vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Media Curriculum Map

Below you’ll find a link to a pdf which is the mapping task I did for the media program. This was used in a curriculum development meeting to help think about the how and why of our teaching. The map is not about content but shows the approaches, strategies and ideas that inform (or should inform) our curriculum. Specific content sits on top of this structure, and is what changes from year to year.

The terms used are supposed to be suggestive and it certainly isn’t intended to be proscriptive an any narrow sense (but it is certainly proscriptive in outlining a particular approach to our teaching of content and providing a structure across all courses and year levels). So it might be useful to orientate where and how material should be delivered, assessed and why at different years and subjects.

As was noted in the meeting, what is missing in this are the technical streams and their progression, so it would be good to add this after more discussion and thought. I think this document will also form a great basis for a brief essay about the ‘shape’ of our media program, and a second essay about the philosophy of this pedagogy in relation to contemporary applied media education. YMMV.

| media curriculum map (pdf) |

An Emerging Project

I have started on a Korsakow video project. Working title of ‘any-instant-whatever’. Basically each vog that I make from now on will appear in the videoblog (here) and it will also be included in this new project. I’ll write more about how the Korsakow Project works later, but what I’m interested in is a video practice that is open, ongoing, and allows structures or patterns to emerge. (The same qualities that draw me to writing in hypertext.) This is, in some ways, against the spirit of Florian’s original project, which is much more a system for building works that then get published as finished. Much like using Storyspace to write finished hypertexts. In each case they are made up of multiple parts, have multiple pathways, and a single reading or viewing may obscure as much as it reveals.

Since the Korsakow system relies on keywords I want to use a very simple keyword system. The patterns will look after themselves through the content of the vogs, and I don’t want to end up with some bizarre keyword list that is more taxonomy, or folksonomy, than a simple rule set facilitating emergent structures. (Many people when they come to these sorts of systems assume that complexity is the product of complex rules. It is not. Complexity results from simple rules iterated. It is this that produces complex structures, and it is these structures that we regard as intentional and meaningful.) My rules: each episode (Florian’s Smallest Narrative Unit, or a node) will have three keywords: the day on which the work was shot, or made, a sort of Bachelardian label (each of which expresses two possible positions), and a noun relating in some way to the content. Each episode will have these as keywords, and will rate more highly those with matching keywords. If that doesn’t work, I’ll change it. This work is not public yet, I only have four vogs in it, which is not nearly a critical mass for such a task.

State of the Day

A children and parents breakfast at school. On the up is don’t need to make breakfast. On the down, need to buy pastries (settled for Hot Cross buns, the marketing window grows ever larger).

Off to see a man about a new mountain bike.

Try to catch up with Mark’s latest and once again scuttle (a good word with its connotations of a deliberate sinking and scurrying) away intimidated by the breadth and energy.

Need to collect C. from her first half day of child care at 1.

Write subject guide for Integrated Media.

Did the politics test at the ozpolitics blog to find out that I’m:

• far left in political outlook
• left in economic policy
• far left in social policy
• far left in terms of ‘traditional’ values
• and these align 93.4% to the Greens

Which is weird because of course I don’t think any of the stuff I think is particularly off centre at all and all quite reasonable (well, it is, social justice and equity are the benchmarks of a civilised modern culture in my universe), but if that is left and far left I guess I need to realise that most of the community probably thinks differently. Well, think they think differently. The cumulative results seem to indicate that most respondents are left anyway.

Nomads Land

www.nomadsland.com is a new project intended to distribute films that are documentary and have a social mission. Seems they might have some sort of play per view or download model in mind as in the email I got they promised to share royalties with the owners of the works. There’s a manifesto which I haven’t read though from my quick glance it reads more like a press release come discussion about their mission rather than a manifesto. The terms are generous, it is non exclusive, though of course since there is some editorial going on it becomes exclusive in some other way. The big problem with things like this are that their compression just sucks. It is one thing to have a few artefacts and a bit of noise in your work, but here it just looks like really bad television. We can explore video on line now as a viable form because of broadband, but why then compromise that with these sorts of artefacts? If you are a professional film maker, or care about your work, then you tend to need to have some control about its presentation. It is like being a writer and someone goes and publishes your poem with typos that you didn’t put in there. You care about your words, they matter. So you care about your images which is more than just distribution.

Minor bug bear though. Be interesting to see if this survives, how, and what it might do for other work. (But I for some reason get anxious when we are promised quality content. That’s just an empty statement. Quality of what? Compression? Production standards? Content? At what point does it just become yet another shibboleth of presumptions and assumptions of someone else’s judgement of value?)

Integrated Media 1.3

Seth sent me an email the other day reminding me of a post I blogged last year looking back on Integrated Media 1.2 (second iteration, get it?). I forget that I write these things, so I’m glad someone around here has the good common sense to remind me! Well, it’s nearly time to roll out version 1.3, and as is usual in my practice rather than just reiterating or reproducing the same I’m rethinking much of what happened last year, what changes have happened outside of the course, and making some changes.

Where to start? Well I was reading some Freire (Brazilian home) the other day about learning being dialogic. It got me thinking about assessment (and has lead to an essay still being written) and just how dialogical things might be. At the moment for all our discussion about being student centred it is very common for assessment tasks, or assessment genres, to be bracketed off, out of bounds. So the language of the academy intervenes and is maintained most forcefully at the sharpest end of the teacher – student relationship. So I reckon that can be pretty dramatically rethought.

I want and need to slow down my teaching. I wrote about this the other day and it still applies. Fill in the gaps, take the students on the same journey that I have made. Which goes more or less like cinema studies, then hypertext (poststructural approaches to narrative, reflective practice, other knowledge objects/genres, associative writing, emergent patterns and structures, mixed media, rhizomes, multiplicity, materialisms of new media practices, hypertext as a post cinematic writing, post televisual writing, post literate writings), then video that becomes hypertextual (external and internal links, fragments, collaged, layered, low tech, emergent, experimental). About the ideas and practices in each that feeds into the next thing.

I want and need to slow down the labs, so that things like QuickTime, RSS, and aggregation, as well as editing and making timebased content online, becomes much more strongly embedded into their practice and networked vocabulary.

Constraint. Constraint is going to be big this year. Integrated Media 1.3 will be the year of constraint. So I want them to learn more about what constraint might be, what it constrains (well, what else could I say?) and enables, and how constraint is productive not reactive. Enabling not limiting. I think a key way of probing this will be through the work produced, which will all involve constraints of some type or other.

Ideas, what ideas should we cover? Well, soft video, serialised narrative, narrative, other (quotidian) media practices, syndication, simple interaction in time based media. What processes should we cover? That’s trickier. I liked the iterative aspect of the research project last year, and I think that was very valuable, so something about iterative practice would be good (these students are just way too much into making as finishing rather than making as thinking). Something about opening up the black box of an applied creative and critical practice would be ideal, though right now I’m a bit stumped as to how I might realise that. There will of course be an emphasis on reflective practice, which will pick up some things about how they learn about technologies, specifically how they learn to apply or use technologies, their troubleshooting strategies, resources and so on.

I’ve been thinking that the lecture slot will become, well, vaguer than it already has been. Some of the time they will be run more like a conversation, just asking some questions as probes and seeing where that takes us. Other times I want to simply ask they what they would like to know, and answer it as best we can. Other times I want to show them things, slowly, joining the dots (see above).

Assessment, well their blog will be used to publish/distribute work, as well as document and reflect on their practice. There’s participation. Then want? Perhaps a small episodic piece (audio or video or both). The best would be something that requires engagement with some theoretical ideas or idea, but realised in a form that requires creative engagement and thinking in media – in the same way that they probably think they think in words. Cute idea, but for students who are grounded in print I think the realistic and reasonable outcome is to point to this, and give the opportunity, but to realise this in any legitimate way inside of one semester. I think that’s an outcome of several years of practice (reflective, critical practice). But whatever form it ends up taking needs to be clearer and more strongly scaffolded for the students.

The subject should be experienced by everyone as experimental. That doesn’t mean they are test subjects with something being trialled on them, but that we are all co-experimenters together. So the big thing for this year, the really big thing, is not so much what will we do, but how and why. I would love to be able to have a discussion with the cohort about what general directions or ideas we need to look at, and why, and then to ask what things we should look at to learn about it (partly a problem based approach). And more particularly, I’d really like to able to ask them to think about, and then have a conversation about, how their knowledge and learning should be expressed, why, and then assessed (and why). I am going to sleep on that. Imagine a scenario where their final piece must provide a response to a problem (question), involve time based media, and consist of several parts. How they realise that they need to work out, and justify (reflect upon). Is that doable? Is there time (in amongst RSS, pod and video casting, aggregation, reading, blogging?).

The “Dad” vog

“Dad” was shot in January 2007. On a very hot day in the summer holidays instead of going camping, where two days of total fire bans meant no cooking of any form, S, J and I packed a suitcase and tried five star camping at the local Hilton. This is some footage I shot while the kids were playing in the pool. The audio I recorded on an iPod. There are no buttons just some text commentary about water as a reverie. The text tends to be too fast, just the problem of trying to fit the text into the duration of video I shot on the little still camera (a statement that is no longer an oxymoron a camera is pretty much now a camera and records still, moving image and sound). If you miss the words watch it again. It is short, and repetition is the basis of rhythm.

Amsterdam, Finally

Well, I’ve been back probably two weeks from Amsterdam and am only now sitting down to write about the trip. I’ve already written about how many hours of travel versus how long in town I was, but what did I actually do?

I gave a couple of talks, and got to be involved in two days of the Anymedia Documentary workshop (which went on for several more days). The main lecture was on softvideo, where I talked about, and showed, some of my research and practice on, well, softvideo.

OK, it is now February and I think I’m now over Christmas, the holidays and have processed all that went on in my intense few days in Amsterdam. Point is, I came back with my head buzzing with excitement and ideas. I was really impressed with the mediamatic setup, their approach to workshops: informal, laptops on trestle tables, access to cameras and recording equipment, and a quite no nonsense roll up the sleeves and make something attitude. Klaas’s role seemed to be a combination of mentor, teacher and executive producer so he was happy to go over ideas and material and equally happy to say that something just wasn’t good enough and needed more development or input.

I met Florian Thalhofer, who has written the Korsakow Engine, which I’m currently beginning to experiment with. This deserves a whole separate conversation because what I find deeply fascinating with this engine, which is basically a system for adding keywords at time points to videos and using these keywords (which boolean rules) to determine which videos are available next), is that its deep structure is identical or nearly so, to Storyspace. I asked Florian about this, and he didn’t know about Storyspace, so it was like convergent development (a bit like convergent evolution). This was the case not only in how Storyspace uses guard fields on links to help manage and produce constrained structures but also in the way that Storyspace operates on the level of nodes where each node becomes a minimal unit in the Storyspace environment. Thalhofer talks about SNU’s – Smallest Narrative Units, and uses this to help others to understand the sort of granularity that is required in these environments (granularity and so on are the ways I describe this).

Some of the film makers in the workshop found this quite difficult, and its at those times that I realise I know a lot about this stuff and that I have not done a good job in getting out of my head, my classes and my conversations and onto paper. Well, a screen. And into some suitably austere publication. So after I knock off the DAC paper that is due, oh, and the book chapter on material thinking, oh, and possibly a paper on material thinking, multimodality and something else, I’m going to write this stuff out.

We talked a lot about constraint in the workshops, which I really enjoyed, and it gave me a lot of ideas and material to bring back to RMIT to use in my teaching. I’m thinking about really slowing down one of my subjects, which has always been helter skelter whistle stop sort of thing (much like me). So slowing it down and just working through things more slowly. I have a bad habit of pointing out things, assuming (once having pointed this out) that it makes obvious and perfect sense, and going on to the next thing. I don’t fill in the steps or gaps about what falls below or informs whatever it is I am doing or saying, nor providing enough road signs or context to let others see it. It is always more or less a game of catch up.

For two days as I travelled to the workshops I experimented with filming some material. Sample movies. Every two (or five, or ten) minutes simply film whatever you find most interesting at the place you happen to be. Put them together. (This is a Deleuzean inspired idea from the Cinema One book and his wonderful discussion of the any-instant-whatever, a discussion I appropriated for an interactive video essay about videoblogging and the any-instant-whatever.) I have the material, it’s very banal, so I’m still wondering just what to do with it, for example since there are two series I might play them next to each other in the one movie. Then on my last morning I wandered the inner city from 6.30am, photographing anything that took my fancy to make a very dull travelogue photo show. Just got very interested in off the cuff informal documentation, and since I was there as part of an international documentary festival, increasingly returning and concentrating on the documentary aspects and possibilities of vogging. But documentary that is closer to Joris Ivens (a suitably Dutch exemplar) than Discovery Channel!

So now I am distilling all this, grabbing bits of it to use in my teaching, and trying to find time (usually in the evening after Cleo’s asleep) to make some video sketches. I should have a Korsakow project online in the next month or so, a first experiment. The trip was invigorating, exciting and while tiring just plain damned inspiring. I struggled a bit with the workshops, as I wasn’t exactly sure what my role was, or could be (I was sort of talking a lot about vogs and web 2.0 sort of stuff but they were making Korsakow specific work), but now that I’ve experienced the structure and started playing with the Korsakow Engine I’ve got my orientations if I ever get to participate again. (Something like this really should be run locally.) My biggest disappointment was only being there for the two days of the workshops and not seeing how the projects developed. Going through the entire process, and seeing the completed or at least developed outcomes, would have been fantastic.

Dad

Play Quicktime version