vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

One Down.

Well, got the promotion application done. Runs to 32 pages and 15,000 words. Jesus H. Christ, as we say around here. That’s a chapter. Includes a current CV, but also 5 pages each for a Research Portfolio Summary, Teaching Portfolio Summary, and Leadership Portfolio Summary. Then there’s the 1 page summary summarising all that, as well as indicating how you meet the University criteria, oh, and a 1 page summary of how you use the Boyer scholarship model.

It is an interesting process, deciding whether you try to document anything and everything that you think will get you over the bar, or cherry picking what you think (and hope like hell you choose well!) is the best and discussing what’s so great about that. It is difficult to only write positive things, and I’m not sure why they didn’t also want you to at least nominate some weaknesses. Some of the previous applications they provided to help us had a lot of evidence to back up statements. I couldn’t do that. Seemed constitutionally unable. I feel like it is trivial to grab a quote from a student, or a colleague, saying how wonderful your stuff is. Just as easy to find one that complains about you too, so I’m not convinced. Anyway, my students now all blog, there’s plenty in there that is yay and nay.

Which is the advantage of having a blog. This is pretty much my portfolio. All my research gets documented here. Most of my teaching, including reflection, though I guess I haven’t noted any ‘leadership’ type stuff. Probably because I don’t actually get what that is. Bit like my theory of web publishing. Write, audiences accrue over time. That’s it. Do stuff, some pay attention, some appropriate the bits they want, most ignore. Though I guess it might be fun to tell people what to do.

So, if you’re an early career academic, take note. Keep a blog. Use it document what you do. Hey presto, you have an eportfolio. You clever bunny. Now I need to turn my attention towards a Carrick Institute application where we are hoping to take over Australian higher education with a blogging juggernaut.

That Week

There won’t be much happening here this week. Even though there are comments to reply to, interesting posts elsewhere, and the usual things. This week I must complete my promotion application (a 20 page document). It’s due Friday. I must complete all of my assessment. By Friday. And then I’m on leave for a week, with the kids, and after that there’s, well Semester Two (not exactly sure when I’ll be preparing for that) and a research application that has to be completed. I am being more productive than usual, which is a pleasing event. But right now, I am inches away from being drowned. Worse, I’m inches away from the feeling of being drowned, and when that happens I actually don’t know, can’t tell, what to do next, and it just gets worse.

So, I might escape to a blog post on the sly, but I really shouldn’t. This week is crunching the keyboard.

There’s Subscription, and Then There’s Subscription

Gavin Sade is someone I met in Sydney at BlogTalk DownUnder. Jeremy told me to make sure I met him, so I did. (And on the plane up James was wondering about this Gavin guy who had this g-one name on this stuff. I explained that just meant he was a sound artist. They all have handles. I still don’t know why.)

Anyway, Gavin gave a fantastic paper on using CMS’s in a design studio. But he also runs clippings.reblog where he reads god knows how many RSS feeds every day (it is a lot) and runs them through his own system which quickly keeps what is worth keeping and send the rest for chaff. This, in turn, becomes a meta RSS feed. This sort of inserts Gavin into this intriguing cybernetic relay where he harvests or farms all this stuff, via RSS, mines it and then republishes the results. A bit of human sense amongst all these other nodes of human sense that lie between a lot of machine. His blog is well worth a read, too.

Quality and Quantity

One of the things I concentrated on, directly and indirectly, last semester, was the distinction between quality and quantity. I did this because I wanted students to begin to learn, and experience, the ways in which networked communication (that is conversations on distributed, rhizomatic networks) offers qualitatively different experiences, processes (and objects) to other networks, but that most common or popular conceptions of these networks thinks of them as quantitative questions.

This is why, for example, journalists seem to be concerned with how many readers you have (a question of quantity) rather than how good those readers are. Or that there is just more of everything, and that’s the big deal about the ‘net.

So, as I’m writing a Call For Papers for a forthcoming issue of the Fibreculture Journal (on new media education), I realised that a useful way to think about elearning, learning objects, and that whole mess, is that too many of those working in these environments treat new technologies in pedagogy as quantitative changes. More students, better ways to measure things (“you mean I can see how many words a student has contributed!?”), smoother flows of education as accounting.

No. As I’ve said, about once a week since 1995. The paradigm shift is in cultures and practices of writing. Of making new objects, differently. This is a qualitative change. It can be as significant a qualitative change as the invention of the book. If we let it. (And if we learn to see it.) This is largely the only thing I teach. I just dress it up in different clothes.

Material Pleasures

My PowerBook is provided by RMIT. It comes out of lease right about… Now. I am due to get a nice new 15″ which has been super sized for me: 1Gb RAM, 100Gb hard drive, SuperDrive, extra Video RAM. It will take me a few days to install all my stuff, migrate the data over, etc. (This tends to become down time, since all my stuff is done on computer. This tends to become book time, since all my stuff is done on the computer.) But I like the tingling excitepectation of hardware that is more than 3 times faster.

Monday, Winter, Indeterminancy

It’s Monday morning. I’ve spent nearly 18 months trying to sell the car I can no longer afford (I know I once wrote here something about ‘finishing’ – 18 months to sell the car, there you go). There is someone very interested in it, and so I’ve delivered it to the prospective purchaser’s future son-in-law who is an apprentice mechanic. For final approval. Or not.

So I’m sitting in a suitably fashionable cafe in North Fitzroy (if the tables are laminex, then it’s suitably fashionable, this accommodates the new which seeks the 70s, and the legitimate which has survived gentrification), latte and muesli muffin to hand, writing my Research Portfolio Summary for my promotion application. And find myself completely unable to determine the gender of the person serving me. Hipless male? But there is such a lack of facial hair. Of any description. Boyish female? Even their voice seems to fall between. In the 70s I mocked my parents for not being able to pick the gender of the long haired kids on the street (to my child gestalt eyes it was always obvious).

The winter of my indeterminancy.

Rhizome One, the Movie

Kristian Nilsson (from Malmø, just over the sound from Copenhagen), has made a movie based on rhizomeOne.mov. I hope she (and others) use it as a template to make several, and not just for ‘one offs’. In this example there is a drive in the car and moving house. It’s shot on a mobile phone, so begins to explore just what you could do with mobile direct video. What I like about this is that the moving video is largely silent, except near the end of it as they open the letterbox. Here it becomes very playful and opening, and more specifically its noise, is repeated. A bit like we needed all that silent countryside to get to 4 bands of the lid. Punctuation is important when video is indeterminate and looping.

Meanwhile Andreas has also made his first rhizome movie. This one uses the two videos to establish a contrast. The left is the library, quiet, sedentary, but also a response to a recent conversation on the videoblogging list when Jay apologised for knowing nothing about Malaysia and blaming the media. Andreas pointed out the media could only go so far there, and perhaps a trip to the library would help (personally I’d complain about the education system). The right video is busy, street scenes from somewhere ‘state side’which I think is the trip to (or from) the library. What is really interesting here is that the contrast established between the two is not what you find in say, parallel editing, but they do complement each other. This and then this. Or this before this. They ‘talk’ to each other thematically by tying time together. This is probably quite different to what happens in parallel editing, which is usually simultaneity in time which isn’t simultaneity in time (since you don’t show both at the same time).

Jan McLaughlin has followed suit, with a quirky, delightfully idionsyncratic celery interview (the celery appears to be the microphone). Here the left video is the interviewer, asking specific questions, while the right is Jan replying. Now, you could mouse between the two trying to match question to answer, but this doesn’t work very well, after all each has quite different durations, so what you end up with is a much more interesting serial sort of work. You watch and view one, then the other. Order doesn’t matter. And once you’ve got familiar with the content playing with it then becomes this interesting video bricolage – much more so than the other examples.

Finally, Will has also made a rhizome one movie. This is a day at the beach. The baby on the left (Will’s son? I don’t know…) making those wonderful early sounds, crawling around in one of those jump suits that really should be available for adults, while on the right we get ocean on a dark dour sort of day. Here, unlike Andreas’ work, there is not a contrast happening so much as contiguity – two views of the same place placed together. However, there is an intriguing relation in the soundtracks, one is all atmosphere and ocean, the other baby home video from a videographic point of view (which is to say from child, not adult, height).

Technorati Tags: vogRhizomeOne

Rhizome One Bug (That Isn’t)

Rhizome One doesn’t syndicate via RSS. This is because it has two child movies that are loaded via a relative URL into the parent movie. It plays just fine in a web browser, because the parent movie lives in the right place relative to the child movies. In RSS the parent video is downloaded to the client and so the relative link is broken.

To fix this, upload everything in the usual way, then open rhizomeOne.mov in QT Player (you need Pro for this) from off the web server. Save it as a reference movie. Embed the reference movie into your web page, and your RSS feed. The reference movie will always get the original content, where the relative relations to the child movies are preserved.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

This has turned up. It’s written with the United States in mind, so some of it is not applicable in other places, but the general principles are useful. It’s written by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is theEFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers.

rhizome one

This is a quick piece just to show rhizome one, which is available for you to download and make your own vogs with.

It is footage I’ve used before, of my kids. The one on the left is deliberately heavily compressed, the one on the right less so. Compression and its artefacts is not to be hidden from in online video. It is our version of film grain.

When making your own work keep in mind that shorter, more highly compressed work, will load and perform faster. If you want to use rhizome one to deliver two 20 megabyte tomes, then you should quickly learn that people won’t wait. (Consider it my effort at teaching granularity.)