vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Practice in Action

In the classes for Integrated Media last week everyone was reminded of what they had learnt last year. Getting video off a camera into the computer, compressing to H.264 MPEG4, uploading to their blog servers, and then embedding and publishing this. Several things I am learning as I do this the second time around, and after quite a few years of teaching these skills.

• you learn by doing
• so it is (if you like) like a studio practice
• a key skill to be learnt is a thinking in doing
• which is also a practice in action

This is because there is not a set group of tasks or procedures that you learn and then can happily apply, that is a set procedure with specific describable steps. As we discovered this week, for example, one piece of software was not installed and so we needed ways to work around this. This is the simplest way to demonstrate that what is fundamental to teaching these things you are actually immersing students in a practice, which is why it is irrelevant educationally to teach individual software products. The latter produces educational sweatshops that confuses content with practice. It is a learning by doing where the doing is to learn the argot of an OS, the network, and its assumptions and architectures.

Teaching is the same: the software was missing. Rather than letting that stop the class, we simply identified another way of achieving the same outcome, and did that. The outcome was how to strip carriage returns from a text file, the process was how to achieve that. This is the exercise of competencies that are performative and process orientated.

It also demonstrates that it is not about a piece of software. Just examine that one small task: strip out carriage returns. This requires you to understand that there are carriage returns which are characters. That they can be found, and replaced. That text files are very important in relation to working online. That there are programs that can do this. That these are text editors as opposed to word processors (and that is an intriguing difference right there). That you can find a text editor if this is what you know you are looking for. And so on. That is what is being learnt. Not how to use BBedit, TextWrangler, TextEdit, pico and so on, but that you can use these to replace these carriage returns (and we haven’t even addressed why they might need removing).

Good-Enough-Problem

Problems. A problem is not an error, a mistake, or something wrong. It is a lump that requires you to stop, gives pause, and it changes you. It might change how you think about something, how you go about doing some thing, or how you feel about some other thing. It has resistance, some sort of solidity, it pushes back against you. You might never get through it, and will find you have to go around it, but only after trying to listen to it and in that learning to listen learning to hear other and new things.

I often return to this idea of the good-enough-problem.

Podlove

Late, but I’ve missed a lot of stuff lately. Podlove, initiative of Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (memo to ABC, why is it that SBS are eating you for breakfast around content – RAN for lowbudget local drama, a whole commissioning budget for edgy works that actually address national concerns, and so on, oh, and they have the World Cup this year) that explicitly seeks avant-garde five minute docos. This is the real content model for micro media. Like popular music, radio, soap opera and advertising, this media needs to accommodate the temporal flows of the quotidian.

Fluxus Masquerading in Classroom

This week the overly talkative lecture was about constraint, materiality, and a bit of hypertext. I used the Oulipo as a way of illustrating constraint. Didn’t get to tying it back to computers and their own practice, so that’s for another day. However, the task they are to complete for next week’s studio class is to make a two minute (maximum) video piece, published via their blogs, that is about whatever they are doing from 6.11pm to 6.13pm on any day in the next week. I like the formalism of this, and also I’m intrigued by 40 or so video pieces that do this – this collective work, what will it be (I think I can use del.icio.us tags to collate them individually to make this collective work, or just use mefeedia).

Mess

Walking to my new open plan office in the autumn sunshine it occurs to me that we all, somewhere, end up in a mess. It is how you deal with that mess that defines you as a person.

labsome

Today was my first seminar, workshop, class in the new Bachelor of Communication Honours program, aka labsome. I have been anxious about this for several days, making notes, rewriting notes, crossing things out and adding them again.

It was a lot of me talking, but that I hope is enough for now. It was to describe what we’re doing, partly why, and partly how. This is a humanities research studio. I only have a sketch in my head of what that is. With these students the sketch needs to be made into a work. There were a lot of very good questions. I’ll post course guides, etc once the CMS is in place.

Next steps, get a new installation of elgg for them to use, and joomla for general administrative updates and what nots.