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.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Rollin' the Katamari ball forward
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 :)
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 :)
Friday, December 11, 2009
Reflecting on the fall 2009 term
Egads. What a great term this was. A friend of mine once described talking with a friend of his who was a blues guitarist. He went to watch him perform, and noticed that he did not seem to pay much attention to his guitar-playing while he played. He mentioned this perception to his friend after the show, and his friend concurred. He said when he had gotten to a point where he didn't have to think much about playing the guitar, this meant that he was able to start thinking about the audience, which in turn meant that he had begun his career as a performer.
Something like this happened to me this term as a teacher. It's actually been gradual, as I have gotten more and more accustomed to working with first-year students at this very unique institution, but this term the trend went all the way through to a phase-change. Previously I was having to pay quite a bit of attention to the course materials, assignments, etc. in order to see what was working, what was not working, how to assess the students' work, how to make changes in the right places and for the right reasons, how to make sense of the school as a context, etc.
This year I still think about and work on those things, but when I go into class those types of things are in the background and I am there to do one thing and one thing only: to be with the students. This produced great delight for me, and I think it's quite analogous to the guitar-player and his becoming a performer: for the first time I was able to do the technical parts of teaching fairly easily, and I could therefore focus on and enjoy interacting with the audience. I guess, if the analogy holds, this means I've began my career as a teacher this term, even though I've technically been teaching for quite some time (part-time prior to three years ago, full-time for the past three years).
The syllabus for this term's course is online in website-form at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma20092110/
A highlight for me is the course description, because it reveals a major part of how I resolved some of the technical issues of teaching in a Liberal Arts department at a Fine Arts institution. This is online at: http://sites.google.com/site/dma20092110/description
There were many examples of good student work this term -- in conversation and in the making and telling of digital-stories. The previous post in this blog recounts one of the strikingly good conversational moments. Here are links to just a few of the many good examples of digital-stories (a more complete collection will be posted on the ongoing student-work showcase website): Rachel's story, Erik's story, Samm's story, and Nick's story. I'm beginning to do some initial research into ways to hook up an exchange of digital-stories with an art college somewhere in a different culture.
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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.
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.
.jpg)
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.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
This seems important
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.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Method then Principles then Issues
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Electric Soup
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.
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.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Weird and Sticky
Surprisingly (to me anyway) the DMA course in all its sections and varieties seems to have achieved lift-off quickly. After only a week and a half of courses and homework, I feel as though a great deal has been accomplished.
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.
- 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.
I'm now anticipating that we will move through the Media Studies materials in relatively short order, much as we did with the Liberal and Fine Arts materials, and again this opens up some interesting options. One of the things that came out of our conversations today and yesterday about conversation --noted above and also in response to the question "What are the ingredients or elements of a good conversation?"-- was that this may be a very fun set of DMA sections to jump into online communication with, in class and as possible homework, and compare it to face-to-face conversation.
I'm in the process of generating a kind of master-list of elements identified by all of the sections as crucial to good conversation. This will be an interesting list, and will range from items such as mutual respect to a more open-ended sense of just specifying the basics or foundations (talkers willing to listen and listeners willing to talk) and seeing what happens. This alerts me to the complexity/chaos element or dimension of conversation: in some ways part of what makes conversation such a good thing is that we're not really sure where it will go. This is part of its creative charge. I may show the complexity video clip in class to support and illustrate this point.
Next week we get to talk about Marshall McLuhan and electricity. Conversation and electricity have a lot in common (or so I will propose). Both connect things, and both have an unexpected and often-unnoticed element of 'stickyness' or 'glue' to them. I'll have to find the resource I have on the glue function in electricity. Hopefully the conversations we will have on the luminaries of Media Studies will play well.
Speaking of play, I mentioned in a couple of sections that a couple of years ago I made and posted a short video of me juggling while talking about my early experience of UNCSA. For those interested, here's a link to the video.
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