Tag: teaching

"node among other nodes…"

“In a world of constant change, if you don’t feel comfortable tinkering you are going to feel an amazing state of anxiety.”

John Seely Brown

 

I like that quote quite a lot, and especially like the video it came from:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/49645115[/vimeo]

I posted this video to the site for a course I’m teaching this term, and we watched it on the first day. I had run across it via the DML Facebook flow as I was prepping for class and was struck by how much Seely Brown’s narration about education today meshed with the way I approach teaching, learning, research, and just about everything else I do in my world. Running into this video was a nice, poetic way to kick off the academic year for me as it reminded me why I do what I do. It also reminded me how I do what I do (to some extent)…All of this reminding reminded me that I had been up to a lot since the spring term (2012), but had not posted much here. On to a round-up…

Toward the end of spring, I helped install a display at the Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the decathlon as an event in the modern Olympics. This celebration coincided—surprise, surprise—with the 2012 Track and Field Trials, and my primary responsibility was to coordinate or curate materials that visually narrated the past ten decades of U.S. Olympic decathletes. Much of the material came from the collection of Dr. Frank Zarnowski. He loves the decathlon (verges on an understatement…), and was able to loan us a bunch of fantastic stuff. Along with two graduate students, I worked on sourcing historical images, coordinating production, and hanging the show. It was all quite successful and I got to work with great people. Here is an image from install day (on Flickr, where you can find a set with more documentation):

 

In early June, I traveled to Montreal in order to participate in the 2012 McGill/ICASP colloquium. “ICASP” stands for Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice, which is a large-scale nationally-funded research project in Canada. The 2012 colloquium focused on the intersections of improvisation, technology, and critical theory about the body, under the title, “Skin-Surface-Circuit.” I was lucky enough to co-present with my colleague and good friend, Dr. Kevin Patton (artist site here, professional site here), and we talked about improvisation, boutique guitar pedal circuits, ethics, and business models. It all worked out quite well, and we received some great comments and feedback. Here is the Prezi we used (though it might not make much sense without us talking over/around it):

 

Skin: Surface: Circuit 2012 on Prezi

One of the coolest things I encountered during the ICASP symposium was the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments project, which is housed in the Deep Listening Institute. We all participated in a demo of the tools/software at a school focused on other-abled kids, and it was somewhat transformative to be part of that effort. I highly recommend going to the AUMI site and checking out the materials, but if you don’t I’ll just say that the software takes advantage of various digital technologies and available computer equipment in order to make “music” and “instruments” more widely accessible for people of all ages and abilities.

For a month I was out of the country with my family, traveling to Dakar, Senegal and then on to an area in the French part of the Swiss Alps. This was mostly fun, though I did a bit of work-related stuff by meeting scholars and artists in Dakar. The art scenes around Dakar were lively (long tradition of that since Senghor), and I’ve put together a small Flickr set documenting our travels. Here’s a sample image from the artists’ colony on Goree island, and clicking it should take you to the set:

Finally, in September I traveled to Minneapolis for the 2012 NAMAC conference. It was a phenomenal meeting, and I learned so much about media arts and culture in the U.S. that I’m still digesting it. The official conference blog does a great job of capturing all that was going on, and I’ll try to post more once I gather all my bits of paper and ephemera together. I had been asked to chair a panel on mobile media and creative place-making, so will focus a (near) future post here on that panel.

Crowdsourcing (part of) a syllabus…

 

Diversidad etnica
Image via Wikipedia

I’ll be teaching a new course this coming spring term (2012) on digital ethnography (with a likely, but somewhat bland, title of Digital Ethnography). As a methods course preceding the establishment of a new media & culture graduate certificate, I’m thinking it iwill attend to at least two areas under the “digital ethnography” heading: doing ethnographic work using digital tools, and doing ethnographic work in the digital domain.

Barring a few reading options, this is as far as I’ve gotten in the planning. I am seeking comments and input from students (potential or otherwise) about what else the course might take on. So, please post comments here with suggested readings, methodological issues, tools you are curious about (or have used)—in short, anything that you’d love to see in a class of this sort. In that I’m imagining this class to be a collaborative experiment in general, having at least part of the syllabus co-authored/crowdsourced is fine first step in my mind. And I’ll certainly credit any/all contributions that I end up using!

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DML 2011 digest…

I was recently at the 2nd annual Digital Media & Learning meetings, held this year in Long Beach, CA. Sponsored/organized again by Digital Media and Learning Research Hub @ University of California, this year’s meetings extended many of the themes, conversations, debates, and initiatives that emerged at last year’s event in La Jolla, CA. For extensive info on the 2011 meeting, go here; in this post, I’m just setting out to highlight and digest some of the fantastic things I encountered.

The Twitter backchannel was active again this year (#dml2011), and led me to a host of resources: websites, projects, conversations, people, and places. One of the coolest—and this should happen at every conference with parallel sessions—is a set of collaborative & public notes put up on Google Docs by conference attendees. Check it out for a wide range of perspectives and reports on the various sessions (plus, I’m certain it will continue to grow as people add to it…). You can also peruse the online archive of all the twittering/backchannel communication going on throughout the conference here (make sure the “view” limit is pretty high…it should already be set to “10,000,” though there weren’t that many tweets).

One of the more exciting sessions I attended was called the “Ignite Talks,” wherein each participant had under ten minutes to give a brief talk and generate some conversation/thinking. I heard some phenomenally engaging presentations on “grading” via “badges;” using YouTube in a middle school English class to explore representations of race, class, and place through “gangster” adaptations of Hamlet; work with Asperger’s syndrome youth in Second Life; and the ways that parents can/should encourage techon adept/adapted living in a balanced way. And that’s just a sampling of what presenters sprung during the first Ignite session!

I also attended two fantastic workshops. One was called “Thinking through Code: DIY data-mining and the politics of off-topic forums,” and focused on tools for ‘scraping’ data in an ethnographically-oriented manner when doing research with online communities. In lieu of a hand-out, the organizers created a “living” document gathering resources and tips; you can access it here.

Another amazing workshop, sponsored and facilitated by Mozilla, featured plenty of hands-on work with some really great tools. Called, “ Hacking as Learning: A slice of the Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival,” the session was basically four concurrent miniworkshops in tinkering, hacking, and playing with emergent tools. One group waded into the realm of Hackasaurus, and learned about/through the often misunderstood realm of web hacking. Another group learned how to “write” with satellites, using a piece of open-source software that allows one to generate text with satellite images (I didn’t catch the name, but check the Google doc collaborative notes linked above…). A third group examined the ‘hacking’ of established/traditional notions of grading-as-assessment strategy in formal education, and proposed some great ideas for reimagining how teachers might think about evaluating student work in the current (and future) cultural environment. Finally, the group I attached myself to worked with Mozilla’s “Web.Made.Movies” project, an emerging platform for creating media-rich or transmedia web-based video content using the HTML5 standards. The authoring tool is called “Butter” (which you can find here), and it is basically a graphical front-end for the Popocorn.js programming environment. If you are adventurous and JavaScript-literate, give it a shot—otherwise, explore Butter (still very much in alpha), which was quite intuitive and fun. Essentially, it allows a user to use JavaScript to call out web-enabled artifacts such as Google Maps, Wikipedia entries, Twitter searches, or Flickr images at specific points in a video timeline. A super-cool idea, and one with many potential applications within and beyond educational settings.

Many more things stood out (or jumped out) during this conference, especially in the “science fair” exhibition space featuring winners of last year’s DML/HASTAC funding competition. Some examples (follow the links for more info than I could provide…):

Finally, kudos to AAD 2nd year grad students Alyssa Fisher and Arielle Sherman for winning two volunteer spots at the conference in a highly competitive environment (30 applications/8 volunteer positions = AAD win!)…

All around wonderful conference, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s in San Francisco!

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@ ELI conference in Washington D.C.

So I’m at the annual national meeting for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) meeting with Doug Blandy this week. You can follow the meetings via Twitter with the hashtag: #eli2011. Here is a Twitter search widget running a loop of current tweets:

Media Management Praxis course blog

I’ve started setting up the course blog through which I’ll run the Media Management Praxis course this winter term (2010). The blog can be found here. Please feel free to poke around in the blog, but I’ll warn you now that it is not fully populated. I’ll get more up as we move toward the beginning of the term, especially with regards to content related to the first few weeks of the class. For those of you enrolled in the course, be aware that there are some readings to do for the first meeting connected to our guest for that day, Richard Herskowitz. As of right now, I’ve set up a password-protected page for all readings (to maintain ‘fair use’ on copyrighted materials), but I’ll get a post up with links to the readings Richard has recommeded since they are all online articles anyway.

Ten short weeks…

Just wrapping up teaching the first blog-based course I’ve done: Perspectives in Media Management. This was a “special problems” course that I offered to second-year AAD students who had expressed interest in media management, but would not be able to take courses with me this year because of my reduced teaching schedule. The new WPMU ePort platform provided a dynamic and flexible means for me to teach this ‘course’ without using a classroom, and, as an experiment I believe it was quite successful. I should note that there were six students involved in this experiment, but I think it will scale nicely next term to my other classes…

We had one physical meeting all term (in week 8), and the discussion wove back and forth between the ‘content’ of the course (case studies on issues in media management posted by each student) and the ‘frame’ of the course (the blog platform). The students’ verbal feedback during that meeting mirrored my excitement over how the course had gone, and has pushed me to reflect a bit more on using the blog format in this manner. I’ve asked them to post their own reflections on the course blog, but here are some of my thoughts intertwined with paraphrasing of the things we talked about/learned during the term:

1. The ‘frame’ of the blog invited a collaborative effort in the course that most of us hadn’t experienced previously. Many students noted that they felt involved in the flow of the course, and indicated that this was different than simply being enrolled and doing the work. Comparisons to the course management system (CMS) at UO—Blackboard—emerged at one point, and almost to a person they felt that this course would not have worked out in the same way within the toolkit offered by Blackboard (primarily the Discussion Board).

2. I felt that this collaborative dynamic gave the students ‘ownership’ in the course, and that the structure of the blog afforded such an investment. There are two qualifications I need to provide here, as I do not want to seem like I’m uncritically presenting this course as an absolute success that signals the direction everyone should go. First, I gave each student the role of “author” on the course blog—this means they could post directly to the blog when doing the main assignment (case study), and so had control over the flow and formatting of the content. Second, this was a self-selected group of students that all shared interests in ‘media management’ as an area of inquiry (and, as mentioned above, it was a small group!). I imagine that if I looked more closely at this aspect I’d be able to come up with a more precise analysis, but I’ll just say that there were likely qualitative differences between this group and the more standard ‘group’ that emerges as students enroll in a regularly-offered course. That is, this course emerged in part out of a collaborative process (students inquiries into courses to take with me preceded it), so their investment or ‘ownership’ of it was there from the beginning.

3. The format of the main assignment—case study posted by one student directly to blog, comments offered by others in course—enabled a set of conversations to emerge within and across case studies. Once the comments started, the authors of the case study post could jump in and respond to particular points or questions, allowing for observable shifts in thought or analysis. Furthermore, given the ‘archiving’ that happens on the blog, it is possible to easily go back and comb through previous posts/comments in order to trace emergent themes across all assignments. Coupled with the tagging/categorizing capabilities of WPMU, which enable an instantaneous and somewhat customizable reorganizing of the blog’s content, the archiving allows for on-the-fly remixing of course content in the moment. What I think (and hope) this might push educators and students toward is the kind of synthetic and critical thinking that is an essential aspect of higher education; getting people to think past the reading/assignment/question in front of them and back to the material that came last week or last class meeting (not to mention that which is yet to come!) has often been something I get hung up on in teaching. I’ll be looking forward to finding ways to make the blog ‘frame’ part of this synthetic thinking process…

I’m certain that the reflection process will be ongoing, especially as I move deeper into prepping courses for next term. While both of these will be the standard in-person affair, I’m hoping that relying extensively on the blog to deliver content and extend classroom discussions will be successful in the same ways this term’s experiment was. At any rate, please do visit the Perspectives in Media Management blog to check in on what the students did and leave some comments on their case studies—almost all of them drew on materials related to their master’s research projects and planned on using the blog throughout the next two terms as means for publicly seeking feedback on research-related issues.