A stage set for new-media composing

In this post I review and distill the content of the first two units-of-study in the spring 2013 version of the Digital Media for the Artist (DMA) course.

 The first two units-of-study --one on Working online, and another on the Basics of new-media composing-- together set the stage for later developments in the course, and for this reason it makes sense to put them in the same frame, and reflect on them in a single post.

The course design is unfolding well, so this post is mainly a recounting of the process and main points, although I also make note of new developments in the realm of staffing (the organization now includes a great cadre of Facebook group managers and this is making an appreciable difference in the way the course is playing out).

The text of this post is an edited pastiche of paragraphs drawn from overviews, assignments, and so forth, collected and unified herein. And, again, the text summarizes and highlights just the first two units and course goals. There are three remaining units and goals remaining, all of which build on the first two.

At its core, the DMA course is an opportunity for participants to develop intellectual, creative, procedural, and technical skills. To this end it involves working with principles and methods (rather than long-form content), in an active-learning framework of conversation, composition, and substantive play.

Two foundational methods are introduced in the first two units. One is the learning-cycle --which involves a phasic, rhythmic structure of Gathering, Creating, and Reflecting. The other is the new-media composing algorithm --which involves selecting, combining, recombining, and remixing Contexts, Principles, Genres, Tools, and Processes in the context of self-selected themes and topics. If students learn how to use these methods, they in effect learn the needed knowledge and skills.


Young/emerging artists need new-media knowledge and skills

The DMA course is a direct, structured, formal response to the essential question "What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?" As the instructional architect for the project, my job is to build a learning environment or ecology that is responsive to the question, and in some sense 'answers' it structurally. Once the structure is in place, my role shifts to project manager.

New-media is framed initially as "the new reading and writing." In this regard it is presented as the new-normal for everyone. For young, emerging creatives the bar is simply a bit higher. The proposition is that young creatives need to be able to work well online in a practical sense (which again applies to almost everyone these days in any field) and they also need to have a good handle on how to work the creative side of new-media (which applies mostly to art-minded folks who work in artistic fields).

Part of the rationale for the course is that many young/emerging artists have grown up using the internet mainly as consumers of new-media content, and now need to become fluent producers or composers of new-media content as well. In other words, it is the composing regime that warrants the formal structure of a course. The passive reception role --and even many aspects of the combining of information and perspectives into knowledge-- can more or less be taken for granted in the current Web 2.0 and beyond conditions. Composing is more specialized, though, and is therefore pulled-out of the more general matrix of 'online life' for closer, formal study.

Len Masterman's schema of media education and awareness provides a resonant context for this aspect of the course. Masterman's framework allows us to locate ourselves in an empowerment phase of media, which is the culmination of earlier inoculation, popular-arts, and investigative phases. In the empowerment phase it not enough to manage our screen-time (inoculation), choose content wisely (popular arts), and know when and how we are being manipulated (investigative) --although all of these remain important. We must also know how to compose and share our own content (empowerment). And, again, in the case of young/emerging artists the content-composing requirement may be a bit higher and more specific.


Young/emerging artists need to know how to work online

The first structured response to the above essential question --"What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?"-- is this: young/emerging artists need to know how to actively and effectively work online. Given that the internet is a conceptual + physical environment rolled into one (more will be said about this ontology later) knowledge and metaphors are as important as skills and software tools.

The approach to conceptual understanding begins with the simple observation that the internet is BIG, and seemingly chaotic. It is BIG in the obvious sense that it envelops and interconnects the entire planet, and it is also BIG in the sense that it literally represents the introduction of a new ontological category into Western culture (a category of things which intrinsically combine or exist in-between conceptual and physical). Westerners are perhaps somewhat accustomed to seeing such phenomena at the margins or edges of life, but with the advent of new-media and the internet 'tweeners' of more than one type are taking center stage!

Some of this BIGNESS and chaos associated with life has found expression before:

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing, confusion.”  

--William James, 1890

But the blooming, buzzing, confusion of life is now multiplied times-two by the internet. So it's not just plain big (a global network) it is also exponentially big. It is indeed the case that life has always been complex, as William James noted, but it has never before been exponentially complex. What we have now is complexity on complexity, complexity raised to a higher power.

The premise in this is that the internet largely and literally mirrors life itself, and --again in a very lifelike way-- the internet is also, then, precisely what we make it. The mirroring adds an inner loop in which we are implicated. So, conceptually, the internet is presented as large-scale and exponentially-complex. This begins to set the stage for working effectively and creatively online. Complex environments require complex interventions and creative refashioning of scale and organizing metaphors. This provides initial guidance.

Beyond this general and general point, though, the DMA course proposes quite a few things that young creatives can do to render the scale of the internet into workable proportions, and thereby shape its exponential complexity in support of practical and creative work.


Working online means working with chaos

I guess the general point here is that of 'working with' rather than 'controlling' the internet is a reasonable first step. Working-with is defined as becoming skilled in making the following sorts of substantive simplifications.

1. Get your attitude on
Like everything else, the process of making the internet into a workable workplace starts with attitude, so we need to check out attitudes out. The best way I know to do this is to relay a set of attitudinal orientations to the internet laid out by a stalwart media studies dude, Len Masterman (pictured on the right). Find below Masterman' four options (which BTW he relates to four sequential, historical phases in media studies). Masterman's options can serve as the raw materials from which to build an attitude that will serve you well in working online:

Option one
We can construct an attitude based limiting our exposure. Keep the exponential mess at bay! Masterman posits this and refers to it as the "inoculation" approach or phase. Note in this context that media studies often starts with the TV era, but as mentioned previously some in ancient Greece regarded writing as a toxic/offensive medium, so the historical context for 'inoculation-based' attitudes can be expanded meaningfully back further in time. (This makes me think we might have some fun doing some faux product-design for lines of digital-screen products, in squeeze-tube and/or spray-application forms :) I'm not knocking this approach, though. I pester my own sons to be aware of the need to learn how to pull themselves away from the almost magnetic attraction of screen-world. Some measure of inoculation may be part of the attitude you build for yourself.

Option two
We can build an attitude based on the development of good/smart content selection choices, and thereby manage the chaotic mess of it all without having to renounce or wall ourselves off or limit exposure to the internet. Masterman documents this strategy as well, and refers to it as a "popular arts" approach in which we select rather than reject-all. Historically this ties to the era when people first began to realize it was possible to create good content on TV --the era of PBS, Sesame Street, etc.-- and possible also to make good choices about what to watch. Spending hours online doing research is not the same as spending hours just kind of goofing off. A "popular arts" element in attitude construction adds a qualitative, selective dimension.

Option three
We can create an attitude based on the study of how media systems work, how chaotic/complex systems work, how profusion and confusion work, how commercial interests may seek to use the chaos and confusion of the internet to their benefit rather than ours, etc. Through studying these types of things we can gain clues as to how to make the chaos of the internet work for us, rather than for someone else. We can sort of fight fire with fire in this way, or fight marketing research with other types of research.  Masterman labels this an "investigative" attitude or approach. It is tied to an era in which people began to actively explore issues of media bias, stereotyping, media ownership patterns, etc. For our purposes, we can build some measure of the "investigative" ethos and methodology into our quest to make the internet into a workable workplace.

Option four
We can adopt an attitude of assertive empowerment, based on becoming media-literate --in other words able to "read" and "write" in a variety of media including but not limited to text, and capable of producing and publishing media content in addition to consuming media content. This attitude would imply adding our own hand-built finishing touches, building our own 'house' on the internet, and in that way literally making it into the kind of workplace we would like it to be. Masterman would refer to this as the "empowerment" attitude or approach to the internet.

The above attitude-construction materials are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined, recombined, mixed and matched. The important thing here is that you reflect on the above options or building materials, and complete your own attitude-building process as part of the larger project of making the internet into a workable workplace for you.

2. Find and use resonant organizing metaphors 

Marcos Novak's poetic notion of the datasphere as 'liquid architecture' and Roy Pea's notion of 'distributed cognition' are both apt. The internet is often characterized as a relentlessly distributed (as opposed to centralized or hierarchical) environment, and distributed cognition names the way that intelligence is inherent in the mix. So distributed cognition in a way extends the reality of software (which is one part idea, one part physical manifestation rolled into a unity) to everything. Tables are seen as containing a lot of smarts, a lot of 'idea.' A lot of thinking goes into making a table, and the thinking that goes in stays in, then reverberates in use. So a table can be seen as a form of very rudimentary software. It has the same nature or ontology. Pencils or pens are very smart, not as smart as a smart phone, but still very smart, and then of course computers, software, and the internet are incredibly smart.

The concept of distributed cognition was then used to introduce the proposition that new-media has in effect introduced a new ontological category into Western culture, a category of in-betweenness. And in this context we also explored the reflexive point that we don't learn of  this new ontology via having it taught to us, but rather as a by-product of living it in the form of software. The naming of it comes after. And we also explored the reflexive point that the internet is inevitably what we make it. Our interpretation of it --our own attitude and so forth-- is part of what we see when we look at it.

A third and very basic metaphor is that of the network (rather than the fortress or centralized/hierarchical form). Very often complexity can be well-represented as a network, which allows the type of meaningful, non-reductive simplification we are after.  

3. Use the natural artist's response: compose! 

Artists have always been involved in responding to and creating representations of BIG things in order to make them intelligible, so art has a big role in helping society understand the internet and new-media. The internet is an arena that begs for artistic help, and the arts have always been about creating representations that are packed with intellect, creativity, beauty, questions, insights, and answers that exist only in the overall or whole effect of a work itself. So the arts may be well-suited in and of themselves to making the internet understandable and workable. 

4. Make models or microcosms

Architects and other designers usually build models before they start building actual buildings, and it is creatively very fun as well. Such modeling is a great way to render BIG and complex things workable.

5. Make drawings or visual representations 

Like models or microcosms, graphic representations --even very simple ones-- can be very helpful in representing complex systems in simple yet meaningful terms. This is the basis of data-visualization, but simple drawings are often just as useful as complicated computer-generated ones. Network diagrams/drawings are particularly useful because these are keyed to the distributed nature of the internet and new-media. BTW holistic or 'global' graphic representation is oddly one of the things that computers are not entirely good at. Whiteboards and blackboards, and even laying or splaying materials out on a table or floor, is cognitively better if the idea is to get 'the big picture.'

6. Learn about systems-theory and complexity/chaos-theory 

These theory-domains open up onto intellectual/linguistic strategies for understanding BIG things. These are branches of science devoted specifically to the study of large dynamic systems. If we frame the internet as a complex system, we can then productively note patterns, currents, trends, and instances of "emergent order" (which is a key concept in complexity/chaos theory). Pattern-recognition is a hugely important intellectual skill in the internet era, and educating yourself on systems theory and chaos/complexity theory will give you some tools with which to develop your pattern-recognition skills.

7. Identify and use themes/principles and methods 

This is an 'architectural' or 'architectonic' approach to rendering BIG things usable. It is featured in the design of DMA, along with the other obvious approach of composing. When it comes to liberal arts content, extracting and using principles and methods creatively --rather than acquiring and re-stating long-form content-- is better keyed to the needs of young/emerging artists. From there, composers need to work with principles and methodologies, not long-form content. It's as simple as that. There is nothing wrong with long-form content. It's just rarely not work very well for composers. The idea is to have distilled bits of reality to PLAY-- to arrange and rearrange, to align and distort, to mix and remix, and all the rest. Sometimes this requires long-form research and study, but again this is for the purpose of mastering principles to work with. It is for this reason that this proto-software website on new-media composing for DMA features a fairly extensive list of distilled principles, processes, genres, and tools to mix, match, and remix.

8. Know what the internet and new-media are made of in a scientific sense 

It is hugely important to know --as we already do in some ways via Novak's poetic metaphor of "liquid architecture"-- the nature or ontology of the internet. Many of the potentials (and potential pitfalls) of the internet workplace are directly related to it being, at bottom, made of electricity (which also 'flows' and which also can be described as a 'current'). As such the internet is as fundamentally mysterious as electricity is. Electricity functions as a connection-and-communications system --it does this in our own central nervous systems, and also in the external electrical grid which now includes internet. For example, if we understand this deeply, issues around privacy are much easier to understand. Electricity knows no bounds really, so we should expect a bit of a struggle to make boundaries in a world where new-media (and hence electricity) is everywhere.

9. Re-frame the internet in collective/species terms 

We often see the internet in individualistic terms --i.e., what does it mean to ME? How do I use it? etc. But some observers, including Michio Kaku and Jeremy Rifkin, are placing it instead in the context of what it means to humans as a species.

10. Make the creativity connection 

Think about the connections between electrical current or flow, and creativity. Is it pure coincidence that great performances are sometimes described as 'electric'? Or, looked at in the reverse direction, can it be pure coincidence that creativity is often characterized as a 'flow' state --for example by noted creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Might this have a species-level significance as well? We will explore this in the tasks as well.

11. Create an online studio/workplace 

This is a concrete example of combining the 'architectural' and 'compositional' impulses to meaningfully simplify the BIGNESS of the internet and new-media. Having a place of one's own on the internet is extremely important in simplifying it into context in which we can work productively. Note that 'one's own place' will much more likely have a distributed, networked flavor, again much like DMA does: recall that part of the DMA workplace is a website, part of it is Facebook, part of it is Blackboard, part of it is blog-world. This structure is intentional.

12. Get down with Culturomics 

This involves finding and learning how to use tools for managing BIGNESS --in particular managing "big data" much in the same way that we might use calculators to help us manage big numbers. Text analyzers are one example of this kind of tool.

13. Think environmental 

This is a very productive line to pursue in regard to constructing online workplaces. The best work currently being done in education IMO is by folks like David Perkins, Steve Benford, and Lois Hetland. All of them are analyzing education in terms of its environmental aptness to play an active role in the instructional process. They are my touchstone people for my 'infrastructional' approach. Hetland focuses on the characteristics of studio environments. Perkins focuses on the need for online workplaces to have certain features. Here's a quick quote: "Any learning environment can be parsed into five facets. These five facets are information banks, symbol pads, construction kits, 'phenomenaria' and task managers." Cool stuff (note that 'teachers' are replaced by 'task managers' for example). And Benford focuses on the characteristics that make f2f workplaces good, and then creates software that enables such things to take place online. For example he notes that having "peripheral awareness" of who else is online in the workplace is very important. Benford's field is Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) --which is again insightfully and refreshingly different from talking about 'online education.'

14. Think public 

In regard to organizing the internet as a workplace, it can again be compared to life itself. It is relentlessly, unavoidably, and yes, sometimes vexingly public. BUT, knowing this, we can adopt the same types of strategies we use in everyday life to balance public and private. These matters are rarely simple, but at least we have practice in everyday life that we can transfer to how we frame and work on the internet.

All of the above have potential to help us befriend the BIG chaotic beast. They include yet go beyond mere description by articulating actual methods for bringing order to chaos without reducing the richness of its creative potentials or its deep, broad, and intuitive significance as a mirror of life itself.

All of the above are offered in response to the essential question,"What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?" as part of the first structured response to the question: young/emerging artists need to know how to actively and effectively work online.

Working online ends up involving a complex combination of knowledge and skills, much as life itself does. In the DMA course itself,  all of the above strategies are employed in one way or another. For obvious reasons the course emphasizes some of them (composing for example) more than others, but they are all present and accounted for.

Discussion questions included in the above first unit-of-study include the following:  When you hear the words 'internet' or 'digital/new-media' what comes to mind for you? You can start with likes and/or dislikes, but beyond that, what metaphors do you use to describe it? What is the current or actual state of your unintentional web-presence? Do you feel as if you need to hire reputation.com to help you manage things or climb out of the hole you dug for yourself in high school?? :) Do you feel as if the grown-ups are growing up around issues of online pictures and so forth, calling off the dogs so to speak, doing less over-reacting? What would the ideal state of your unintentional web-presence be? What is the current or actual state of your intentional web-presence? Do you already have a website, blog, both, other, etc.? What would the ideal state of your intentional web-presence be? Have you asked anyone in your field about these matters? Are you assuming you need a professional website without doing your research?


Young/emerging artists need to be new-media composers 

The second structured response the DMA course offers to the question,"What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?" is that they need to know how to compose content for practical and creative purposes in a fully empowered fashion.

This unit-of-study by learning begins by learning and working with a flexible composing methodology that involves selecting, combining, and recombining contexts, principles, genres, tools, processes, and exemplars --with the selections and combinations keyed to self-selected themes and topics.

The term composition is defined generally, and literally, to mean 'putting together' and is intentionally meant to apply to any work --from music to writing to dance to drama to film to new-media to cooking-- that is arranged or put together using conscious thought (and arguably also using 'unconscious' thought as well if we factor in the creative process).

Composing is also closely allied with the constant activity of combining and recombining sensory experiences and reflections into concepts and/or ideas. We typically call this type of physiologially-based composing perception. It also closely enjoins the psychologically-based composing that happens in representation and framing. All of these are included in the general intro to composing.

Artistic composition is mainly unique in its association with, or foregrounding of, the creative process. This does not mean, though, that all artistic work always foregrounds the creative process (artistic composing can sometimes be much more formulaic or practical than creative). Nor does it mean that the best artistic compositions are purely creative. The best ones may likely also enjoin intellectual, spiritual, and/or scientific processes or ways-of-knowing.

So it's safe to say that composition is a complex whole --and this of course renders it very useful for making sense of other complex wholes including 21st century living (the complexity-on-complexity we articulated in our first unit-of-study). Composing can front-load or foreground process, ideation, genres, or tools. It can front-load creativity, spirituality, intellect, or science. It can front-load rhetorical appeals to emotion, reason, and/or ethos. The whole house is in this house, so it is able to serve as a fitting-scaled methodological mirror.

The 'grammar' and 'vocabulary' of composition varies from one art arena to the next. For example, my training in painting and drawing familiarized me with a particular framework for thinking and talking about composition. It is a framework that features concepts like foreground/mid-ground/background, shallow/flat or deep/perspectival pictorial space, directionality (diagonals for active, horizontals for calm, verticals for stability), warm vs. cool color, linear vs. curvilinear, visual texture, scale variation, line-quality vs. line-description, abstract vs. realistic depiction, and so forth. Basically this amounts to a particular compositional vocabulary and grammar.

Dance, design, drama, film, and music all have unique compositional grammars and vocabularies that are all, nonetheless, somewhat similar. One of the things I love about UNCSA is that is provides a wonderful opportunity to compare different artistic compositional frameworks --ones derived from music, dance, drama, film, and of course new-media. What are the universal grammatical elements common to all? We look at the commonalities as well as the differences.

Our first set of new-media compositions were on the topic or theme of composition itself (which already enjoins the new-media principle of reflexivity), and involved various forms of comparing and relating 'everyday' composing with 'artistic' composing. We used the flexible methodology described above, with the proviso that there were pre-selections made in order to enable guided practice given these were our first works. As we move through the term the compositions become progressively more complex,  involving less pre-selects, less guidance, and more autonomy in operating and morphing the composing methodology.

As noted above, in the exponential conditions of LIFE+INTERNET, everything gets doubled, raised to its own higher power. 'Context' is elevated to 'text,' for example. Rather than just creating artworks, artists now often create genres.  Remixers don't work with traditionally-defined individual notes, they work with swatches, chunks, or samples that serve as their 'notes'' and so on. Everything gets ramped-up to a higher level, and that is where the understanding needs to go, too.

So our first compositions included as a pre-select the new-media principle of 'simultaneity' in order for us to dive into 'doubling' right from the get-go in a practical/experiential fashion. This echoes the conceptual point that it is not that we are composing our perceptions one minute, and then composing artwork at another, it's both at the same time. This is the kind of magic we are after. That's the magic that is key to unlocking the specific creative potentials of the new-media context. It's not that everyone will turn the key, or even want to, but the education of young/emerging artists requires that they all at least know where the key is if they want to pick it up at some point in their careers.

Maybe contemporary artists have a role to play in raising awareness about the need to ramp-up our understanding to a higher, exponential power. Here's what the brightest light in media studies, Marshall McLuhan, said about this --way back in 1964 in his classic book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man...

“The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments by a generation and more has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist "the antennae of the race." Art as radar acts as "an early alarm system," as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time in order to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as merely a form of self-expression. If art is an "early warning system," to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to the study of media but to the development of media controls.” 

--Marshall McLuhan, 1964

But isn't this how art has always worked?  Arguably, the arts have always been about creating meaningful complex microcosms, packed with intellect, creativity, thought, emotions, interactions, movement, stasis, beauty, blight, questions, insights, and answers that might exist only in the synergy of "whole effects" produced by the interactions of all of the above. The internet may in this way be functioning only as a gigantic megaphone, blasting out the message that it is time for artists to get going, time to step up and loom large on the new-world and new-media stage. It's for this reason I delight in working with young/emerging artists re: the creative potentials of new-media. If they understand it well, they are simultaneously understanding the contemporary world well, and --as artists-- they may then be in a key position to help others understand as well.

A Portrait of Young

This portrait is of the internet, and the internet generation. There is so much knowledge, so much readiness, so much power, so much raw potential, so much intelligence, so much good will among the young. Why so little direction? I don't mean that in a critical sense at all. I mean why aren't colleges and universities providing more opportunities for direction?

Statistics say that there are roughly 2.6 million students enrolled in college in the U.S. A single week of let's say 20 hours of work per student yields around 5.2 million man-hours available in a SINGLE week. The world has X number of problems. We have all that smarts and the manpower. So where is the direction to understand and solve the problems? Why aren't colleges and universities doing more crowd-sourcing? More data-mining and analysis? More perspective-gathering? More real-world, problem-based learning? Might this provide some of the needed direction?

The problems besetting instructional architecture all seem to resolve to the training of the architects, not with the current group of learners. Increasingly, curricula and classes seem to me to be part of the problem, a major distraction. Why? Because I think classes and curricula need to be directed at real life issues and problems. But the current group of instructional architects/teachers (myself among them) were trained to be interior designers, trained to be masters of presenting internally-coherent and internally-consistent content, trained to be masters of pretty perhaps? Maybe we need to figure out how to orient ourselves to looking out the windows of our practices rather than in. Maybe we need to build structures that point outwards. Do I think a poetic worldview and the knowledge of literature to back it up can be part of this? Absolutely. I am not arguing for a reductionist/utilitarian concept of education. I'm just arguing that we should experiment with putting the world first, pretty much as poets do in their own work I would think.

So I am setting my portrait of young in the context of the above types of questions. It is a portrait that I see before me, painted by the young folk I have the privilege to work with. They seem to get it. They have come of age right alongside the internet and, as one of them noted, they now for the most part carry the internet in their pockets. Okay, they have questions and concerns and all that, but hey, these are in large part the things that tell me they get it, they are ready, they have come of age. But when will the grown-ups grow up? That's my question I guess. I think there is hope for us, but we need to know how to provide views that look outwards, direction to the real world, channels, currents. We still have a role to play and I'd like us to get better at it.

My worry is that when the young connect to their elders they hear recorded messages telling them that they have made a connection, but that the number they have reached is no longer in service. It is connection with no content. Why? Because they don't need the content. The internet provides that. What they don't have are conduits or pass-throughs to the real.

We provide some of these types of connections, but not enough. I worry that we still think teaching and learning are about content, rather than about real problems and real life. It's a lot of information and perspectives we all swim in. A vast ocean. A lot of liquid architecture. Do we perhaps need to build or generate some currents, ways to channel the flow to the real? Might this be how how 'liquid architecture' becomes more than a poetic metaphor for the internet?

So let's bring this all back home. There are 123 students enrolled in the Digital Media for the Artist course this term. How can I best channel the amazing amount of smarts, good will, and energy that a mere 123 young folks bring to the arena or theater (it's a small subset of the 26.2 million, but it is still a LOT of ability and energy). How can we make the most of this?

One way for us elders to grow up in tandem with the young is to help learners build or recognize currents by becoming becoming better data miners. Data-mining is clearly how the big boys (Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al) are making boatloads of money; they are sailing on the liquid data-streams they gather from us and sell to others. It's the ability to deal with vastness of scale and proportion that is now of most value, literally and figuratively. We might as well get in on the action, what say you?

So for starters we gathered responses in Facebook groups to the following prompt:

When you hear the words 'internet' or 'digital/new-media' what comes to mind for you? You can start with likes and/or dislikes, but beyond that, what metaphors do you use to describe it? What do you think of Novak's metaphor of 'liquid architecture'? What do you think about the idea of ontological in-between-ness? What concerns or worries do you have about what the internet is teaching us? What do you think it represents in human life and human development? 

Find below a small sample I selected from the responses. So, first off, note that you are getting a human-filtered dataset below. It is a particular portrait of young, in a way composed of of lines, colors, and shapes provided by the selection I made of participants' responses:

"I wish we knew when to draw the line, put down the smartphone, and just enjoy the Frappuccino before it gets all melty and gross."

"Privacy and pointlessness, I think those are the two most important problems the Internet has." 

"One of the most important benefits of the internet, besides entertainment and instant knowledge, is the more recent effects it has had on political issues. Protests and revolts have gone from the concepts on the internet to real life changes."

"I have heard lots of metaphors used in conjunction with the internet, for example; it’s like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube. Once something is out in the open, it is out; whether you wanted it out or not."

"The internet has allowed corporations to traffic in information, and when public information gets bought, it gets trimmed down by those who own it." 

"I fear that someday two people will fall in love and even get married without ever meeting face to face." 

"I think that while the internet and new media offer us the ability to see ourselves and the world in a new and transformative way, it simultaneously may be transforming what we think of as a ‘self’, for better or worse." 

"When I hear the word “internet,” I equate it to an intangible world bursting with endless information, representing the knowledge and creativity of millions of real people." 

"Until we stop the banality, originality and creativity will be mired in swamps of memes and self-pictures and vintage filters." 

"Ultimately, I believe that the internet or digital/new media is more of a blessing than a curse; people simply need to be mindful of how they use such a powerful tool."

"My problem with the Internet comes in when I think about the ways digital media could be utilized in such effective and important ways and instead how it is so often misused. I think that what a vast majority of the population uses the internet for is not to gain knowledge or learn about new ideas and cultures, but simply as a “watering hole” that we are all drawn to but that wastes our time, hacks our computers, and bombards us with continual ads and pop-ups that try to make us spend more money on things we don’t need or want." 

"The internet is both one of the greatest and worst things that has happened to my generation. While you have limitless access to information and have a constant flow of news coming at you, when used excessively I feel like it creates a disconnect between people. When I walk into a room it isn't a surprise to see more than half the room indulging in their smart phones, whether they're watching the latest movie trailer, checking their Twitter, or reading the latest news from CNN. While all of those things are very informative and can be helpful, where has the face to face conversations gone?"

"I think the internet represents our human need to connect with one another. For instance, we're always logging into social sites to see how other people are doing. The internet makes our planet a little less huge in a way, because we can so easily connect to other locations, cultures, and people far away. Maybe this is another need of ours too, to feel like the world is something that can be made less large and mysterious." 

"The internet is what you make it." 

"When I think of the Internet, and the way it's developing and evolving, it reminds of a maturing human brain. Forming new networks and connections constantly, sharing gathered information; and slowly developing a consciousness. I believe that this "Internet consciousness" is the precursor to artificial intelligence which will bring in a new era in the relationship between mankind and technology."

"While I'm not thinking of it this way, google is constantly acting as a teacher for me. It allows me to find answers to my questions, literally at my fingertips. In less than ten seconds, I learned a new word. I can take the initiative to actually get answers to my questions any time i want, and it is both convenient and beneficial to my growth."

"When I think of the internet I think of the future. I think that we can all agree that the internet has both its pro's and con's. In my opinion the pros out way the cons."

"I think the biggest things about technology/ internet is that... its potential and its opportunities and resources are only going to be as much as we want them to be."

"It's up to us as humans to use all of the information the internet gives up so easily and readily. And we have the CHOICE to look into the information given and believe it as law or pass it off as something interesting we read on the internet. The question should not be wether the internet itself is merely good or bad, rather, are human beings using the power the internet gives us to push us forward or hold us back."

"The internet is a sponge that absorbs all information that is put into it and we as viewers squeeze what we can out of it."

"There's so much information on the internet now a days, its almost impossible not to learn something."

"That's what I think new media is, simply a new canvas on which we can dance, sing, act, film, or design. New media is the art of sharing and creating new and interesting ideas that we find intriguing, thought-provoking, or informative. It is simply a new way of thinking about the arts."

"The internet in my perspective is most like a mind, it is present and can create tangible things, but it itself is no more than just a stimuli."

"The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the internet is knowledge. Now a days you can learn just about anything online. The internet has now created a generation of Do it Yourselfers, allowing us to be more independent. We may not be professionals at first, but practice does make perfect."

"The internet is the baby boy of your Aunt's being shared over Facebook, the Youtube video of the Evolution of Dance, the Google search of late night wondering; how come the stars align as they do? What is the big dipper? It is a dated Ask Jeeves, Yahoo! Answers, lesser programs such as Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. It is a Tumblr blog full to the brim of cats and fandoms of popular television shows such as BBC sensations Sherlock and Dr. Who. Bandoms are also an avid group of people who enjoy music such as Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, One Direction, and Fun."

"The internet is like the answer key for a huge final exam."

"When I think of the internet I am really thinking of power."

Okay so the above represents the results of a human-based data-mining operation. But I decided to also push on. I decided to go in search of text-analyzing tools to experiment with a machine-filtered portrait of the above collection of quotes. So I inputted all of the quotes as a single bloc of text into the text analysis program, and here are the results.

My main points? 1) instructional architects need to invest in developing the skills of data-mining and analysis, including data-visualization techniques,  2) the data-stream of DMA views on the internet is intriguing and well worth mining, and 3) I could have spent the same time today preparing a lecture on my views of the internet, but I didn't do this. I did the experiment in data-mining via text analysis instead, and this caused me to have to learn something new --which was much more interesting to me in every way possible. In particular I enjoyed reading the participants' perspectives on the internet, I enjoyed the selection process, and I enjoyed the feeling of jumping off of the rails to explore a new tool.

BTW here is a link to the free Textanalyser tool I used. http://textalyser.net/

Also, here is a link to a Wikipedia entry on Text-mining: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mining And in case you are interested, the accuracy/reliability of Wikipedia has been studied, and it compares well with the accuracy/reliability Encyclopedia Britannica.

Revisiting a talk by Andrea Lunsford on writing in the 21st century

Andrea Lunsford

Andrea Lunsford gave a keynote address several years ago --entitled The Role of Rhetoric and (New Media) Writing in 21st Century Universities--  at the NC Symposium on Teaching. Her presentation is worth revisiting for its ongoing relevance to teachers of writing at the college/university level.

Her presentation (the audio of which is linked to below) ocused 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 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!

Turning a corner, catching my reflection

For quite a while I've aspired to Eliel Saarinen's maxim: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." With several larger-than-course projects now organizing my teaching practice, I think I am finally realizing this aspiration. I'm deeply involved in program-design in my area. I'm internationalizing my practice. I'm writing two articles, one on the topic of creative planning and another on the topic of education in Facebook. So I am finally working within a next larger context. I have turned a corner.

I have also for some time thought about a point made by Stuart Brand in the documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future. His point is that if a person gets to a juncture in their professional life where they look around and notice that no one is doing exactly what they are doing, then they are doing pretty well! With regard to my own pursuit of an integrated approach to liberal arts, fine arts, and everyday life, I think I am reaching such a point of convergence. I am beginning to see my own reflection in Brand's mirror of professional progress.

A portable, billboard-style blackboard I made --mobile tech!

Appropriately enough for a media studies professor, a key last step in this convergence was the rediscovery of a particular medium --chalkboard drawing of all things. I have my eldest son Will to thank for this. He was at the library and spotted a book called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and checked it out and brought it home for me. This book makes a wonderful and solid case for the idea that in order to solve problems one needs to be able to splay things out on a single layer (use chalkboard, whiteboards, lay materials out on a floor or table, etc.) in order to 'get the big picture,' and then distill this into a fairly simple picture.

The aha moment for me in this was the realization I had been frustrated with computers on many, many occasions due to their being what I have now begun to refer to as a 'layer' rather than 'splayer' medium. Rather than seeing one's thoughts on a single surface --as in chalkboard drawing-- computers constantly drive us to work in layers. Books do the same thing for that matter. Both are layer technologies. We literally never see the big picture, and this actually impedes certain modes of thought --in particular, brainstorming and similar modes. For other things computers are of course preferable and wonderful. I'm just more aware now of the need to combine and recombine layer and splayer mediums. My most-prized item in the media studio I teach in is now my portable blackboard, which I made by pulling an unused blackboard out of a closet and making a billboard-style rolling support framework for it by repurposing a wooden desk I had previously made and was not using, and adding clamp lights. I'm tellin' ya, it's a love.

Okay, so the last point in my convergence story is that whilst working at my new chalkboard I noticed that chalk on board (a liberal arts tradition) closely resembled charcoal on paper (a fine arts tradition). So now I am reactivating the fine arts side of my professional practice via charcoal drawings, and also exploring various hybrid forms involving combinations of chalkboard-drawing+charcoal-drawing+new-media. William Kentridge is among those who pioneered such things, so one of my first experiments was to do a Kentridge-style time-lapse movie of a drawing in-the-making. See video to the left.

This all adds up to being a fun and interesting time for me. I'm also (finally) creating a personal website, so I am doing what is for me the arduous work of mining through various and sundry stashes of various and sundry artifacts --fine arts related, liberal arts related, teaching related, etc.-- and putting them in some semblance of order. More on this in a different post.

Assessing assessment

Grading is right up there with courses in terms of being a major structural stumbling block that nonetheless could be a building block in formal higher education. Wise heads seem to agree that 'assessment' is an important part of learning, but that it need not imply or employ 'grading' in the usual letter-grade sense.

One of the contemporary champions of good, well-designed, and/or authentic assessment is Alfie Kohn. In case you are not familiar with his work, here is a link to a piece he wrote called From Degrading to De-Grading. In it, he advocates for authentic assessment and does a good job of defining various forms it can take --none of which involve letter-grades, as you might imagine.

A logical conundrum that Kohn in some ways does not forthrightly address is the piece of writing linked to above is this: any system that can be set up can also be gamed. So, in setting up a new system to replace the letter-grade system, we would unavoidably be creating a new game. Most folks stop right there and throw up their hands at the futility of doing anything re: grading, so we get stasis (all talk, no action, conversation without composition, etc.). So in order to move the process forward I think we could try broadening the context a bit by thinking deeper about games:

1) Assuming there is no intrinsic motivation present for a student to learn certain subjects, a game framework provides an agreeable form of extrinsic motivation for them to meet this externally-imposed requirement. The serious-games community in educational thinking is on this path: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game 

Assessment or evaluation in this category simply means getting a good score as defined by the rules of the game. The games don't have to be computer-based. For example mastery-based learning typically makes a game of sorts out of sequenced units of readings-and-quizzes, the aim of which is to get a perfect score and thereby attain mastery re: a body of content. No letter grade needed for game-based or mastery-based learning. You either get a good score in the game or not, or in mastery-based learning you either get enough of the questions right or not (sort of like the written part of a driving test). 

2) Students at my institution, UNCSA, are arguably already playing an earnest-game (more serious than a serious game, even). The game is in the genre of "Bet-against-the-house!" and it is called "Get a day-job in the Fine Arts." The extent to which we can tie content and assignments to their success in this game is the extent to which we win by helping them win. For example in my bailiwick a requirement to create a professional e-portfolio gets no push-back because this is perceived as helping them win the larger game they are playing. If I use fine-arts exemplars of creative thinking, rather than liberal-arts exemplars, I get better traction with students at UNCSA because it helps them win the game they are playing. So I focus on fine artist exemplars like Laura Karpman, and only mention liberal arts exemplars like Walter Ong. 

So in this context we already know that students are playing a high-stakes game that they are invested in. Motivation here is ample and intrinsic. Hence no letter grading is really needed. Assigned work keyed to their earnest-game simply needs to pass muster, and if it does not then presumably the student is automatically worried. I think this is pretty much the leverage art-area professors work with, whether they have to give letter grades or not. Their fine arts teachers are in the process of engraving the students' tickets into the arena of day jobs in the fine arts. 

3) It's a big undertaking to introduce additional, larger types of games like "Having a life of the Mind" or "Living a well-rounded Life." These games are earnest as well, and are typically played by students who --unlike any of the students at UNCSA-- are engaged in serious study within the liberal arts. Introducing games, in addition to producing stressful overload and overhead costs, involves teaching students the rules of the new game(s), promoting them as more important than the one they came here to play and win, etc.

We can tell them that getting good at having a life of the mind will help them win their earnest-game in the short-run (by making them more interesting, articulate, and better at the 'soft' aspects of their art or craft), and also help them in the long run (by helping them maintain satisfaction and edge professionally, and by broadening their fall-back net in case they either don't win the earnest game they are playing, or win it but find it hollow). But these matters are at least one step removed from their intrinsic motivation, and the content is not typically presented in game or mastery-fashion. So there is little to no intrinsic motivation or time to take the earnest game of the liberal arts seriously, nor is there really much extrinsic motivation. Beyond being intellectually skilled (able to read and write in a variety of media including but not limited to text) and moderately informed of the intellectual content of their art areas, there is no need really for the BFA to include the liberal arts. So, not surprisingly, those of us operating within this motivational chasm have tended to rely on the artifice of fear-based letter-grading --even though neither students nor teachers really need or benefit from it. It is a pox on both our houses!

So...

If we want to remove letter grades we would need to remove the need for them in the currently predominant category 3 system. I think the best strategy to remove the need is a variant of a category 2 type of deal, in which we seek to do things such as: 

1. Treat each student as a person, much like they are treated in their art areas (in this way we can embed a big chunk of the Humanities in our actions rather than relying so much on our our curriculum and teaching).
2. We would/could also align our assessment practices with what is done in arts areas, which would be perceived as helping them win their game.
3. Devote more of our effort to framing what the liberal arts needs of film students are, compared to music students and so forth.  Beyond a core set of courses designed specifically to educate students about all of the arts, I'd argue that there is a need for a more defined sense of curriculum and electives based on arts area. I sense for example that that film students need to read a body of literature in the liberal arts that is quite different from what a design student needs to read, and right now it seems very hit or miss to me whether or not students get the appropriate advanced liberal arts work. And, as noted above, if the advanced electives were more closely tied to their earnest-game they might be much more easily convinced that doing the work well could be a game-changer for them. If we got this type of thing established, then the need for letter grades might be reduced or at least rendered as insignificant as I imagine it is in the arts areas.
4. Here is an article on collaborative grading (meaning that instructors collaborate to assess how each student is doing). This is an extremely overdue measure for us to take on the liberal arts side of our institutional house. We need to be assessing students, not isolated work done in isolated courses. The article is by Veronical Boix-Mansilla and is called Productive Shifts: Faculty Growth through Collaborative Assessment of Student Interdisciplinary Work.

In closing, a great example of the harmfulness of grades is IMO in Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament in which he imagines a scenario in which music was taught like math --with high-stakes grading, laborious memorization, and so forth. Obviously not many people end up wanting to do math, and grant funds flow to anyone basically who thinks they have a clue as to how to teach math better. This is a particularly relevant cautionary tale at our school because we get the benefits of how the arts are typically taught: in other words the students who come to our school are with few exceptions excited about their work. If math were taught as an art, there may be more students who would care passionately about it and hence pursue it as a major involvement. Another angle or artifact of this is that arts-oriented public schools seem to fare pretty well.  Reynolds High School in in our local area (it's in Winston-Salem NC), which gets way way more applicants for an arts-infused high school than they can admit.

Finally, a quick note of humor about a type of grading practice that one of my colleagues assures me is ancient. See video below for a 29-second introduction to this timeless form of grading! 

A volley into the valley of organized nonsense

Part of my compositional energy goes towards articulating or framing problems. This is as it should be, but I am also dead set against whining. My motto as a composer of education is "don't whine, prototype!" I am a big fan of doing the needed research then designing and running a pilot or experiment, or constructing a real-world prototype. I love conversation, but nothing is more enervating that endless talk coupled with no action. Conversation needs composition! It needs a doing component.

So in this post I am relaying a piece of research on the history of American higher education that I think will be useful in the construction of a prototype for my current work context --a context which finds me working on the liberal arts side of a BFA degree program.

The title of the article the excerpt below comes from is only somewhat more forgiving than my subject line. It is: "Brief History of American Academic Credit System: A Recipe for incoherence in Student Learning." I was busy trying to track the craziness of the BFA --marketing slogans which IMO might include "Just add the liberal arts and stir!" or "Just bolt it on to the fine arts!"-- when I happened upon this article. It sheds a different kind of light on the origins of the current plight of higher education in the U.S. as it struggles to find a new form.

For me the value of history as a problem-framing and problem-solving lens is that it conveys the clear message that structures we inherit --and which can thereby strike us as determined or natural-- were created in prior conditions by prior individuals just like us. For me this argues for the need of every generation to re-form the basic structures themselves, rather than conforming new situations and opportunities to old forms.

So this post is one of several that focus on the structural problems that seem to beset the BFA degree and trip-up efforts to reform curricula and so forth. My general pitch is that the problems run deeper than curricula, having to do more with structural, organizational features like 'courses' --and this article fits in this matrix quite well because it talks explicitly about one chapter in the history of courses.

BTW the emphasis in the article on the benefits of using a comprehensive examination (of some sort) rather than credit-hours to determine whether or not a student is awarded a degree dovetails with what is typically done in MFA degree programs in the visual arts: each student has a culminating thesis show. So, why would something like this not make
sense in the BFA degree program as well? i.e., in our case, a presentation and oral defense of a portfolio of best works?

Students would still sign up for and take classes but, as is the case in MFA programs, faculty would give mostly A's because grades and courses don't matter really. And this mirrors how students are graded in the fine arts areas of the BFA. What matters is the progress students are making in their work, as reflected in artifacts, and in presentations and defensea of these at whatever intervals make sense.

In my MFA program we had "reviews" at the end of each term which were basically mini-shows we mounted in our studios, a bit like what D&P does but more frequent and less formal. Our faculty members would basically studio-hop, and each individual's committee members would had more to say and discuss.

Moving to this type of model would mean we would work with STUDENTS, not with courses and credit hours. We could use the existing advising system to divvy up the students each of us would work with. In effect we'd all serve on the committees of x number of students.  I'm tellin' ya the stresses we feel are related to some fundamental structural problems in the way we keep trying to do things. The wackiness includes but is actually bigger than just grading.

Anyway here's the excerpt from the article I found:

At the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of 1900’s, the Carnegie unit became the basis
for granting high school diplomas and credit hours for the baccalaureate. In the late 1800’s,
Harvard’s Eliot pushed for comprehensive examinations similar to those he observed at
Oxford, the Carnegie Unit as a measure of higher school attainment, and elective
courses in the Harvard curriculum. He succeeded in the last two but not the first.

The elective system obviously works against common comprehensive
examinations but for a credit hour system. Kreplin summarized their mutual
reinforcement as follows:

The emergence of the credit-hour system apparently coincided with Charles W. Eliot’s
introduction of electives at Harvard College in 1869. Following Harvard’s lead, the notion
of electives rapidly spread both within disciplines and among institutions, and this
expansion was paralleled by the introduction of quantitative course measurements.

Dietrich Gerhard identified two phases in the spread of the system of course
credits that were stimulated by the introduction the elective system following
1870.

From now on in the growth of the credit system two phases can be distinguished: an
earlier one in the which the colleges start to measure the teaching of subject matter in
hour units, and a later one, in which the credit system is further perfected and becomes
consolidated: the value of each course both in high school and in college is now listed in
units of credits, and it is definitely stated how many units of credit are required for
receiving the respective degrees. The first phase can be dated as of the 1870’s and the
1880’s; the second as of the next two decades, around the turn of the century.

The college credit hour is based on the same rationale as the high school
Carnegie Unit. And the Carnegie Foundation, according to Gerhard, explicitly
stated:

… in the counting of the fundamental criterion was the amount of time spent on a subject,
not the results attained; if, for instance, a year’s work in plane geometry would be
covered by the way of two weekly hours, the subject should be counted as only 2/5 of a
unit.

As the credit hour became the dominant measure of student attainment, four
years became the standard requirement for the baccalaureate. Jones and Ortner
identified six influences that led to the four year standard; one of which was:
There was little trust put in final examinations, and external examinations had no tradition
in the U.S. Hence, the time spent on the college campus became a convenient
measure.

John H. Finley made a parody of the Carnegie Unit as follows:

45 minutes make an hour
5 hours make a week
36 hours make a unit
15 units make a matriculant
5 matriculant hours (for one year) make a point of count
60 points or counts make a degree

In his thorough review of the quantification of education by time units, Gerhard
observed:

It is the rigid system of “points” and “units," organized in a businesslike way, cutting
education into pieces which, from now on, though well fitting into the structure of a
modern depersonalized business civilization, became the headache of every true
educator ….11 (Emphasis added.)

The credit system makes the university a banking system. Gerhard sites
Norman Foerster in his 1937 book, The American State University, as likening
the pursuit of the American baccalaureate to buying it on the installment plan.
Once a credit was earned, it was as safe as anything in the world. It would be deposited
and indelibly recorded in the registrar’s saving bank, while the substance of the course
could be, if one wished, happily forgotten.

The author is John Harris and the full-text of the article is available online at:
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED470030&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED470030

A closing reflection and opening farewell

As the curtain falls on the DMA summer-edition --and after having reviewed the results of a survey about various aspects of the course-- I now feel ready to gather my final thoughts and lessons-learned.

For starters I want to thank the participants in this course. What a cool and centered group you have been to work with! Kudos to y'all on taking on this challenge, and on meeting it with such positive attitudes, intentions, camaraderie, creative intellect, and results. For me it's been a phenomenally interesting and insight-generating conversational and compositional exchange we've had over the past five weeks. I have learned a lot from you and have appreciated your efforts and insights all along the line. I have also appreciated your willingness to venture outside of your comfort zones to try new things and put yourself out there.

Meanwhile, the survey data confirmed a constant feeling I had during the course of the term that the basic composition as we were enacting it this summer (including its online delivery format) was  working. It was indeed enabling a balanced learning ecology to emerge in the interactions of student-to-student, student-to-content, and student-to-instructor. That's the ticket. Hooray!

More specifically --remember the lament I began my summer composing challenge with?

"I confess. In many instances in my teaching I fall prey to being an absolute idiot, a complete knucklehead. I spend time worrying about keeping things in order, or thinking about grading, or thinking about [insert some other form of approved and officially-recommended craziness here], and I let this overwhelm the far more important need to think about, provide a space for, and tend to the quality of a conversation. I absolutely believe that all learning takes place in conversation, and that conversation is beautifully and wonderfully creative. To me, conversation is like a cognitive-emotional form of dance. So why would I allow myself to find ways to ignore or limit conversation in my teaching?" (this was from my first post on this blog, way back on May 22)

So the heart of the experiment or intervention we enacted this summer was the use of Facebook-based conversation as a key element in the course composition. This didn't come out of nowhere, because I knew from past experiences that online conversation can be rich and mighty in its potential to knit life and learning together (where they belong :) and I have for some time felt strongly that all learning takes place in conversation (with the self, with nature, with each other, and so forth). But I had no idea how well Facebook would work in this regard, nor whether students would take to the idea. Given my predilection to build on what learners already know, the choice made sense, but it was a gamble in terms of academic course design. I was delighted with the way the platform worked, and students took to it well, so we won this particular gamble!

From what I could gather from a cursory web search, most instructors who use online conversation in their teaching use Blackboard or other learning-management system discussion forum. But for me this wouldn't have captured the blending of learning and life that I think is pretty much a sign of the times. From what Mimi Ito and other stellar research-performers are finding, young folks are involved in learning all the time, so why isolate formal education from the 'natural' education students are already engaged in? Why not just add to the already rich mix of information and perspective sharing going on?

So, these above things were tried, and in the summer-edition it seems clear that Facebook-based conversation served us well. As part of this, I thought the group provision created an appropriate sense of membership and enclosure. And I also thought it was great that we got profile pix and windows on each others lives as people as part and parcel of using Facebook for discussion (and the pix sometimes changed, which added yet another interesting layer). To me these kinds of things all matter in an online environment. If we had we used Blackboard for discussion my sense is that we would have gotten too much separation, and too little integration and synergy with our everyday lives. And, the conversation was consistently good --just plain good, and also good in the sense of being full of learning. So, with your help I got some major deliverance from my above lament!

I now want to share a few final observations about the content of the course and what I learned. Not to rehash things, but to create markers that I can return to in the fall and beyond, and also to tell you a thing or two about things I think I know, which I may not have already told you :)

Thing #1 

I think the general description of a contemporary context defined in many ways by boundary-blending, as initially outlined by Marshall McLuhan, is pretty accurate and worth contemplating further. I posted this description initially in the Facebook group conversation, and have re-posted it in this blog as a different,  separate post so as not to clutter this post or make it overly long.

Thing #2

In conditions of boundary-blending --characterized by constant shiftings, continuous cycles or loops of dissolution and novel coalescence-- the concept of emergent-order (and/or self-organization), derived from chaos-theory and complexity-theory, provides a very useful structuring principle. As mirrored in conversational interaction, the new order is dynamic rather than static --and balances the dissolution of familiar boundaries with the generation of new (yet familiar) boundaries. There are non-random elements, in other words, but these are dynamic. They are verbs rather than nouns! This is what is truly new about the current age, and it is something that we haven't quite gotten our hearts and minds around just yet: the "fixed points" in contemporary life are in fact dynamic, not fixed. This may be important for us new-media composers to ponder.

BTW the presenter in the video below talks about how the interaction among just a few simple elements can result in immense and beautiful complexity --again in much the same way that just a few people in conversation can generate all kinds of insight and knowledge.

Along these lines it needs to be said that the conversational dynamic in this course generated several mentions of dynamic forms of order, and unerringly led to these two main/concluding "Things." :)

Something else I learned --and still related to the concepts of boundary-blending and emergent-order-- goes like this...

Seurat's masterpiece The Side Show

French impressionism and pointillism can be seen as harbingers or prescient forms of the current dynamism. Much as the paint becomes particulate or granular in impressionism and pointillism, everything in the new-media era becomes particulate and pixelated --including things like creativity and intellect. These things flow and coalesce, and ultimately know no boundaries until they form them on their own.  Again much as what one sees in an impressionist or pointillist painting is constantly shifting as well because it is constantly being assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in the viewers' eyea.

A detail from The Side Show

This 'particulate matter' approach resonates with the principled approach we've taken to new-media composing. For example Manovich's principles become can be explicitly coalesced in particular ways, as can the exemplars we have considered. These things can be seen as particles.

Working collaboratively can be seen in the same framework. For example the famous collaboration of Rauschenberg (artist) plus Billy Kluver (engineer) --or the more recent Laura Randall (scientist) and Hector Parra (music composer) collaboration-- arguably treat individuals as particles that flow and coalesce in marvelous ways.

Collaboration also provides a good example of how boundaries dissolve and also re-emerge. It's interesting to see things like an engineer or a scientist working alongside a visual artist or a music composer, and to see the boundaries between these domains dissolve. Yet new ones emerge. For example it's pretty easy to see that Billy Kluver was not your average engineer with a pocket protector with several different mechanical pencils stuck into it. He was apparently a creative dude who happened to do engineering for his day job.  So in the meltdown of boundaries between science and art for example, what may emerge is a new focus on finding "the creatives" in whatever discipline or field they happen to be toiling in, and work with them. Instead of looking in a particular 'bin' as it were, this is more like a cross-sectional approach that moves between and amongst many 'bins' if that makes sense. So one set of categories (artist, scientist, engineer, music composer) dissolves to some extent, and another forms up or comes into being that consists of categories like creativity, intellect, spirit, or science as rooted human dispositions and/or ways of knowing or WOKs (more on this below).

This sort of describes the ethos or organizing principle of Black Mountain College --a joint that has been mentioned quite a few times over the past five weeks-- and is also the ethos that informs the ongoing existence of places like the U.C. Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, a college-with-a-college that admits folks to major in art, biology, chemistry and biochemistry, literature, mathematics, music composition, and physics. Note that social networks across disciplinary boundaries exist throughout history, but it's likely the structural or disposition-based commonalities --creatives flowing and coalescing together for example-- would be a persistent feature.

Thing #3

(Okay, yeah, now I'm taking serious liberties). In a boundary-blended context, with emergent-orderings serving as constant yet dynamic "fixed points" if you will, artists may need to proactively invent new genres, not just new artworks. If boundary-blending applies to new-media composing as well as all other types, this means that as soon as new boundaries are set up, as soon as new genres come into being, these too will have their boundaries messed with. This is closely aligned with one of the key points in French deconstructionism; namely, it is relentless. The deconstructive process (which sounds negative but it's not) is informed by the dissolution, or progressive granulation, of old, tired categories. This process is relentless and also constant/incessant, like change itself, but --and folks often miss this-- the dynamic of deconstruction does not preclude order, it just refuses to prescribe order. It welcomes ongoing flow-and-coalesce movements, and it welcomes emergent order.

Thing #4 

I learned that my very own ways-of-knowing or WOK framework may be an emergent form in this regard. In the dissolution of the boundaries between 'disciplines' or even 'professions' a new set of boundaries, a new categorical scheme, may be emerging that features the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and scientific dispositions or ways-of-knowing. One of my sons asked me about the WOK thing, saying (in the typically direct fashion of a fifteen year old), "Dad, did you just sort of make that one up on your own?" And I had to say, "Why, yes, I did..." --but then I also told him that I gave a guest presentation in the spring semester in a philosophy of art course taught by Rick Miller, and afterwards he said my view of art as as a way-of-knowing was somewhat in line with the view of G.W. Hegel --so maybe I get to borrow some respectability from this association. So anyway, I didn't talk about the WOK deal much this summer term, but I think it's a fairly sturdy framework. The basic idea is that each WOK represents a unique way in which humans pose questions to, or probe, reality. And each WOK delivers unique responses or answers not covered by the others. And each has its own signature methods. Again what I've learned this summer is that the WOK framework may be emerging in the wake of the collapse of categorical systems based on disciplines, professions, and so forth.

A few quick remainders and reminders follow...

1. I learned that dividing new-media composers into folks who expand on new-media concepts, processes, or technologies makes everything easier to understand. I hadn't really thought about this prior to talking about it with y'all this summer. For me it helps explain how composers like JR can seem so cutting-edge and 21st century while not being involved much with the technological aspects of new-media.
2. I learned from all of you that all I can really need to do as a teacher is try to inspire via putting content and tasks before you that may be worthwhile for you to consider or engage creatively and intellectually with. I of course need to try to provide a coherent structure, and a decent learning environment or ecology that includes good materials, but the materials need to be compelling enough to drive the process. I can't reach everyone, but everyone needs to be able to reach the content, and everyone needs to find at least some it worthwhile when they do.
3. I've learned include the role inspiration plays in decisions about having something to say. Its role is really one of replacement. It is not so much that young composers need to have something to say, it is rather that they are looking for inspiration --things that move them. These can come from internal passions (a passionate interest in dance, filmmaking, or what have you --which is kind of a given at UNCSA) or from external sources (stories that are inspiring on a basic human level, for example, stories about overcoming obstacles, and so forth). In this same regard I noted a connection here between the importance of inspiration and the rise of inspiring-content venues including TED, and the PBS program area called "Off Book." I am also reminded of a distinction I developed over many years of visiting museums of art, that some art inspired me to want to make art myself, and other art sort of awed me as a passive recipient. I always preferred the former (when I look at Rauschenberg's work for example, it makes me want to make art, not look at it).
4. In this regard, part of the role of the liberal arts in the BFA degree/training of young artists is simply that of introducing additional sources or types of inspiration. In DMA I hope one of those additional sources is the idea of being one's own new-media composer, and I hope another is that of being able to see composing in broad as well as specific terms. I also hope at least some of the exemplars of new-media composing shared in the class might be inspiring. An autobiographical+biographical approach continues to make sense to me in the age of social networking that is, again, keyed to inspiration and rooted in principles that include a fundamental dynamism.
5. A couple of practical matters. I learned that a "question of the week" format works well if the question is good. So I need to be ever on the lookout for good or better ways to frame questions.
6. I also learned that it might be good to have a daily, regularly scheduled 'helpline' time in the fall (and along these same lines I think I will also have an official face-to-face 'helpday' in the f2f media lab classroom in the fall since everyone will be on campus).
7. So, all in all, I think my summer composition, my own challenge, yielded some progress towards reshaping DMA in positive ways. I initially reframed the DMA course as a composition course, and I am seriously contemplating submitting a name change from DMA to NMC (New-media Composing).  I then talked with colleagues and students about this framing. Following that I gathered clues for how to do this from my many travels in curricular and pedagogical design, and teaching experience that includes a kind of incurable  love of education as a creative medium to compose in. Then I created the course itself --composing it of Facebook-based communications, Google Sites + Google Docs content delivery, blog-based portfolio assessment, conversation-based pedagogy, mixed-reality ecological design, and so forth. And I am now reflecting on my efforts. So I've "walked my talk" in these regards. I've used the learning cycle myself. And it worked!
8. I also mirrored what I was teaching by attempting to balance concepts (having something to say), processes (saying it creatively and intelligently), and technologies (selecting materials, and orienting assignments, towards variety in media-type).
9. Given that I treat course design as a compositional arena, it's inevitable that I do some things in a very process-oriented, improvisational way. My hope is that some of what students learn is felt --on the level of David Boehm's "implicate order" of things. I would like to think that people get more of a feel for new-media composing through my use of creativity in designing the course itself, and I would imagine these affective aspects may, assuming they occur, be just as important as things like teaching and learning the basic principles of new-media as articulated by Manovich, McLuhan, and others.
10. Along these lines, though, I also attempted to integrate and 'walk the talk' of the new-media principles that were introduced. I attempted to design-in these principles, such that the course has elements of numerical representation, modularity, variability, automation, transcoding, dynamism, simultaneity, multiplicity, ubiquity, and reflexivity.
11. The reflexivity principle came around full circle in fact, in the above way, and may be something I'll continue to think about. It may be the case that other instructors, in other content areas, could benefit from using content-related principles derived from their subject matter as design principles in much that same way that I've ended up doing (again some of this has been the result of a creative process, not the result of pre-planning, although there was some of that as well).
12. What have I learned? That I am hooked on process :) I will maybe want to move back in the direction of doing  a couple of discreet bodies of work in the upcoming year, maybe one in digital imagery, and another in sumi-e painting, and maybe another that combines these two.
13. I also learned that I very much like the idea of replacing 'studying' with 'composing'. This too seems to me a warranted streamlining of the BFA degree that would make the liberal arts component much more meaningful and relevant to what students are learning in their arts areas.
14. And, finally, I stumbled on a new metaphor:
    
    "Starting with a metaphorical flat sheet of paper --thinking and talking about composing in general-- in week one, we then proceeded in a principled, project-based way to fold the sheet into a specific shape --new-media composing-- in weeks two and three.
    
    By the end of the third week we had identified and explored concepts, processes, principles, genres, tools, and exemplars of new-media composing. The sheet of paper had taken on a definite shape.
    
    In week four we then unfolded one side of one new-media principle --namely the hyper-individual side of new-media dynamism-- by framing and enacting self-directed projects.
    
    In week five we unfolded the other side of the new-media dynamism principle --its hyper-social side-- by composing something of a collaborative nature with a particular social purpose."
    
    
15. And I stumbled on one other metaphor I like a lot as well --  'composing en plein air.' 

Well, it's time to fold up the tents now, I guess. It's been great camping, conversing, and composing with all of you, way up here online, en plein air. And this would be my last totally uninformed inclusion of a German phrase --"Auf wiedersehen" y'all-- which I gather is one way to say "until we meet again." Meanwhile I'll be assembling, posting, and sharing my cut of an "Intro to DMA" movie tomorrow, fully expecting I will like your versions much better! So I guess this is just my opening farewell.