Summer Project

Yup, I think the new project for the summer is coming together. I’m becoming more and more focused on studying dramatic and narrative patterns and their images.

The project will probably be one hundred stories, brief examinations and examples of plot, action, and character, one a day. I think John’s gearing up to follow with one hundred sound tracks, which will be really cool. This is a call for others to consider such a project also.

I’ve been practicing. I wrote a story this morning in about ten minutes and another a few days back in class while the students worked on their hypertexts, that one about twenty minutes. I’ll be posting them soon on the MediaPlay site.

George Will and Science Writing

There’s a lot going on concerning George Will’s science writing. Two Letters to the Editor in the newspaper have responded by going to the source.

RealClimate has a list of links that readers can follow.

Much of this goes to citation technique and internal analysis of source material, much as we treat it in courses on argumentation: that one should always place their quotes into an analytical context.

Myself, I’m surprised by George Will’s childish response, but I’m not surprised by the politicized nature of the the whole business.

Teaching Philosophy

From what I remember of my younger days, I used to consider myself a “teacher.” I was someone who “instructed” students in the arcane arts of reading, writing, literature and history. I grew up a medievalist and nurtured the image of the dusty scholar in his library professing on Beowulf.

Academics call themselves by many names, such as educator, professor, teacher, and so forth. It’s a jumble. And it’s not really that important how one perceives oneself in a job, unless that perception grows dangerous, whatever that might mean. In any event, I see myself now as simply being in a position to offer opportunities for people to learn a particular framework or set of methods or ideas. These opportunities are dressed in assignments assessed after completion by standards of evaluation in a particular “course” of study.

I don’t worry so much anymore about whether students want to learn, care about the work, or even do the work, as the opportunities are offered and left at that. Students will jump in and get wet or stay out of the water and find something else to do. Those who are excited about the work dig and in and go to work. Over the years, I’ve learned that my own worries matter little to a person who isn’t interested. I can’t make people like or be interested in something. This can be tricky, as it may sound like indifference.

Here’s a case. Sometimes we show examples of new media to people and they get excited about it. But when the work comes, people turn away, wanting to jump right into the “creating” part: how do I animate a ball; how do I make that kind of film; how do I do that cool stuff to photographs? They don’t want to know about the real work and some don’t care about knowing it. Those that do care are “students.” Both kinds of people want to do the cool stuff the authors or teams of authors of which have gone through thousands of hours of academic or self-study to create. The “student” is willing to be patient. That’s why we like those people who will work for hours on a problem and rarely show evidence of conceding.

Second case. I still find “new media” a useful rubric to describe web work, games, world simulations, film, electronic literature, digital graphic design, and programming. “New media” as the rubric describes a host of human concerns–methods, concepts, and objects–that have found fruition in the digital. We develop plans, evaluate those plans, prototype, follow disciplined production, and evaluate, fix, then try something else. For me, “new media” describes a method of work, a describable tool set and vocabulary, a community, an ecology, and an economy. New media as an ecology is a set of concepts and structural apparatus. Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson captured, I think, the basic ethos and ecology of new media in their conceptual flourishes. Facebook’s TOS issues are a good example of an ecology in action: thousands of years of law, communication, machines, and human discourse.

Third case. “New Media” has very little in the way of pedagogical history. There are lots of programming text books. These books are good for tracing pedagogical history. But “New Media” is hard to capture in a text book. Rather, it’s a collection of nodes: from the writings at A List Apart to books published by O’Reilly to the work done at the hundreds of labs around the world and by software developers and engineers, librarians and artists, and the archivists of emulators. That list also includes architects who plan for media and data; city planners who embed computing into their street lights; and researchers who dig into the potentials of nanotech. Our friend Ted Mikulski is a “new media” person because he works with Second Life and connects that work to architecture, design, and communication tools; in his work, he uses multiple systems and evaluates problems for fixing (such as SL’s method of human scaling). But he’s also a painter “New Media” pedagogies are, therefore, related to the traditions of communication and architecture.

If I want to have deep discussion with students on the subject of e-literature, then what’s the prerequisite? Lots of literature courses? That takes time. Some coverage of the “memex”? How does one have a conversation about linking when a person may not have a lot of experience with poetry in the first place? What will the added aesthetic burdens mean? Here’s an example. In our Digital Narrative course at the college, a student asked me what I meant by analyzing 253 for a project he’s working on. I asked him if he’d had any literature courses and he answered no. Thus I learn. We’re developing the course and we need to know what proper prerequisites to add to the course. But is literature a proper prerequisite? In an ideal situation, a student taking digital narrative would have an intro to programming course, a design course, some history and literature courses, a creative writing course, a math course, and an intro to computer graphics course. Wow, that’s a lot of prerequisites. But the list makes a case for the ideal “new media” student: a student involved in a multi-disciplinary, inter-dsciplinary way of looking at the world.

Tools vs Concepts
In our new media approach at the college, we don’t emphasize tools, though we introduce students to them. We want to provide students opportunity to think and make decisions in new media contexts that require problem solving, literacy, and collaboration. Given this problem, what’s the right tool or collection of them? In this context, comparison comes from some amount of practice with a number of tools and their “intrinsic” functionality. I had a student ask: can I animate an image in Tinderbox? I said no. Flash is our animation tool, but you can also animate with (fill in the blank). Why animate when you should be thinking about link effects? But it’s a good question, whose better answer will come when the student has a range of “projects” under his belt (and lots of additional courses). But the question: what’s the best tool for the job at hand is a problem for “every professional” and every “carpenter.” Our process, therefore, takes universals seriously.

We want students to respond positively to a range of problems and to work and life solutions through on paper or in the proper software, then seek out the answers by finding the right set of relationships. We don’t want them to be experts at Photoshop.

On the Right

John Derbyrshire writes in The American Conservative:

I repeat: There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. Ideas must be marketed, and right-wing talk radio captures a big and useful market segment. However, if there is no thoughtful, rigorous presentation of conservative ideas, then conservatism by default becomes the raucous parochialism of Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, and company. That loses us a market segment at least as useful, if perhaps not as big.

Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?

Via Doc Searls.

Ignorance

What a wonderful display of ignorance on Morning Joe this morning. All talking heads admitting little understanding about banks and how someone should explain it all, please. Oh, how all of them were tricked and did not see the crisis coming (while reporting for years on proper power tie colors).

Little is required other than some research. Then some further digging. And there were plenty of people who saw the crisis coming.

Twenty Five

I’m not sure what the notorious $25 to the unemployed has to do with relief, stimulus, or economics, while AIG gets billions, but I’m reading HR1 anyway. The billions to Citigroup is taxpayer money but it boggles me why the “common share” question is just an easy decision (see second to last paragraph below). The shares will either be preferred or common, right? This money goes to shareholders.

ARRA is, as most bills are, a tangle and weave of complicated relationships and references to places in the world that are as obscure as the moon’s surface, written in the language of “WLLEBI” (what looks like English but isn’t). In addition, it’s a little scary because if it has veracity then we are in a pretty doomed state to start (what gets lost in political arguments). What the bill appears to do is lay the ground work for more to come and provides a path way for making things move more efficiently or, probably better, at least move. It appears to argue that hefty infrastructure dumps can’t happen until some sort of “new communication and information infrastructure” is in place. Maybe I’m incorrect, but this is how the bill reads. In addition to pumping money into items I have no clue how to understand, the monster reads as lots of thumbs in the dike and as a floor plan.

The politics that surrounds the bill is naked, however. Some are scripting for how, in a few years, they can claim that they fixed their own problems despite the legislation, while using most of its funds; others are arguing that future generations will pay for HR1, which is false, as the future has already lost trillions in “valuations.” Above, money will flow to Citigroup but not to what matters: actual investment.

I’m going to take a practical position and try to help as I’ve leapt to conclusion before about how Obama’s mind works and learned better.

And the cranky economics talk show hosts: that’s all about rating boosts. Not good.

On Dreams

I had an odd dream the other night. So, I wrote a story about it:

In a dream, a man lost his son. The son wouldn’t stop committing crimes. He wouldn’t stay in his room, no matter how much the man yelled for this. The son kept stealing the policeman’s handcuff key, pickpocketing wallets. He threatened the world with strange little fists and darted through rooms with a knife.

Outside, an asteroid, trailing great curls of smoke, arced down from a quiet sky, turned away the earth, and raced back into the atmosphere, the desperate cities below glowing orange.

The man woke up weeping, but he didn’t know why. He’d never lost his son in the waking world. In the waking world, his son was intelligent, thoughtful, well-mannered, somewhat clumsy in roomfulls of furniture, and his smile taught the man the mysteries of love.

“Why did I wake up crying?” the man asked his wife, but she didn’t know. In Argentina, he asked a man selling hotdogs on the street and the man gave him a hotdog with onions and peppers. In China they said we know less about dreams than we do about children but that asteroids are stones lurking among an ambience of mindless potency.

When he got home, the man found his son grown, mowing the lawn, grinning in the sun. The man’s knees throbbed and his face hurt from the winds of the sea. He raised a hand and waved to his son, surprised at how green the trees hung, how the smell of grass migrated across the drive in gusts. His son raised a hand back, and he aimed the mower at a patch of ground grown wild. Inside, the man kissed his wife. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, peeled off his worn clothes, and lay down and went to sleep.

Tunxis Poets

Jackie Majerus of the Bristol Press has a write-up on our excellent poet, Sara Nichols:

A Tunxis Community College student, Sarah Nichols, will be among the young poets from Yale, Trinity College, Wesleyan and other Connecticut colleges selected to showcase their work throughout the state.

Nominated by Tunxis English Professor Sally Terrell, Nichols was named one of five Connecticut student poets, a group that is part of the Connecticut Poetry Circuit. She’s the only community college student selected to take part in the college tour this year and the first ever from Tunxis.

We’re proud of Ms. Nichols, who has a fresh professionalism about her. Here’s Sara on her work:

Nichols said her poems are often focused on art and her interaction with it. She wrote one work about her reaction to the film, “No Country for Old Men.”

“It’s intended to be blackly humorous,” Nichols said.

Others, she said, are highly personal and are drawn from her own experiences.

One of those is about electro-convulsive therapy, often referred to as shock treatment, something she first had at age 18.

“I’ve gone through it many times since,” Nichols said, as treatment for depression. “Fundamentally it changed me. It changed my life. Writing it down, trying to make sense out of it in poetry, maybe it’s a way of putting it away.”

I’ve read the mentioned poem on “No Country for Old Men.” I say, go Sara! This Poetry Circuit business has been a real thrill.