vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Endorsement

Several years ago the media program I’m involved in undertook a major review. I took that as an opportunity to lobby, harangue and browbeat (I am a dogged and unweilding bastard at times like these) everyone to make curriculum the major aspect of the review and its major outcome. As a consequence we developed an entirely new curriculum, and have been trying (where again I have recently been doggedly unweildingly browbeating my colleagues) to implement a new pedagogy too. Problem and process based, decline of content based models, a move towards peer and self learning (and assessment), and a dissolving of the distinctions between theory and practice.

This was done in the deep conviction that students will learn more valuable things if they learn about learning, and the processes underlying everything they do. It is a stronger learning outcome to realise that the edit menu applies to all media (text, image, sound, video) and so you can always edit parts (most students, even after two years of video production, used to be amazed that you could edit video from the Edit menu in something like QuickTime Player – you’d be surprised how many people teaching video production are also surprised) into new wholes, than it is to have memorised all the keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro.

This blog post from a student is one of the ways in which I know we are doing things better, and on the right track. It isn’t that the ABC sat up to take notice, it is that the student (who at one point was struggling with some of this process orientated work) now understands why, because he gets the how.

Hard Disk Housekeeping

Well, the hard drive on my PowerBook is getting over full (well, unlike a filing cabinet you can’t over full a hard drive…). I’ve moved some video projects off it, but as quickly as I recovered some space it seems that I lost it again. So last night I ran Cache Out X to clean out all the caches, and then monolingual to delete a pile of language support and platform support (eg G5 code etc) to clear up some space. It’s helped quite a bit, though now of course when I upgrade to a new PowerBook next year a pile of my self-purchased applications will require a complete reinstall as I’ve now removed support for Intel architectures. It really is a pain not being able to keep all of your work on the one drive on your laptop, as inevitably what you archive elsewhere becomes what you want.

Return of the Rhizome

A few years ago I made some rhizome templates. I’ve now written an academic essay (coming out in a journal soon) about them, and I’ve also decided to rebuild the templates. The original ones had some bugs, and were also designed for 160 x 120 videos. I’ve now made them bigger – what with increases in bandwidth, video on the web, and so on I figured 320 x 240 would probably be OK. So, this is made with the first of the new release of the rhizome templates. The content consists of a project we did in Integrated Media One this year, “things that quicken the heart”, and then a sequence of shadows that I filmed. They were not originally compressed to use in a rhizome template, I think each is a bit too high in their datarates, but it seems to play OK here at home on my broadband…

btw, the video that loads when you click the poster image is actually a poster movie which when clicked on will load the movie in QuickTime player, not the browser.

Blip and Facebook

Blip now talks into Facebook. Via the blip blog.

Miro (no, not that Miro).

Democracy Player is now Miro, apparently too many people thought the former was a political application or slogan.

Look, it’s 2.0!

Seems at the moment if you stick 2.0 after something you have automatic network literacy credibility. This is because web 2.0 stuck so well as a meme, though I (and others) still think web 2.0 seems to be the web catching up to what the original hypertext pioneers described in the beginning… but that’s another story. So education 2.0, media studies 2.0, and so it goes on. The paucity of vision here is sad. Five years ago it would have been iMediaStudies, iEnterprise, iEducation. Five years before that eMedia, eEnterprise, eEducation. Apart from knowing how to rebrand to sell mutton dressed as lamb, what have we really learnt?

Videoblog History at AoIR

Richard Show has a proposal accepted for the next AoIR. It’s a videoblog based research documentary come piece about the history of videoblogging.

The videoblog community, partly due to their dissatisfaction with the wikipedia videoblog page (wikiepedia emphasises neutrality over all else, which does mean it tends to be bare bones rather than critical, but it does want to be an encyclopedia after all), have been writing their own history. This is interesting in terms of a self documentation exercise, but as an academic I am intensely uncomfortable, after all I should be in there, but apparently I have to put myself in there to be there. That just runs against the rails of peer review, recognition and judgement. I’m all for forms of self publishing (this is a blog after all) but there is also some sort of line that I don’t know about but feel that I find difficult to cross. (This could just be culturally specific too. In most cultures it is not up to yourself to declare the significance – or not- of your contribution.)

Will be interested to see where Richard gets to with his project. And he should get in touch with Seth who is involved with the videovortex conference and presented a creative research project at AoIR in Brisbane last year.

On the Event of Her First Birthday

Cleo turned one last week. There was a party with family and friends on the weekend. A party on the actual day of the birthday. And cake and “happy birthday” at daycare. This is from lunch on our Big Day Out At The Zoo. It was cold, grey, and she was wide eyed (arm outstretched pointing with her insistent “UhUhUh”) at the lions, Australian fur seals, giraffes, elephants and zebras. She slept past the gorillas, tree top apes, otters, tigers, mandrils and pygmy hippopotamus.

iPod and Non-Place

Sean suggests that the iPod needs to be considered temporally as well as spatially. Related note, when I had a discussion with honours students about a chapter from Augé’s “Non-Places” the observation was made that we use/wear our iPods in Augé’s non-places. The airport, the train carriage, possibly the mall.

Vernaculars for Knowledge

I’ve been writing an essay about material thought, bouncing out from Paul Carter’s Material Thinking. The essay is a contribution to a larger collaborative project where a range of academics, all (except myself) from design schools, are writing about Carter’s book to develop ideas around material thinking in the context of design education. My approach has become quite different, where I’m interested in how material thinking applies to alternative forms of humanities writing as a research practice – not research and writing as documentation or even a essay outlining what has been discovered, but writing (very broadly conceived) as the activity of research in itself. So, as I’ve tried to write this I have increasingly realised I have a whole epistemological vernacular. It is my own argot, but many of the key terms I use are highly loaded and have became a sort of theoretical shorthand. Even as I write this, which was to be an explanation for a new category in my blog “epistemological vernaculars”, I’ve realised that each of my key terms could easily become a brief essay in their own right! Anyway, one facet (that’s one of my shorthand theoretical terms, so stay tuned) of the writing and thinking I’ve been doing around material thought is that in material thinking we each develop our own vernaculars. These can become habits, well, they are habits, but as habits they are ways of doing and ways of thinking which orientate actions, ideas, and problems.