An interesting thread has been going on at Fibreculture, which like so many lists now seems to splutter to life intermittently. This is my reply to Danny which continues the conversation. I’ve included it here because different people will see it, and I wanted to keep what I wrote. The original email is archived online.
On 18/06/2004, at 8:30 AM, Danny Butt wrote:
>I’ll disagree with Adrian here and say that I don’t think basic code
>literacies are a core part of a critical humanities curriculum in the
>new media environment.
not sure how what follows is a disagreement :-)
>In the early stages of HTML, yes, to engage with writing in this new
>medium you needed to know HTML. So for your 1997 hypermedia module, go
>for it. But now, to customise templates in a content management system
>effectively one needs a lot more knowledge than a few HTML tags. As web
>production tools increase in complexity (in order to make it easier for
>people with no interest in learning those tools to publish with them) I
>see diminishing returns on the amount of technical knowledge acquired
>by a humanities student. If you know >b> >i< >p< >br< and >h1-6<, i.e.
>one class worth of stuff, you can use many online writing systems
>effectively.
>
use them to publish, but use them to design/build with? I think what has been common to the posts here is that blogs and CMS’s and all the rest of the mess is not about publishing. It is about writing. The paradigmatic shift that these technologies enable is in letting people write, not consume. (Why does every university still include ‘delivery’ when they mention online learning. Education is not bread and if you want to see why it doesn’t work just think of why you would even use ‘delivery’ as your metaphor.)
I have just intro. blogs to a group of design postgrads. Few have any html experience. The blogs don’t work for them. Why? Because they have to be able to design in them as well as write. As someone like John Thackera (or Richard Florida, or Ken Wark, and so) would say, these days it is not just about writing or publishing but it is about writing as a designerly act. This includes choosing colours for your website, images, layout. but it also includes more general acts of considered making (who to link to, when, what to write, why).
If you can do the basics in a class, that’s fine. It is still teaching basics in terms of a markup language and its principles of content versus layout (fundamental to all blogs and their CMSs, here the distinction between markup as declarative versus markup as descriptive is crucial if you don’t want to corrupt your design via your CMS). Basics equals some notion of a literacy in a skill or language. The difference might be in what constitutes the basics, but it isn’t a disagreement.
to return to the design postgrads and their ilk. if you don’t understand basics of markup how would you insert a blogroll from blogrolling.com into your blog template? Or the appropriate code from technorati, geourl, allconsuming.net and so on. These are not *accessories* to a blog but are what constitute this as a different paradigm of networked writing. Emergent, distributed, complex patterns of part to whole. YOu only get to play in this sandpit if you can include the toys in your CMS.
>Another pet peeve, endemic in interdisciplinary spaces like new media,
>is curriculum encouraging “experimentation with design” without
>covering design principles as taught by people with expertise in that
>field. I agree that it’s useful to know principles of design and
>programming, but I think they need to be taught with a)
>accountabilities to the professionals in those fields and b) with an
>understanding of the importance of specialisation, some reflexivity
>around the limits of DIY, and experience of the *collaborative*
>practices that occur in the new media environment.
>
agree 100% here. Design is a specific professional practice. My common and well voiced complaint to many in the trad. hypertext lit. community as they moved into flash and co was to work with designers. They’re writers, not designers and it shows.
In media at RMIT we are building collaborations with design students. this is because they’re better than media students at design. It is also to teach media students that they have to learn how to talk to designers, to respect design as a professional practice/discipline, and how to collaborate. which is not to tell a designer that you want a yellow logo in Arial tomorrow morning.
>That requires interfaculty collaboration in program design in a way
>that in my experience most universities don’t facilitate that well. In
>many ways, it’d be good for the humanities to stick to writing (I know
>that sentiment is not likely to be popular here :7)
Well, I wouldn’t want to hypostatise that too much. Simplest response from me would be “what is writing”. It is changing, fast. Most humanities academics and students can’t see past the essay. That’s ok in an antediluvian kind of way, but is probably why they lost the knowledge wars some time ago. How many scientists/engineers, and today, designers, feel obligated to write essays? What forms do they use to legitimate knowledge? Who are essays for outside of the humanities academy and its particular ideologies of learning?
cheers
Adrian Miles
Tags:
hypertext,
practice,
teaching,
tools
