vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Graham Watson’s Video Blog

Graham Watson has a video blog that uses lo bit rate or lo fi material. This is closer to what videoblogging ought to be (yes, I am so over the era of greed aka instant infinite bandwidth -bandwidth access should not be confused with bandwidth pollution). So Graham, working in Canada (greetings to Commonwealth partners) is interested in the aesthetics of loss, which lets face is a damn sight better than the faux familiarity of the usual video blog which is rapidly turning into any other television show. Networks are noisy, the world is noisy. Loss is one manifestation of this noise. Rather than hide from this, or pretend that isn’t there (I guess this could easily slide into some sort of critique of North American hegemony couldn’t it, something along the lines of the ways in which aspirational, individualistic cultures struggle with ‘noise’ in any manifestation) I think the very aesthetic of our work should celebrate noise as the productive expression of difference.

The View From Bed

Today I’m at home stuck in bed, worse than poorly and shortly about to see a doctor. Some sort of viral infection I think, so I lurch from sleep to fatigue and in between manage to read a little bit, listen to some music and try to do some work. The biggest thing that has been getting to me lately has been email. I just seem to be unable to keep up. Too many arrive that feel like they need detailed, long answers, so I put them somewhere to get to later, but of course then another 50 arrive and I end up lost, drowned, and flailing. Enough, time to get back to what email always was. Brief, direct, and to the point. I’ve amended my email sig so that it points to here, and I’m now going to start on the backlog.

A Better Analysis

Charlie has nailed this perfectly. (The comfort I can take is that the process based learning we have all done is what has allowed this to happen, and yes, I am learning from my students.)

More Brazil

Must be the month for me and Brazil. An essay of mine, Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext, has been included in a Brazilian anthology on new media. The book is O e o Caleidoscópio, edited by Lucia Leão.

Aesthetics of Information

I note that Tara is concerned that her project isn’t really interested in aesthetics (or more accurately she isn’t), but that research is something that she is really in to. This is good. It is good because she knows a) what she is good at, b) how she is good at it, c) where her emphasis lies. The trick, and the problem? How to turn the question about aesthetics into a constructive or productive relation, rather than a reaction. For example, rather than a project that tries to look structured, planned, and have order, to just throwing that out. Why is text in columns? Why are images in the same place? Why is the same heading on every page? You can’t have your cake and eat it too :-) Embrace research and let it all hang out, let it be noisy, don’t domesticate it. Wild research roaming free, now that would be an intriguing project.

Self Assessment, Reflective Practice, Content

Late in the semester I realised that one of the aims of the new curriculum in media is to foster, scaffold and allow students to take more responsibility for their learning. A key aspect of this happens via their assessment. In first year, certainly in my subjects, 30% of their final mark is self assessed, and this is around participation. In second year 50% of their mark should be self assessed, and this is to be a combination of assessing participation, and also the blogs (in Integrated Media Two participation is 30% and blogs are 20% of the final mark).

So, self assessment. I invited everyone to write a list of criteria for their individual participation, with an emphasis on collaborative activities. I had thought, at the time, that most of our work would be collaborative, but I quickly realised that wasn’t the case since what we were, basically, working on all semester was personal, quotidian media. Media that doesn’t need a production crew, or for that matter a lot of investment in hardware and software. Hence when it came time to assess participation I needed to return to the same model as I’ve used previously, which has not helped my students (or myself) in developing more sophisticated understandings of our own learning processes.

Why did this happen? Usual error of misjudging content for process. I was concerned about what forms of collaboration were being experienced in other parts of the media program, and so over reached myself, the subject, and my students, by thinking that I could address this in Integrated Media. Wrong model, wrong place. It was me being anxious about some learning and so tried to address this by making it the content of my course!

The blog assessment was also confused. For the future what I will do is invite the students to write, for themselves (individually) a set of assessment criteria for their own blogs, basically what they think they would need to do in their blogs for their blogs to be an appropriate (and define appropriate) contribution to their learning. They can then assess their blogs against these criteria. This lets the students develop analytical skills, as well as beginning to learn how to benchmark, evaluate and also determine – in advance – what or why they should be doing something. However, we didn’t do this. So I ended up writing a blog assessment matrix for all of the students and inviting them to use this to assess their blogs. As Charlie noted, this is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted (I guess my own experience as a student was that you never knew what you were being assessed for anyway, it was just a black box, so having criteria, even if after the fact, is better than nothing).

[If you read this and think that students just get to write something and then assess against it, well, it doesn't quite work that way. Yes, they do control and own the process, and what mark they give sticks, but around these activities considerable class time is spent going over what criteria have been developed, hearing other's, and being able to contextualise them so that they are meaningful and have purchase. These sorts of reflective learning activities often form all of the content of my classes, so that two hours may be spent developing a blog assessment matrix.]

Why did this happen? I’m not sure. We are in the middle of implementing a new curriculum, I’m trying to think a lot of this out on my feet, and unfortunately it occasionally goes amiss. I like to say that we can learn from our mistakes, and that this is the place, and time to experiment. Still, it is deeply dissatisfying to realise in retrospect how better outcomes should have been achieved. This semester I had a clear idea of what we would do in my head, but as it turns out a clumsy model for how we might get there.

Interviewed by Marcus Bastos

I had an email interview the other day, Marcus Bastos asking some questions about videoblogging and such like. He’s posted it to his website, and at the moment is running a very good discussion around new media writing on empyre.

A Different Fatigue

On Sunday I joined some other post 40 gentleman in Around the Bay in the Day, which is a 210Km ride around Port Phillip Bay (the bay that Melbourne rests upon). A 4am get up for a 5am start to the ride (apparently getting to the ferry at the bottom of the bay early is important). Was a great day, glorious weather, the camaraderie of the ride and the ache of sustained effort. Buggered now though. And been to the physio, the dreaded ‘overuse injury’ – in my case I think it is the popliteus has appeared. C’est la vie.

Blog Assessment, Semester Two

In Integrated Media this semester I have, once again, relied a great deal on the use of blogs. The value of blogs has been reduced, from 30% of the final mark to 20%, largely because we have used them for two semesters already and blogging is, for most students, a given.

(And for those students who still don’t ‘get’ it, a third semester is unlikely to solve that problem for them.)

Previously students self nominated entries, subject to a very explicit assessment matrix, and I read and marked their blogs on this basis. This semester, as part of a larger, whole of program approach to self assessment, student directed learning and reflective practice, I am encouraging students to assess their own blogs. To do this an assessment document has been written and made available. Each student assess their blog against this, writing an entry that includes the result they have assigned to their blogs. This continues an assessment method used since first year, where students have, in their classes, publicly assigned participation marks for their semester. (In this exercise participation diaries are kept for the semester, and students describe what they’ve done well, what they’ve learnt to do better, and what they could have done better, for the semester.)

In the spirit of this here is my self assessment of Integrated Media 2.

• Proactive: 4
• Reflection and Discussion: 2
• Documentation: 3
• Connecting: 3
• Regularlity: 2

Most of the content delivered has been a creative and critical response to ‘conservative’ ideas of time based media, from the point of view of TV and radio as media. The experiments that we’ve done (noise moviebooks, rhizome movies, ezedia projects) have all required a relearning, or unlearning, of assumptions about video and audio as only a ‘delivery’ format online. While lots of questions got raised, and not necessarily answered (eg the role of loops, repetition, links, buttons, architectures, narrative) each of these are key questions to ask and it is probably just as useful to ask these as it is to think that we have answers to these.

Early in the semester a lot of effort went into collaborative practice, though the subject is not about collaboration. The sorts of projects and ideas explored are more about ‘personal’ media making, the sorts of things that, like blogs, can be done by individuals in almost ad hoc sorts of ways. This was a misjudging of what we were doing by me, and was also an anxiousness about what everyone may have been learning elsewhere about collaboration. I moved away from this quite quickly, but it did mean that we did not have a robust scheme for participation for the semester, which is a stuff up. The format of the course, with a ‘lecture’ and a lab is proving difficult. I believe the most effective ‘lectures’ have been where we’ve just had conversations around ideas, but the use of a raked lecture theatre and with out a specific set of readings to orientate things makes problems for this.

I did not document in enough detail some of the ideas that I introduced, whether it was on the teaching site or in my blog. However a substantial reference collection has been developed in my citeulike and del.icio.us accounts which everyone has access to.

The course content and materials are well connected to contemporary debates and ideas around blogging, community media, participatory media. My material links outwards, but I removed my blogroll as it was just getting in the way. I changed the URL of my blog this year which has broken most of the existing links in that I receive, and I have been engaging with my blog community very much so this blog has tended to be more links to new things and commentary rather than blog-versation.

Finally, the posting has been in spurts. Wednesdays I’ve read, tried to catch up with email, and skimmed other things, and that’s when I’ve done my writing. I think it is pretty normal for blogs to wax and wane, but at the moment it isn’t really reflecting what I’m working on! Then again Mark remains my blogging exemplar, and the quality of his posts always demonstrates how blogging can be more than soap boxing.

So, using the official RMIT marking matrix, I reckon a Credit, a good Credit, up towards the higher end of Credit, but a credit.

Video Architectures, Folksonomies and Blogs

Is the title of the very informal seminar I’m presenting today in the Computer Science department at RMIT. I am going to treat the presentation not as an opportunity to deliver the sorts of things I might do at the ACM hypertext conferences, but to talk, as a new media sort of humanities theorist, about the world from my side of the fence. So folksonomies, some of the ways I think about blogs and blogging, and then sliding that into video. Which will become my wish list.

So, some URL’s for the talk:

• flickr
• citeulike
• del.icio.us
• vimeo
• vided
• ACH (Association for Computers and the Humanities)
• ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations)
• Realism and a General Economny of the Link
• Hypertext Syntagmas: Cinematic Narration with Links
• Violence of Text