First off, via Eli Chapman we find Fred Viola’s beautiful little QuickTime piece which, though he made it in AfterEffects is a cinch to do in QuickTime Pro. Haunting, considered, understated yet says a lot. From here I jump cut to Will Luers who uses the definition of haibun to think about a vlogging aesthetic. Yes, this is what our work should do. Things that quicken the heart (as Chris Marker memorably mentioned once). Otherwise, why?
Tara makes a brief post about what makes a good blog. The idea that it should express you but not be about you, while I’m not sure is actually the case, is a strong idea worthy of consideration.
A problem I posed to all of my students this week was “Do you write your blog or does your blog write you?”. We’ve had some lively discussions as a consequence. The question begs a lot, and part of the intent was to get them to recognise that each of the terms in there needs defining, and how they’re defined is going to affect what you think the answer ought to be.
My own view is that we are written by our blogs. Remember, the subject we’re doing is concentrating on social software, network literacies, networked writing and as a consequence networked identities. Our common sense notion of writing is that I write, and in writing I am writing out something of myself. What or however we want to take that. But when we blog (as an exemplar of networked writing) these boundaries don’t work. Where does your blog begin and end? The answer is not the date of the first and most recent post. You have links out of your blog, is the ‘end’ of your blog what lies at the destination of that link (after all it is ‘your’ link)? And what if that link leads somewhere else? What about all the links into your blog, these also ‘write’ your blog, and these are not written by you.
This is, if we make it simpler, your blog identity. It is who you are as a blogger. This is also, very much, your network identity. This That is the some of the relations you establish and others are established outside of you by your participation in the network. This network is radically outside of you in ways that existing networks aren’t. Your existing networks are largely defined by spatial proximity – same class, suburb, bus, workplace, and so on. Not here.
In other words your indentity is the sum of those connections that you are a participant in, but, you have little or no say about. It is difficult, for example, to prevent someone else from linking to one of your blog posts, or to your blog. Just as they can’t really prevent you linking to them. You are written by this.
I’ve been catching up on a lot of work in Ant recently, finally finding some time to just see what people have been doing. There is some fantastic work. Jay and Ryanne remain, for me, a wonderful illustration of video blogging. Something about their energy, openess and dexterity. Nothing too clever, but the sophistication that comes from familiarity with video, and a genuine depth that develops through the serial nature of blogging.
And then there’s what I struggle with. Long video blog posts. A blog post has a simple structure, it’s pretty much one idea. If you’re a busy blogger and your idea grows legs, then you ordinarily just make a second post. You don’t turn the one post into a microlecture/essay. This makes writing them easy. It makes linking to them easy (follow the link and you don’t have to wade through eight paragraphs to work out why that particular entry has been linked to) and it makes reading them easy. Why wouldn’t you use the same rule of thumb for video entries? If your (hypothetical) video is about your new Ikea furniture, the trip to the store, misunderstanding the instructions, comments about your inlaws, and then the family discussion about where the furniture is going to go, guess what? You’ve probably got material for four video entries. The advantages:
Just suggestions, YMMV
As I’ve commented here (a lot), I’m into process based teaching (often with a problem based twist). This means students are expected and taught how to reflect on their own practice. As learners, as researchers, as writers. As I’ve been reading my students’ blogs I come across various entries that show not only that everyone is very capable of engaging with material in idiosyncratically legitimate ways, but that they’re articulating processes for themselves. Tara describes the influence of publicness on her work, meanwhile Melanie sums up pretty much what I hope every actually experiences in using our wiki. This is a first semester second year student, I think this is stunning. Meanwhile Eira points out she hasn’t written for a week, well, she’s tinkered with her blog design. This is, of course, writing, writing in a very real sense in the context of network literacies and social software. Katie makes the observation that the wiki seems more official than her blog because the entire class has responsibility for it. Wow, when did that realisation happen? And how?
The differences, for me, is that once upon a time I gave them things to read that said all this, then spent a semester talking about. Now when they read these things they should nod their heads in agreement, muttering “yeah, I know”.
My students have been given a list of people to research. The current list, though I’m not sure if all the research is going to be done, consists of:
There is nothing specific about the list, as far as I know. I know quite a few of the people on it, so they obviously reflect my own research interests, but they also cover a broad range of research fields around new media, hypertext, and the like. Next year we’ll add to the list, and possibly some of the theorists like Virilio will also turn up again. Something I’m hoping might happen, and I think wiki supports this, is that they’ll start to learn that knowledge, research, ideas, are densely interlinked networks. They aren’t tidy hierarchies or genealogies. This list I reckon will help. As will a wiki.
I’ve just found fac.etio.us via corante. All I wanted to note, very briefly, is that this picks up an idea I’ve been toying around with for too long. The facets that are described here remind me very strongly of how Bergson defines perception as interest along, for want of a better term, a particular facet. There are a virtual (in Deleuze’s sense) number of facets that are actualised according to specific ‘interests’. The facet that ‘interests’ air in its relation to a diamond is quite different that the interests of the carbide blade, the gem cutter, the fiancé and the pawnbroker. Which facets count, which are actualised, is defined and determined by an axis of interest.
Jay Ruby, a professor of visual anthropology, is someone with a long interest in innovative ways of presenting ethnographic and anthropological narratives. He has spent the last several years working on the Oak Park Stories, and they’re now available on CDROM.
SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator: is something that some MIT grad students have put together. It generates random conference papers, which apparently they then send to some of the more dubious academic conferences out there.
So Eira read Jakob’s essay (which I had set) and posted this. I just like how there’s a thread, you can follow to see how this has happened, it makes her learning visible. And then the comment, which is about how to get the pictures in. Sideways again.
And Irene discussed being technophobic in early March and shortly after thinks the interconnectedness of Flickr is cool. It is cool that I like. Cool means she gets the ambience of networkness.
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