The 2007 interactive Entertainment conference is being held at RMIT, December. Creative Media are the RMIT end of things (a sister program to the one I’m employed by), and it is being held from December 3 to 5, at RMIT. The website is at www.ie.rmit.edu.au
Yesterday’s ramble on industrial institutions is, well, just a mess, isn’t it? What I was struggling to get to is that industrial organisations are still beset by an all inclusive paradigm. This is the sort of thinking where a country believes that to be modern you must (for example) have an international airport, or a national car manufacturer. For universities it is a all inclusive, completely self sufficient learning system. It is also the sort of thinking that is almost Fordist, though not so much in that fragmented, time and motion sort of manner, but more in terms of there being an assembly line where for the sake of scale and efficiency things must be standardised. This blog, that CMS, and so on.
I think this is insane. It is just utterly 20th century and comes from a culture that just doesn’t, or hasn’t yet, understood what it means to work on computers when there is an internet. (“Inter” net, get it?). It is what happens with IT people make decisions on behalf of educators. Educators are about openness, about making connections, looking outwards. IT staff, who are charged with keeping systems stable, secure and risk free have a completely different agenda, paradigm, and metrics for success. The former introduces risk, complexity, noise. The latter requires its reduction. This matters.
This matters because if you have a learning system that is closed, singular etc, that, for example, only lets those in the same course see each others content, then all you have done is move a classroom online. Regardless of how clever everything else is. This is not the networked world. It might model the classroom, but is the point of using these technologies to mirror the classroom or to bring them to the world, and the world to them?
Blogs are a simple example (wikis are another clear one). A blog externalises knowledge, it requires things to be written out, made intelligible. It requires connections between parts, internally, and externally. It lets you move from being a consumer of things to a producer. It manages this by letting other people read and use your material, usually your peers (other students, those interested in what you are, academics, it all depends on what you’re writing about). You get to contribute, not just use. It develops your writing, which in turn helps your ability to think and connect and argue and make sense. You develop an online voice, and this becomes your online identity. This matters because just as you will Google your prospective employer, you can be sure they will increasingly Google their prospective employees, and your blog will be what they find. You control your blog, what you write, show, make, publish, link to. So why would you turn a blog into little more than a subject journal? As a student, who might have a real blog elsewhere, why would I even want to bother, apart from the coercion of the mark?
Here at RMIT we have a Content Management System for university wide teaching and learning. It is known as the Distributed Learning System (DLS). They (being the people who maintain it, teach staff who to use it, and so on) are now including blog, wiki and other social software modules.
This institution is now 120 years old. Venerable in a country that saw first European occupation in 1788. It is the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (actually it is now officially RMIT University but to most people who knew it before it was a University that just sounds odd) and was established to meet the needs for technical instruction in an emerging country at the time of industrialisation. Hence the former title of the “Working Man’s College”. This bit is important, it has a very strong history as in industrial institution – this is expressed in who came here, what was taught (originally trades) and in its organisational practices which of course were developed in the twentieth century with the rise of the manager, reporting lines and asecending and descending scales of authority, autonomy and influence.
Lets bring these two things together. The DLS, and an institution that was born, and grew up, in an industrial century. In spite of all the efforts (and restructures, strategic plans, and so on) the university is deeply mired in industrial paradigms. Hierarchies, lines of reporting, silos and economies of prestige that mix up sharing, authority, prestige and turf wars. It is not as bad as that sounds, it’s actually much better. But it is hard to develop a project across disciplines because each of us have different disciplinary (institutional, theoretical and so on) masters to please, and within the university different responsibilities and budget lines – it is often easier to forge partnerships with people outside of the institution than within. (We are all to blame.)
So, that long aside aside, the university as an institution is largely self defining and emphasises models of management, knowledge production and dissemination that are largely industrial. Some of this is internal, some of it is a product of a federal government that is similarly twentieth century in its vision. One consequence of this, and where it is particularly visible, is in the DLS. Here the learning system is usually:
The biggest simplest problem though, is that the DLS (and their ilk) just assumes that everything can, should, and does live inside itself. This is the opposite of Web 2.0 education. In Web 2.0 education a student has blog over there, videos elsewhere, several email and chat identities (possibly several blogs), and is happy to move between these. What they need to learn is how to weave these things together, so that their video appears in their blog which gets tagged to form a portfolio and so on. It is about porousness. To the world, the web, and to each other.
Yes, there are risks, as there was when writing and then publishing first formed (where is our cultural history or self awareness as intellectuals not to recognise the anxieties that accompanied the rise of mass literacy, the novel, tv and so on being played out once again as we invent all the reasons why university students – adults – cannot possibly have their work public, or why their blogs must remain closed). But there are also enormous possibilities, that moment when the student realises that someone somewhere else has read their blog, even left a comment. Or when they leave with their very own ongoing portfolio of work courtesy of their blog.
So, to bring this to a premature end, Web 2.0 is about being porous, about distributed, shared and visible parts that can be connected. It is not about a single system that does it all. Our students will come to us with existing blogs. We should not make them start a new one, only to delete it in 3 months, but simply let them post in their existing blog and aggregate content as necessary to other places. Or not. This lets them learn and be networked knowledge workers, to make mistakes, experiments, take risks and break things (if not now, when? in their first real job??).
These skills are cross disciplinary, universal for all professional careers, and are the basis of networked literacies, the literacy of this century. At the moment our DLS keeps people in carrels looking inwards. The world is outwards, and it is now nearby, let’s join it.
Jeremy has left a really interesting comment on my post about Web 2 Education. As he points out, when we use RSS to suck content to elsewheres then a pile of contextual language cues disappear. When I write things like “my post” and it now lives in a different blog where content from other writers is collated “my” begins to get thin. And then there’s the problem of things like “here”. He asks what should happen if the post gets edited? And I’m wondering what about comments? If the blog post gets comments at vogmae, and those comments are valuable, should they also travel as a part of the clone of the post? For how long (are comments a week after publication ok but 6 months not? why?).
[Perhaps now the third person should be used, banish "I" to become vogmae?]
I have dealt with similar things before, when I used to teach a much more traditional hypertext subject and we all wrote in Storyspace. Here you quickly realise that all of the connectors that form the basis of ‘good’ essay writing don’t work in a hypertext environment. Things like “therefore”, “hence”, “as I argued above” and so on are all reliant on a linear, page based form. In a nodal system you cannot begin with “hence” since the reader may not have come from the node where the prior form was established. (This of course doesn’t mean you can’t argue in hypertext, it just means you need to use different shapes, see David Kolb’s Sprawling Places and Socrates in the Labyrinth for examples.) Now we not only write but publish all our media in an always distributed mode and these issues come back powerfully. What might it mean in your video blog post, which has been posted via Blip.tv to say “my blog”? or “here”? or even “my channel”? And when this video is syndicated elsewhere (with our without your consent) where is it now?
This of course begs a project where you make content that is only ever distributed. Like the rhizome net.art project I participated in a few years ago where parts of an image where hosted on different servers all around the world and assembled, via a plain old fashioned webpage, into a single sensible image via the browser.
For students, outside of the obvious case of wikis where your writing is distributed via its openness to your other writers, how do you write in a blog where your material is reblogged, aggregated and redistributed? What about for us academics? Is this just writing that travels? As opposed to travel writing? What do we need to write differently to let our words travel?
There has been an explosion of ‘quality’ things at vogmae’s place of employment in recent years. These are actually simple empirical procedures that require compliance, things like form X must be responded to within 5 working days, and so on. Now while these response rates etc might improve the client experience (we shifted from stakeholders to clients a few years back, not sure when students get to be students again, probably when they no longer leave university in a primarily public system with significant levels of debt), as far as I can tell they are just a really dodgy form of empirical managerialism.
Which means things like this are trivial to measure (in 2006 form x was responded to in the required time period 82% of the time, in 2007 this has improved to 95%) and so became false indices of improvement. There is nothing in this about the quality of the experience, beyond the assumption that getting it done in time is quality enough, let alone whether the outcome helped anybody. No doubt many times it does, but at the end of the day it is a process of working out what is actually measurable (quantified), putting in place a procedure to actually measure this (compliance) and then using this as the basis for improvements in quality. As a teacher it would be like saying “all essays will be returned with comments within a week”, and demonstrating that I met this, but not paying any attention to a) why it might be worthwhile (or not) to respond within a week and b) whether the comments actually make a difference and c) if this is an appropriate thing to do in the first place. This sort of empiricism is also how I think most online learning systems work. Because they are computerised, some things become easily measurable (how many words has student x said over period n in forum y) and all of a sudden assessment revolves around these trivial quantifiables.
Qualitative, rather than quantitative, learning outcomes are much harder to measure, though I’d argue they are also much more powerful, relevant, and productive. It is the difference between number of blog posts and links in, versus quality of the ideas in the blog posts and the relative authority (and location) of the links in.
There’s been quite a bit of email to and fro amongst the mashed DLC project team while this site is being developed. There are two major issues at the moment.
The first is how to aggregate content (via RSS) from existing sources and bringing it into mashedlc in a meaningful way. What this means in practice is that I have an existing blog (this one), rather than having to reproduce the same content in multiple places, or to have to decide does this content live here or there (the blog generated by drupal at mashedlc), I can write content and publish it in one place. Then via the magic of RSS this can be bought into this site. I can use a specific category in my existing (WordPress) blog, so only those posts somehow relevant to the DLC project are aggregatged. Once in this site this content should be automagically added to the blog under my username here, and to the project blog.
One of the key features of a Web 2.0 education engine/system/paradigm is the ability to write and publish (in blogs there is no distance between the former and the latter) in one location and then weave and build content via RSS. So if each project member has a blog, then rather than having to write in two places you keep writing in your existing research and/or teaching blog and simply allow content to be pulled into here.
The advantage for mashedlc is that the project blog here will collect all relevant content from distributed locations and authors. This adds value to our work as individuals, and to this project courtesy of the qualitative changes that aggregation allow. If the system can’t manage this then the model is fundamentally broken – Web 2.0 (including for education) is about letting content by where it’s authors place it and then remixing it (if you like) via lightweight but robust protocols like RSS into new formations. If you have to have a new account here, and have to manually write and publish here, rather than your existing sites (my flickr, blip.tv, blog, delicious and citeulike accounts for instance) then inspite of the social and network aspects it is just another institutionally centric model.
I’ll write about the other problem later. My ten month old daughter is pleading for food.
Andreas is co-curating a videoblog festival as part of pixelodeon in early June. Big congratulations to one of the early video bloggers who actually gets the differences between tv, video, tv on the web and what video blogging might be. It is a step forward that videoblogging is getting this sort of critical and creative attention. On the other hand what does it mean that you might ‘screen’ a video blog? (If a video has links in it, how would you scren that?). BTW, pixelodeon is a festival created by videobloggers.
A sketch work with a couple of time based links out. Not in the video, but only because I’m building content for a different project. Frustrated that I haven’t been able to make anything for so long, so today I spent a couple of hours using some footage I shot on the mobile phone in March. This is the work.
In March J (8), the better half, C (9 months) and myself dropped by NGV international for a quick visit. J and the better half joined the queue for the Eliasson work “The cubic structural evolution project 2004” which consists of thousands of white lego bricks (all the same size, I think) which you are invited to use to build buildings with. He’s from Iceland, is Danish and lives in Germany. This project I think has a lot of the qualities of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics where the work is obviously not the finished ‘piece’ but the social relations established between participants, the gallery, the objects that get left and rebuilt, and of course Lego, that brick of our childhoods. This empahsis on process, on what forms a work rather than the object itself, is of course common to much contemporary arts practice, and in some rarer cases academic work (Kolb, Ulmer, Amerika, Vitanza all spring to mind, all North American, what’s that about or is my reading just too small, and three of them all have a one degree connection to Ulmer, I guess that answers that question?).
Sometimes this is what I think my vog practice is also trying to do. It is not about finished works (well, that’s obvious), neither are they stories, they are moments between episodes and are trying to enlarge, to look into, those moments of decision that constitute the work of the work.
What Lionel explores here is precisely what we mean by constraint. You want to do x, but the software doesn’t let you. You either work out a way to get there (via A, then B and finally C) or you need to change your approach and outcome. As I said in today’s lecture, we want you to meet these sorts of technical come creative constraints and work out solutions. This is the very nitty gritty of creativity. Too often when you learn ‘technology’ it becomes an endless parade of new skills/tricks so rather than having to stop and work out a creative solution to a problem it becomes, “oh we just didn’t learn enough to do that but I’m sure you can if only we knew more”. This is featurism masquerading as creativity. (Imagine you’re a painter and you don’t have the right colour. You could complain that Winsor and Newton don’t have the right colour, but next year they will, or you could figure out how to mix colours. The latter is an artist, the former is, well, paint by numbers.)
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