Is memorization emphasized? Or higher order, complex cognitive skills? How much time do students spend preparing for class? --In the first year? --In the major field in which you are interested? What does the campus do to encourage students to spend significant amounts of time studying and on academic work? What do faculty and staff do to challenge and support students so they work to their potential?
2. Active and collaborative learning
Students learn more when they are intensely involved in their education and have opportunities to think about and apply what they are learning in different settings. And, when students collaborate with others in solving problems or mastering difficult material they acquire valuable skills that prepare them to deal with the messy, unscripted problems they will encounter daily during and after college.
Sample Questions: In what percentage of courses do students work in teams to complete assignments, solve problems, or apply course content? How many courses require students to engage in service learning or take part in community-based projects? --In the first year or in general education courses? --In the major field in which you are interested? --How do students work with other students on projects during class? Is an internship required to graduate? What about for the major field in which you're interested?
3. Student-faculty interaction
In general, the more contact students have with their teachers the better. Working with a professor on a research project or serving with faculty members on a college committee or community organization lets students see first-hand how experts identify and solve practical problems. Through such interactions teachers become role models, mentors, and guides for continuous, life-long learning.
Sample Questions: How often do students meet with faculty members outside of class? --To work on committees? --To meet in faculty homes or offices? What does the institution do to promote such contacts? Do campus committees require a certain number of students participate? How many students collaborate on research with faculty members? --In the first year? --In the senior year? --In the major field in which you are interested?
4. Enriching educational experiences
Educationally effective colleges and universities offer a variety of learning opportunities inside and outside the classroom that compliment the goals of the academic program. One of the most important is exposure to diversity, from which students learn valuable things about themselves and gain an appreciation for other cultures. Technology is increasingly being used to facilitate the learning process and -- when done appropriately -- can increase collaboration between peers and instructors, which actively engages students in their learning. Other valuable educational experiences include internships, community service, and senior capstone courses that provide students with opportunities to synthesize, integrate, and apply their knowledge. As a result, learning is deeper, more meaningful, and ultimately more useful because what students know becomes a part of who they are.
Sample Questions: What percentage of students participate in internships, study abroad, and community service? --In the first year? --The senior year? --In your major field What programs and activities does the institution provide to insure that students from different backgrounds meet and work together? --In the first year? --In the senior year? --In your major?
5. Supportive campus environment
Students perform better and are more satisfied at colleges that are committed to their success and cultivate positive working and social relations among different groups on campus.
Sample Questions: What does this institution do to assure that students get the academic and social support they need to succeed and thrive? What is the nature of student relations with administrative personnel and offices? --Is it cooperative? --Or do students complain about the bureaucratic "runaround" when they have problems to solve?
More...NSSE website

Add to the above Mizuko Ito's research which documents the extent to which students' learning online in their own lives is interest-driven, choice-infused, and conversational/dialogic in format, and we have a reasonable picture of how contemporary education can be designed to optimize learner-centered learning.

What can be said of the overlaps in the above three indexes? First, I think all three enjoin the affective and/or ethical domain of how people feel about what they are doing (i.e., do they feel included in the planning, do their views matter, are they given an opportunity to voice their own ideas and hear the ideas of others, do they feel actively involved or just passively receptive, etc.). In this regard, Dewey's focus on "experience" perhaps encrypts the affective/ethical domain, in that experience can mean more or less anything. So current work, reflected in the above tools, is I think an attempt to decode, decrypt, and/or elaborate on the notion of experience --a notion which in some ways launched the ship that is now finding safe harbor in the current age of personal-industry media, which includes and encompasses the affective domain.

So, bringing it all back home, I guess the E is for Experience and Ethos. My practical aims for this year may also be Enterprising or Extreme, but here goes:

I will infuse the course with more ample dialog/conversation.
I started using Facebook discussions last year and these worked very well. My task now is to create a system to assess this work (mastery-based? Rubric?).
I will start the course with an "interests and issues" survey and/or conversation (the conversation option may be better, since this sets a resonant tone with item #1 above).
I will use small-groups substantively, again to incorporate conversation/dialog (i.e., groups can use Facebook, Skype, etc.) and also to build more peer interaction into the mix (peer evaluation perhaps in some instances? Again rubric-based?)
I will work out ways to give helpful feedback and fairly assess student work in this new pedagogical framework.

The intriguing part of this redesign for me as an instructional designer is that I will be attempting to embed the content of last year into the practices and/or assignments or projects of this year. For example rather than introducing dialog/conversation as an important (and neglected) element of the liberal arts skill-set, I will institute much more dialog/conversation into daily practice, assignments, and projects. I will still use the content-site I developed to scaffold the liberal arts skills development of conversation, but I will use it in a different way, which will open a space for new/additional content.

The new content will be learner-generated issues, structured initially by serious play in the early part of the course around identifying important problems related to new-media/technology. The plan (again, still sketchy at this point, but I have a month to articulate it) is to then form groups around issues, and set in place an iterative, cyclical algorithm of small-group research, conversation, content-production (in a variety of media including but not limited to text), and sharing (presentations, postings, etc.).

Please wish me well on this voyage :)

Looking ahead to next year's course

2010-06-28T16:49:00.001-07:00

Lots of changes are in store for DMA in the fall of 2010. The media-lab/studio is in the process of a major revamping, as are (as per usual) most other aspects of the course as well. Well, let me clarify that. Most of the content, which is now stable, will be rearranged, not necessarily changed or replaced. I will be adding resources in current/topical areas to feed new types of projects --but its the projects that matter, and the pedagogical design. I've been doing a lot of thinking, and writing (including a chapter I was asked to write for a forthcoming book on teaching and learning in virtual worlds) and it seems that NOW is the time to put the thought into action, walk the talk, or maybe run with it.

Some of the action swirls around the classroom. Less computers, all Macs. MORE. Four clusters of six desks. What am I doing. Here's an email I sent to Wilcox about this...

I'm still thinkin' about going with small groups (groups-of-five) as a design principle...

--The classroom could then have four clusters (for the four small groups that would be meeting f2f on any given day). Each cluster could have 2 new iMacs, one old iMac, three Flip videos, and an audio recorder or two basically assigned to it. The portable equipment would basically stay in the room, on a wall-shelf next to each cluster, but could be used during class time to go out and gather footage, sounds, etc.

--The online classroom tool-set would include Skype for audio and video communication (i.e., connecting with the f2f class during class-times, talking with group members, etc.), Google Apps for portfolio websites and documents, Facebook discussions for processing readings and so forth, and Second Life as a kind of experimental platform (that groups may choose to explore or not).

--I'm thinking each group member will have to take on a 'job' --sort of like a mini version of what they do at Warren Wilson-- and that the jobs might rotate throughout the term (or not depending on what the group itself thinks about how it wants to operate).

--This might mean that three small-group projects (somewhat more ambitious undertakings than the individual ones I've been assigning) would be required, along with individually-done quizzes and final exam.

This may be the time to shift over to small-group work, in part to prep for a more flexible arrangement when we shift to 2-semesters, and in part to enable the kind of social-learning that students typically already do on the outside anyway. I've wanted to do this but have not had the time to work out how to assess group work. The materials on how to do this are available, though, so I can probably get that part put in place this summer.

At any given point in the term, one group of five in each section is 'in the field' and coming to class via Skype (yipes, this software now lets you conference call with 24 people, still for free).

Maybe each group of five frames and enacts three types of project. A personal interest project --research, media production, etc. all in the wheelhouse. Then expand the circle to a local interest, then on up to a social or global interest. This scaling of interests, finding something in a personal interest that generalizes to a larger scale that is still interesting, then, again, on up. Isn't this kind of what is supposed to happen in college? We expand our interests? This might be what we work on in the beginning of the term. A survey possibly --what are folks interested in? Then some diagramming and so forth to figure out how to expand out from there in radiating kinds of circles.

How's this sound?

So that's that part. Been thinking a lot about dimensions. Like three or more. The first three for a 3D environment might be imagination, emotion, and intellect. So I'm grafting some of the thinking I did about 3D environments in the book chapter onto this. What is 3D anyway?

Also have been thinking a lot about Second Life and the notion of building things in there out of "primitive" shapes. So if one is building art (rather than an object in SL) what are the primitives? This is where I get the imagingation, emotion, and intellect bits. Maybe these are the primitives, the building blocks. If they are all present, the the artwork seems whole/complete. What about if you are building education? What are the primitives? Similar possibly, could be almost the same as building art. But maybe not. Maybe we want to say the primitives are 'highly individual', 'highly social', and the 3rd might be (imagination+emotion+intellect). I've been thinking about different categorical 'grids' for some time, and how they are interchangeable and all, and now I'm seeing where this might go if I think in terms of primitives.

Second Life is 3D in an obvious sense, but it also is 3D in allowing us to see ourselves as others see us (the old desiderata made virtually real). We construct an avatar and we see it/us just as others do. When I walk around in RL now I can picture my 3D self from different camera angles. So there are these profound effects even in the most prosaic aspects of software (which is what I wrote the chapter about). Layers is a very profound concept. So is scale. So is 3D. These are big teachings embedded now in software.

I've been doing lots of thinking also about interfaces. In teaching classes the assignments are SO CRITICAL precisely because they are the interface between students and content. I want to build these interfaces with students this coming year. This would be a new element. In building interfaces, what are the primitives?

So, as usual, I am looking forward to the journey. It's still June now, so I have plenty of time to ruminate on this and hammer out some of the details. I've got some camping and hiking planned between now and then, too. I'll likely add some other posts about this as the summer cooks on.

Reflection on the winter term 2010 edition of DMA

2010-03-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

It's time to look back and ahead as well. Lots of good things went on in the winter term of 2010. About 1/2 of the course was experimental (2/3 would be better, but would paradoxically require tighter organization than I would have been able to bring to bear on the course design this go-round).

I list some highlights below, after a quick note about the accompanying image. We started our project work in part three of the course with each person making a 6" X 6" collage on the theme of boundaries. These collages were on display in the WW3 Gallery for a few weeks. Then we messed with the boundary between one artist and another by cutting each 6" X 6" collage into four parts and recombining/remixing them into one large work. The image included here is of the remixed version.

Part of the deal here was to explore the idea that in the digital age social or co-creation is becoming a recognizable genre. In many cases artists are creating frameworks in which others can combine their creative efforts with others. The In B Flat website remains for me a significant example of this. The current generation already does much of their knowledge-work collaboratively (in this case platforms like Facebook provide the framework for others to combine forces) so the idea was in part to carry this logic over into a project. It was interesting to see how this kind of real-world or Newtonian-scale "digitization," put in place by a simple division, resulted in a powerful compression (around 70 collages got compressed into an area roughly 5'X 7') and also a powerful lesson in holographics, since most if not all of the compositions retained their DNA/logic even when reduced in size. This in addition to the aforementioned experiment in social/collaborative creative work. All in all, this ws a successful experiment.

--We used Facebook to discuss preparatory readings for the final exam. This was offered as an extra-credit option. Quite a few people took me up on the offer. Even though I described it in terms of "pairs of students" a couple of groups quickly formed up with seven or so participants each. So it kind of jumped off-grid immediately and nicely (and in a way that is typical of the kinds of teachings students give me). The conversations were amazingly good, containing as they did generative insights, reflective passages, and all the rest. This is something I will try to build on next term and see where it might go.

--In the first part of the course, the part on Liberal Arts and Fine Arts processes and overlaps, the learning got pretty good I think around issues of quantum reality (a reality of electrons being in two places at the same time, etc.) possibly being just what Marshall McLuhan was talking about with the dispersal of the nervous system (after all a matter of dispersing the material logic of electrons and electricity). This connection seemed to fall into place nicely this term.

--Also in the first part, the Katamari-style learning concept got pretty good play and traction. This was connected to Mimi Ito, Andrea Lunsford, and others who are pointing to new knowledge and skills in the current generation -- not a new species, just a new skillset-- that is dynamic/moving, nomadic, quick-to-assemble, etc. We also heard quite a bit of wonder and/or worry about this new skillset or attitude, but connected these worries to questions of new media going back to the ancient Greeks, some of whom worried about the destructive effects of the new technology of writing. Walter Ong's concept of secondary-orality fit real well into this discussion, which also wrapped around texting, IMing, Facebooking, etc.

--In the second part of the course, the part on Media Studies, I think the connections were also fairly well made. McLuhan of course was a perfect fit with the discussion of parallel universes and quantum reality --I hit on the notion of the current generation as "Generation Q" --the first group of humans to be be truly swimming in quantum effects due to growing up with the internet. Later on, in the final exam essays, I noticed that some of the Media Studies luminaries got mentioned even though this was not required. Bruce Mazlish for instance. I was delighted to see this, and it alerted me to the possibility that my "Sparks Notes" summaries of Media Studies heavy-hitters (McLuhan, Ong, Ito, and others) may have worked pretty well to get some some conceptual tools onto the table in a fairly strait-forward and usable way.

--In the third part of the course we focused on remix compositions. I picked remix because it seemed to fit well with the logic of Katamari-style learning (using the entire world as one's palette, rolling up this and that). This theme segued beautifully into the conceptual content of part three of course, which was intellectual property, copyright, and privacy. We did image, audio, and video remixes, using our own materials and/or materials that are in the public domain --including items from the Internet Archive and CCMixter.

DMA identity

2010-02-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

The Digital Media course has developed a stable, mercurial identity as a Liberal Arts course in the field of Media Studies with a decided focus on the Fine Arts/creative-uses of digital media. 1/3 of the course features developing the creative skills of the Liberal Artist (talking/communication skills mainly, but also reading, writing, and thinking skills), 1/3 involves applying those skills to a cadre of Media Studies luminaries (Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Lev Manovich, Mimi Ito, et al) and issues (privacy, copyright, etc.), and 1/3 involves composition-studies (hands-on projects including a website composition, and image, audio, and video remix compositions). The current website for the course is located at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma20092110/ I also maintain a separate website for the Liberal Arts content of the course at: http://sites.google.com/site/mediastudiesnow/ And a separate site as well for the Media Studies content at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma0910/ All of the quizzes, gradebook stuff, and copyright-protected content are contained in Blackboard sites, one for each section.

The 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 structure or cadence in some ways mirrors the progression of Web 1.0 (the read-only, passive, or lonely web), Web 2.0 (the social-active web), and Web 3.0 (the knowledge-contruction web). The phases of the course also of course include significant overlap. We use plenty of media in the first the second thirds of the course, and we continue to talk about issues in part three.

At this point in time, the course seems to strike a pretty good campus-wide balance for a required first-year offering. Students who may typically shy away from technology may find even the entry-level introduction to technical-skills they get in the Digital Media course to be challenging to learn. On the other hand, students who might typically shy away from interpretative skills and theory may find even the entry-level introduction to the Liberal Arts and to the field of Media Studies to be challenging to learn! That's the nature of a first-year required course, or at least that's how I see it.

In any case, on the technical-side, the Digital Media course provides an entry level, art-focused set of technical skills for students to work on. They learn to work with Google Sites and Docs, Photoshop Elements, Audacity, and Movie Maker, and an array of other tools including screen-capture utilities for still and moving images.

My perception is that the need for advanced or more detailed technical-skills instruction varies pretty wildly in degree and kind, and timing, across the various Schools. My favored approach to delivering highly specific technical skills-training (if students need more or advanced work on Photoshop, more or advanced work in audio-editing, etc.) is to develop suites of online screen-movie tutorials (of the sort I use fairly extensively and produce via Jing or Camtasia). If study of online tutorials is combined with tests that require students to sit at at a computer in a classroom in the instructor's presence and execute the skills the tutorials address, this can work very well. I guess this is to say that DMA is not a tech or computer-skills course, yet it includes such things in context, and if I felt more of such things were needed I would not necessarily put them in a face-to-face framework anyway.

I am reminded of a webmaster job interview I once had. The interview consisted of a short verbal Q and A session with a Human Resources person, then I was handed a sheet or paper with a list of things to do, which included the address of a website I was to critique. I was then given access to a computer where I had to create a website, including a page on the site to enter my critique of the website they had given me the address to. Afterward I felt that this organization got a pretty accurate picture of applicants' skills (including their thinking skills and aesthetic-critiquing skills) by using this methodology. If students who needed advanced skills-training were to use online tutorials to acquire and practice the skills, and were then tested face-to-face, they could be given course-credits for their work, analogous to a job applicant getting into the next round of interviews or getting a job offer.

If face-to-face courses in advanced-skills are the only way to go --in other words if an online tutorials + face-to-face testing model would not work for one reason or another-- then multiple courses would likely be needed at UNCSA, at very least one per each School. Therein lies the next-level design-problem; namely there are not enough teachers, and there is not enough time, to do this. So this, too, makes me think courses may not be the best design-solution for advanced technical skills training.

Rollin' the Katamari ball forward

2010-01-14T05:23:00.001-08:00

This term is off to a delightful start. The discussions about Macomber-related materials --the skills of the Liberal Artist, the life of the mind, Katamari-style learning, etc.-- have gained reasonable traction in all three sections.

I sort of vowed I wouldn't change things this term, but I'm beginning to think something different might happen in part three of the course this term. Part one is still all about the skills of the Liberal Artist. Part two is still all about applying those skills to the field of Media Studies. But in part three I'm kind of intrigued to see whether we might spin hands-on media-skills assignments out of the discussions we're having, perhaps organized around whatever concepts and so forth seem to be gathering energy. For example a group of interested folks might pursue a study of quantum mechanics that includes responding in text, image, audio, and video to the key concepts. Another group might pick a different concept or area to explore. It's possible that these groups could cut across section lines. The group work would involve research, website construction, image, audio, and video. We'll see.

I guess what I'm trying to address with this is a different kind of integration of part three into the course. In most iterations of the course thus far, part three has stood somewhat apart from parts one and two. It has tended to feature student-generated topics and projects. These have always been integrated in some ways. For example, last term the digital stories done in part three were interrelated closely with the structural content of parts one and two of the course in the sense that digital stories were used in parts one and two --in particular the introduction of Liberal Arts skills via the Meeting Macomber digital story. What I'm contemplating here and now is more of an extension into part three that is keyed to the conceptual rather than structural content of the earlier parts of the course. For example, we have talked about Katamari-style learning in part one, and we could practice it in part three if we did research --particularly research with a social/group dimension.

Another new element this term was the inclusion of a student who was in NY temporarily in a class session via the use of Skype. This worked really well even with only a very minor bit of setup. I basically used my laptop built-in webcam and microphone and we got good video exchange and audio interaction. The student in NY heard and participated in the class discussion just fine. A cool NY-style touch was provided by the student attending class while having breakfast at a McDonalds in Brooklyn that had good wifi connectivity :)

Reflecting on the fall 2009 term

2009-12-11T12:29:00.001-08:00

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.

This seems important

2009-10-07T17:26:00.001-07:00

In class today the conversation took a very interesting turn towards the end of the session. It had been back-and-forthing about whether or not the internet is a negative impact on human relationships and communication. Good points were made on each side. I think this constituted a good transformational conversation (using the transactional, transformational, transcendent framework here). Then toward the end the idea of negotiation was introduced --in the context that when something new comes along there are always gains and losses that must be negotiated. Then after that the concept of balance was introduced --which, like negotiation, moved the conversation beyond back-and-forthing. In complexity-theory terms we witnessed a phase-change. In the typology of conversation framework, we saw the conversation move from transformational to transcendent. But (and this is the part that seems most important to me) is that negotiation and balance are both dialogical concepts. Negotiation implies a dialog between at least two parties. And balance implies a dialog between two different elements or positions.

Method then Principles then Issues

2009-10-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

Our method --conversation-- is now well-established via our uncovering of the Liberal Arts. If we uncover the Liberal Arts the gem of conversation is revealed. If we cover the Liberal Arts the gem of conversation is buried under information. As noted in the course introduction, the need to uncover rather than cover the Liberal Arts is acute when it comes to designing a BFA degree. There is no time for everything, unless everything is defined --as James Webb Young does-- as method and principles. Here is what Young says: "Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything." (James Webb Young (1965). A Technique for Producing Ideas. New York, NY: Macgraw-Hill). So, our method is sound in general, and in particular it is keyed to the context of teaching and learning in the Liberal Arts at an art school.

This week we began gathering principles within the field of Media Studies by reading summaries of luminaries from Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong to Lev Manovich and Mimi Ito. Part of the goal for next week is to then use the method of conversation and the principles of Media Studies luminaries to illuminate contemporary issues. We have five categories of issues:

Censorship, Freedom of Speech, and other legal issues
Global Communities and Communication, and Generational Differences
New Trends (including trends in how people learn)
Security, Privacy, and related issues
Internet Business, and related issues

Next week each one of the five small-groups in each section of the course will lead a whole-group discussion on one of the above categories of issues.

Meanwhile, in homework, we will be shifting our attention to the third main part of the course, namely digital storytelling. We will take a brief break (no class on Friday for the MWF section, and a shortened class on Thursday for the TR sections) in order to take a step back and clear our hearts and minds before we launch into writing and producing "meaningful first-person narratives" in digital form.

The term continues to unfold really well I think. I am very impressed with the students, and I think the structure of the course is holding its own. There are some folks who feel that the scores they have received thus far on the quizzes are not indicative of their effort or learning, so this weekend I will be doing some data-crunching (meaning I will ask my fourteen year old son who is a math whiz to help me) to see if scores/grades need to be curved.

Other than that, all of the indications I can pick up seem to be good, and I'm excited about the small-group led conversations coming up next week and the digital storytelling work/play after that. I still have some work to do to structure and pace the storytelling part of the term. I want to make sure the requirements, due dates, and grading criteria are very clear. Likely this means creating an overall rubric divided into sections/parts of the process.

Electric Soup

2009-09-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I also like to refer to computers as boxes of water, so don't worry about the title of this post. Hopefully it will become clearer after you read this and after we have discussed Media Studies, McLuhan et al, etc.

As noted in the preceding post, we've covered the Liberal and Fine Arts in one and a half weeks --not bad! Nah, with a tipping of the proverbial hat to Michael Apple we have uncovered the Liberal and Fine Arts in one and a half weeks. Once uncovered, these grand edifices reveal themselves to be settings or stages for different forms of conversation to take place. But what it the point? In part, as in the Scheherazade story, the aim is to keep the conversation going! In part, as in the life of Socrates, the point is to keep the conversation going because in conversation nothing less than Truth itself is revealed. Uncovering just begins the process.

The Scheherazade story may be doubly important to us because it concerns storytelling as well as keeping a conversation going. I'll quote below part of the Wikipedia entry on the story for those unfamiliar with it:

"The frame tale goes that every day Shahryar (Persian: شهريار or "king") would marry a new virgin, and every day he would send yesterday's wife to be beheaded. This was done in anger, having found out that his first wife was betraying him. He had killed three thousand such women by the time he was introduced to Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter.

In Sir Richard F. Burton's translation of The Nights, Shahrazad was described in this way:

"[Shahrazad] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred."

Against her father's protestations, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the King. Once in the King's chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, Dinazade, who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The King lay awake and listened with awe as Scheherazade told her first story. The night whiled away, and Scheherazade stopped in the middle of the story. The King asked her to finish, but Scheherazade said there was not time, as dawn was breaking. So, the King spared her life for one day to finish the story the next night. So the next night, Scheherazade finished the story, and then began a second, even more exciting tale which she again stopped halfway through, at dawn. So the King again spared her life for one day to finish the second story.

And so the King kept Scheherazade alive day by day, as he eagerly anticipated the finishing of last night's story. At the end of one thousand and one nights, and one thousand stories, Scheherazade told the King that she had no more tales to tell him. During these one thousand and one nights, the King had fallen in love with Scheherazade, and had had three sons with her. So, having been made a wiser and kinder man by Scheherazade and her tales, he spared her life, and made her his Queen."

One possible moral to the Scheherazade story is that as long as people are talking, as long as the conversation is going forward, no physical violence is taking place. This would apply directly, for example, to diplomacy but it also has more subtle forms: as long as people are talking (whether its about what's for lunch or what the boundaries should be) there is no war. Or, in the then-trendy parlance of child-raising advice, when my kids were toddlers the oft-repeated mantra was "use your words." :) Perhaps one could speculate as well that on the purely plus or positive side, conversation may also be an ounce of prevention in relation to the ills of violence.

Macomber would I think have had a lot of wonderful things to say about the Scheherazade story, since it combines conversation, a focus on life itself, and eros. Speakin' again of Dr. M., one of my favorite passages in Plato's Symposium occurs right at the beginning of the dialogue. It recounts a conversation between Socrates and Aristodemus, and concerns the overarching value and importance of just keeping the conversation going; everything else will just takes its rightful place:

"He [Aristodemus] said that he met Socrates fresh from the bath and sandalled; and as the sight of the sandals was unusual [Socrates was known for bare-footedness], he asked him whither he was going that he had been converted into such a beau:-

To a banquet at Agathon's, he replied, whose invitation to his sacrifice of victory I refused yesterday, fearing a crowd, but promising that I would come to-day instead; and so I have put on my finery, because he is such a fine man. What say you to going with me unasked?

I will do as you bid me, I replied.

Follow then, he said, and let us demolish the proverb: "To the feasts of inferior men the good unbidden go"; instead of which our proverb will run:- "To the feasts of the good the good unbidden go"; and this alteration may be supported by the authority of Homer himself, who not only demolishes but literally outrages the proverb. For, after picturing Agamemnon as the most valiant of men, he makes Menelaus, who is but a fainthearted warrior, come unbidden to the banquet of Agamemnon, who is feasting and offering sacrifices, not the better to the worse, but the worse to the better.

I rather fear, Socrates, said Aristodemus, lest this may still be my case; and that, like Menelaus in Homer, I shall be the inferior person, who "To the feasts of the wise unbidden goes". But I shall say that I was bidden of you, and then you will have to make an excuse.

Two going together, he [Socrates] replied, in Homeric fashion, one or other of them may invent an excuse by the way.

This was the style of their conversation as they went along. Socrates dropped behind in a fit of abstraction, and desired Aristodemus, who was waiting, to go on before him. When he reached the house of Agathon he found the doors wide open, and a comical thing happened. A servant coming out met him, and led him at once into the banqueting-hall in which the guests were reclining, for the banquet was about to begin. Welcome, Aristodemus, said Agathon, as soon as he appeared-you are just in time to sup with us; if you come on any other matter put it off, and make one of us, as I was looking for you yesterday and meant to have asked you, if I could have found you."

The key line for me is "Two going together, one or other of them may invent an excuse by the way." In my read or interpretation Socrates is pointing out that the conversation itself is what matters, not the party, so everything will turn out fine if they just proceed together, talking and walking. One will invent an excuse as to what they'll say about Aristodemus arriving uninvited, but whether or not the excuse will be granted doesn't really matter either. Turning around and walking back to town together would be just fine, too. Kind of puts it all in perspective for me.

So, arguably, thus far in our class we've uncovered the importance of conversation. Now the task is just to keep the conversation going, keeping the conversational campfire burning by adding to it. The other purposes of college? We'll invent an excuse for those :)

We'll have a chance to review and discuss the lists we created of the 'elements' or 'ingredients' of a good conversation. So we'll continue our conversation about conversation just a bit in this way.

I'll also introduce or reiterate the whammy alignment of conversation, media, and electricity. They are all in-between, in-the-middle, connection-powered, and ontologically difficult to pin-down so to speak. We tend to see 'things' not the connections between things. Yet what is more important to us than relationships? Why is it that it seems difficult for us to stay focused on what really matters, even when its obvious?

Well, there are various stories to tell that might account for this. We could tell a story about our culture's objectve notion of truth, for example (and note that objective has the word object embedded in it) so we are already predisposed to see objects or things rather than the relationships between or among things. I mentioned this in regard to Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in which she includes an uncanny exercise in which drawing everything but the object itself (in other words drawing all of the spatial relationships around and within an object results, voila, in a drawing of an object. I also mentioned this in relation to Thich Nhat Hahn's zen exercise of noting that literally everything is present in a piece of paper other than paper itself. It's all in the relationships.

There are exceptions to our focus on objects rather than relationshps --the green or ecology movement, for example, calls attention to relationships, but here too we have to consider how much resistance and marginalization occurs in regard to such movements.

So I want us to consider and talk about a collection of 'in-the-middles' entities including conversation, media, and electricity --and how these all tend to be seen as non-entities (and thereby marginalized).

Here are a few slides I used in class to try to convey the importance of in-betweens:

I also want us to talk about the Fine Arts in particular the aesthetic way of knowing as perhaps situated in-between spirituality and intellect, in the realm of emotion mainly, and about the conversation with the self and others that constitutes Art being in some ways focused on emotion. Art connects us to ourselves, to others, to humanity, to the beauty of life. We sometimes say that Art moves us, and this is an emotional term that may refer more precisely to moving us into relationship (again with ourselves, with others -- i.e., we now in some ways know Hugh and Mark Everett and something about ourselves possibly as well from having viewed the Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives story). So Art may be aligned in particularly strong ways with the other in-betweens. This perhaps calls for a sound bite: Art is electric, baby! If electric, then it is also the glue that holds stories --and/or any form of artwork-- together. What would the Parallel Worlds story have been without the father-son relationship and its inevitable emotional resonance? For me it probably wouldn't have 'held together' as a story, at least not nearly as well as it did. I mean the concepts and so forth are interesting in themselves, but the holding power of the story for me was in the relationship line.

AND I have located this fantastic video of an MIT professor talking about electricity as a glue --"which holds the world together" (well okay, along with gravity in some cases :) By the way this MIT prof is having a great conversation with nature, and he lets us in on it. Also, BTW and/or FYI, in regard to my including science stuff in DMA, this is itself indicative of the interconnected, relationship-based age we live in.

Yours is the first generation to practice interconnectivity. Please keep talking on the internet. Please keep producing and posting content on the internet. (Don't do any of these things while driving, though). Your concrete experience may help provide a basis one day for greater, and much needed, attention to be paid to the relationship, interconnections, and other in-betweens.

Weird and Sticky

2009-09-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Gossip Column?

2009-09-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

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:

Movie: What the Bleep Do We Know (Veoh preview)
Movie: Sliding Doors (IMDB site)
Three movies by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
-- Amores Perros (IMBD site)
-- 21 Grams (IMDB site)
-- Babel (IMDB site)
Movie: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (IMDB site)
Book Series: Choose Your Own Adventure (Wikipedia site)
Interactive story/games series: Nancy Drew (Mysterynet site)
Zen author: Thich Nhat Hahn (Wikipedia site)
Movie: Slaughterhouse Five (Wikipedia site)
TV series: Connections (Wikipedia site)
TV series: Futurama (Wikipedia site)
Movie: A Sound of Thunder (IMDB site)
Movie: Primer (IMDB site)

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.

First week of fall term

2009-09-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

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.