vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Treacle

Is a lovely colour and viscosity. Much like my PowerBook. Lately it is has been slow, slower, slowest. That spinning beach ball of boredom making managing email nigh impossible. Quite check in Activity Monitor to discover that the corporate virus scan program (that is part of the generic install) has 3 daemons running which are collectively chewing up close to 30% of CPU. And this was after I had made sure I told it not to automatic check files and all the rest of it. Now deleted, killed, removed. Not sure if it will make a lot of difference to the beachball, but I hope so. (I am due to get a new PowerBook next year, but hey, who’s counting?)

Crystalline Video

This is a draft abstract (is there such a thing?) for a paper and video project I’m currently working on.

Video as a form has retained its formal and material ‘wholeness’ as it has migrated to digital and more recently networked environments. This conservativeness at the material level has not hindered the use and appropriation of the network by emerging and potentially novel forms of video practice, but it remains an essentially backwards looking form as it confuses access, distribution and equity with the new.

Softvideo provides a framework for the reconsideration of digital networked video whereby the granularity and fragmentary nature of video and film is preserved after publication. With the addition of a link architecture softvideography becomes crystalline in structure where any moment, or point, in a softvideo work becomes a possible point of connection with any other.

This crystalline structure, when taken literally, provides a productive theoretical and applied framework to conceive of a softvideographic practice. In traditional editing (hard video) an edit is a decision point. In principle this moment is infinitely divisible, and can be connected to any other subsequent sequence, however in hard video once determined this moment and point is single, fixed, absolute and linear.

When conceived of as a crystalline structure a shot or a sequence in a softvideo work now offers multiple facets or faces of connection. Some may be to other sequences in the one work, others might be to other objects, yet others could be to other parts of other videos.

In this manner the crystalline structure of softvideo produces not only a porous multiplicity of pathways, and so in turn a different sort of video object, but it also productively problematises the basic tenets of film and video narrative. In hard video each edit becomes the fixing of a duration as a particular path through the footage. In softvideo as a crystalline structure editing becomes an actualised series of virtual pathways through the footage.

This essay intends to explore this idea, and to provide an example of such a video work.

Textural

Somewhere around twenty years ago I fancied myself as an artist. A painter. Spent a lot of my money and time on paint, canvas, gesso, brushes. Covered the floor with my efforts, scoured a university library for books about painters. After a few years I learnt my lessons. One, I can’t draw and every painter I ever thought anything of could certainly draw. Two, that I loved the colour and texture of paint. Its plasticity, the materiality of a colour which has a surface.

I think this is why I’m particularly interested in the relation of text to image. Whether it be cinema studies in a different register with the object of study located inside the field of writing (and vice versa), videoblogging where the text of the blog post is able to establish some sort of relation to the video, and finally the vogs I sometimes make where there is text within the field of video. This relation of text to image is one of the ways to introduce texture, the textural into an electronic practice where there is no longer surface to speak of. Texture happens in the distance between the two general economies of text and image. In digital environments the gift of bringing these media together does not erase their distance. As they come closer together their differences and the distance between becomes enlarged. This is the textural (not merely the textual) and this is one of the textures I enjoy.

Road Trip

This week I’ve spent a couple of days in Canberra, attending a meeting about the Distributed Learning Communities project I’m involved in. These pictures show the heavy hitting Carrick DLC project team hard at it.

We planned next steps, but also spent a rather intense three or four hours just writing content in a wiki which is building a cookbook about using blogs and wikis in education. Still got a long way to go with it, but we made an excellent start on putting together a meaningful resource. Well, hopefully. When you start looking there isn’t that much out there that is that useful about using blogs and wikis in teaching and learning. That probably sounds like heresy, given all the papers popping up, but most of these seem to be about the effects (positive or negative) but not very many actually provide strategies – recipes, that actually work, let alone rationales for why and how.

What follows is part of what I wrote about the disadvantages of blogging if you’re a postgraduate researcher.

Well, it takes a bit of time. Not a lot, but it does take some. It takes commitment to get started and to keep it going to the point where you then experience the value of your blog, from there it tends to look after itself. Many (perhaps the majority) in the academic world still equate blogs with fumbling adolescent confessions, and while there are plenty of these there are also thousands of stunning academic blogs. But you’re part of a new generation, so rather than let yourself be acculturated to the old skool world of pen and parchment join this century and begin making a contribution to knowledge from the start.

Some make the mistake of having written some good ideas in their blogs and then move on from these, letting them slip away from their thesis. No, just because you’ve written about it in your blog does not mean you can’t use it in your blog, and feel free to rifle through your blog to grab material for your thesis! The first point though is important, as a research student you can get a bit lost in what you’re doing, so by all means drop the bad ideas, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve argued for, and solved something, because you blogged it. It’s your blog, not your thesis.

While this is what I wrote on a page about why you might blog:

It is probably easiest to begin with why not to blog.

You don’t blog because it is new, fashionable, or a panacea to teaching ills. You will use a blog because what a [[CookBookBlogPedagogy|blog provides or allows for]] supports something you want to achieve in your teaching and learning. These aims (it should be obvious) should come first, then you can work out what technologies will support or work with these outcomes.

Blogging does not automatically make student writers (in much the same way that inviting students to have a journal or write essays does not, of itself, make them writers). The use of a blog needs to be modelled and scaffolded so that its use is understood, makes sense to the students, and of course is relevant to what they’re doing. (And if you introduce a blog, expect a lot of writing, but only provide it with minimal assessment weight then students will not use it.)

Blogging, by itself, does not make, produce or develop collaboration. If you think this then you probably also think that setting a group project also produces and develops collaboration. Collaboration is a learnt skill, which means it can be taught, and assessed for equitably (the most common complaint amongst students about group work is that workload is never evenly distributed, and assessment is therefore inequitable as a result). Ditto with blogs and collaboration. Blogs can help collaboration, but how this happens is not self evident, so you need to do more than just introduce a blog.

Twenty Years Ago

When a younger man time was measured briefly. Well, it wasn’t briefly then. It is now. Things happened “a couple of years ago”, which was near enough to be good enough. Now it is “about twenty years ago”, and once again near enough is good enough. I’m not sure when this change of scale happened, though it seems to have been recently. I wonder if the number of decades will change?

Wiki and Teaching

What follows is a bit of a brain dump on something that is going to end up in some other places. Forewarned is forearmed.

Too many people decide to use things like blogs, wiki’s, myspace or whatever because they confuse innovation, novelty and pedagogy. Just because you move to something ‘kewl’ doesn’t mean your teaching, or your learning outcomes, will follow suit – particularly if you don’t let your teaching adapt itself to the material nature of these environments. So, I thought I’d quickly jot down why I use a wiki with my students. Four things come to mind.

• collaboration
• public
• connectedness
• low tech

Collaboration
Graduates are going to be knowledge workers. They might not define themselves as such, but they will be. They will use digital technologies as a part of their everyday work environment. Increasingly they will collaborate where they will work in some form of team where there will be some sort rhetoric (real or imagined) of equality. In other words your boss will not tell just you what to do and then let you make your individual contribution with no knowledge or participation in what others are doing. Indeed, as a graduate you’d expect this to be the case in your job.

A wiki is in its nature to be collaborative. It doesn’t ‘foster’ collaboration, but it provides a simple place in which collaboration can take place. Simply inviting students into a wiki and letting them write is not being collaborative. That’d be like inviting them into a car with no driving lessons, letting them all out onto the road, and proudly declaring “they’re driving”. So you need to teach how to go about collaboration, and use the wiki as the project environment for these collaborations.

If you want to value the collaboration (and if you don’t then why are you doing it?) then it also needs to be assessed as a collaboration which also requires quite specific things. (If you think the best way to assess a collaboration is for the teacher to assign a group mark, and perhaps rely on students self nominating problems, then you might find that your students don’t really like the wiki very much.)

Public
Whenever I use blogs, wikis and so on with students I have them outside the firewall. Public. I teach university students, they’re adults. They are old enough to drink, vote, drive, get a gun licence and get married without their parents’ consent. They can learn about the responsibilities of copyright, and becoming a knowledge contributor/producer rather than consumer. They’re old enough to be able to do things publicly, as long as why this is being done is clear, and its implications examined, discussed, and owned.

This can’t happen if the wiki is quarantined. As an example I once ran a project with students where they had to write critical biographies of individuals. All were alive. Most students pretty quickly realised that their subjects were reading the wiki. This inserted the students into a knowledge economy, they learnt that what they wrote mattered (on several levels), and that others used the knowledge they produced.

Connectedness
Knowledge work this century has two major facets. One is the discovery and dissemination of new content (always on the shoulders of others). The other is being able to establish (discover, build, reveal) connections between existing knowledges. This can be simply gathering novel connections between existing information or knowing how to find answers to the right questions (as Sebastian likes to say, we no longer have a paucity of sources but an excess and the skill is in farming this excess successfully).

A wiki is all about making connections, that is its hypertextual raison d’étre. As content is added links are made between modes (one student might be writing about Roland Barthes, and mentions poststructuralism, which another student is writing about, any, both or another student links each to the other). These links and connections are the visible manifestation of knowledge connections. They may work literally (a link from a node about poststructuralism to a biography of Barthes), metaphorically (I link from “pleasurable futures” and the reader is expected to work out the relation of link text to destination) or somewhere in between.

low tech
It only takes a class to learn the basics of wiki syntax, and perhaps another class after students have been using the wiki to develop some wiki gardening skills. How to find existing content, avoiding duplicate nodes, and how to remove ambiguous nodes. This means the group very quickly moves to concentrating on writing, research, and publishing, and not on tech-geek tricks.

This low tech threshold has always been important in what I do in digital media. My students are not programmers, they are media students (basically arts students with sound and video recorders) so what is being taught are models for thinking in networked spaces. This is much more important than trying to learn how to build/script/program these spaces.

Now, there is nothing in the above which suggests that I use a wiki because I just wanted to use a wiki. The wiki lets me achieve particular learning outcomes, quite unrelated to the wiki as a particular technology, and these are the reasons that inform my use of the wiki. This does not mean that the use of a wiki does not require changes to my teaching – it does (for example how do you assess work where all content can be edited and amended by all participants?), but the wiki enables particular process based outcomes and that is what informs my use of it.

Tinderbox 4

Mark has released Tinderbox 4. List of key new features available. Software I use every day.

Another World Made

Congratulations to a fine friend who is now officially a Father. Welcome to a parallel universe.