vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Projections

Projections is a blog by Jon (sorry, don’t remember how I found a link to this and I can’t find out who Jon is, perhaps a case of an academic blog where if you need to ask then you don’t need to know?) which is about the representation, etc of Latin America in Hollywood and European cinema. Not sure why other cinemas aren’t there, perhaps they don’t need to use Latin America as a marker of all that it gets used for (make your own list, it’s easy – corruption, graft, sweat, carnality, dark jungles, rain forests that contain monsters/miracles/epiphanies, and so on). Most of the commentary appears to be on specific films and their use of Latin America, but it is excellent commentary. For someone who has drifted out of screen studies in recent years, finding sites like these are exciting, if only because it is refreshing to find good cinema studies being done this way. And it lets me skim read some material to get a sense of the current intellectual flavours populating cinema studies. It has always had strong fashions, some might even say foppish.

Vidgets: Network Based Video Works

David Wolf’s exegesis of his Masters project is now available. You can get the pdf from: http://dpwolf.net/blog/ma-exegesis-vidgets/

I supervised David through his Masters, and watched his development from building proof of concept works in LiveStage Pro to becoming an adept at Quartz Composer where in the end he was building custom VJ tools. Theoretically the work was informed by Russolo’s noise machines where the any sound becomes and all data.

Longsight

Longsight is a company that provides support for the deployment and use of open source tools and applications in higher education. This strikes me as a much more sensible model for a business, and for education, than some of the existing traditional models. Why?

1. Open source has a community of distributed users and expertise which means you get support.
2. It has a rapid development cycle and also tends to squash bugs quickly.
3. Open source systems tend to do a good job of being interoperable and talking to each other

As we move to an increasingly porous media environment we also expect and would like our students to be similarly porous in their use of media. The are no distinctions between media moments and activities. I no longer go over there to use the phone (which is on the desk and needs its own time and place), or there to my desk to write, or that space there which is the library, and so on. Each of these happens together (I text from my phone while writing on my computer in the library) and as the whole web 2.0 thing shows, we weave them together. But most of our learning management systems are following industrial models. They are made by single companies which own the intellectual property and they emphasise management of students and learning processes rather than conversations between parts. The result of this is you get modules that add “blogging” but blogging is only a simple diary form without many of what we would recognise as basic requirements of blogging (RSS, trackbacks, easy integration to things like flickr, blip.tv and so on). It is a Henry Ford model (any colour as long as its black) which flies in the face of our students experience of media, our own use of media, and what we ought to be doing.

New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies

An issue of Fibreculture Journal that I have edited has finally seen the light of day. It is themed “New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies“. It has been delayed, purely because of my tardiness, but now that it is together it is looking good.

3eep

This is a company that offers a social networking platform. Which is smart and interesting as it recognises that a viable business model for this stuff is not to offer a specific content service (eg youtube as service for videos) but that if you can build something that offers the backend with a usable front end so that I can buy into it to run the niche service I need, then you’ve got a business. Pronounced “threep“. So this one is a social software engine/system which is intended for use in sports communities. A strong market. So, what would the equivalent platform look like, be, do for academics? For students? Why?

Head South Young Man

Peter Morse is on an expedition to the Antarctic. He’s going to be photographing Mawson’s Huts as part of a visualisation dash cultural heritage dash computer dash Australian history research project. Sort of Extreme Blogging.

Generation Why

My university, and I’ve not doubt most others, are providing impressive resources for ‘elearning’ (you can substitute whatever currently useful argot is necessary for your neighbourhood). This includes enterprise level learning management systems, often instructional designers, developers or interaction designers to make/code learning objects and the like. Now the problems with these are obvious. They retain an industrial model of teaching and the teacher and are primarily content management systems dressed up as learning management systems (just because it provides online quizzes with feedback about mistakes hardly makes it interactive, nor a ‘learning’). These systems can do good things, I guess, though they remain much more empowering for teachers rather than students as they make the entry threshold for putting your (the teacher’s) content online that much lower.

Now this really bugs me, and is something I just don’t understand. Staff who have learnt how to use these things leave workshops exhilarated and excited. These are usually staff who have quite low level tech skills so getting course material online is big. But the big deal is not about getting the course content online, it is the excitement of making, of publishing and getting work out there. That is still a buzz if you haven’t done it before. Yet each of these teachers then institutes a system where this same exhilaration, these same excitements and possibilities, are not not provided for the students. The students just get to respond to content. Usually in formats that increasingly bear little relationship to their day to day experience of networks (a clunky threaded discussion board for instance).

Similarly the groups that all our universities now have for helping produce high quality online learning resources suffer from the same lack. They are about making very good content that students can then use. Rarely are they about making systems that students can then use to make content. If this were print then our institutions are helping all the academics to make books for the students to read, thinking this is a god send for the students. Yet the students can’t write. That’s why I just don’t get it. Surely we want the students to write the books for it is in the making that deep knowledge is not only demonstrated (teaching as auditing) but made and discovered. And with our digital technologies surely we should be in the business of making systems that let our students write/build/design ‘content’ that we should be doing.

At the moment it is a manuscript culture. Glorious beautiful illuminated digital (interactive because you can click) manuscripts. They’re chained to the desk (do not use this outside of the institution, you may view, perhaps add a note, but not fundamentally alter, you may observe and even let it run, and so on). What we really need are biro’s and notepads.

It’s Free

At the staff development event I participated in the other day I saw some great projects. Quite a few staff in health sciences are working with the university’s Educational Media Group to produce educational resources. They were also told about the university’s copyright management service which does a great job of helping staff get copyright clearance for material to be used in teaching resources and the like. It was impressed upon everyone, only a couple of times, that these services were available free.

Now, in case this gets misjudged for something else both of these services are excellent. That is not the object of my observation. It is that the culture of an institution of learning has changed to the point we need to be reminded that simple and basic in house services, both fundamental to the delivery of quality education, don’t incur a cost. We need to be reminded of this because everything else costs. That cost is the bottom line of the business model (more or less). We are still 50% public funded and are now obligated in the university to use the learning management system as a ‘minimum online presence’ so in many ways it would be a bit rich if the things weren’t free. But it is sad that it even needs to be made as a selling point that a basic service in a public university for staff is that it is free.

Scorsese does Borges

This is an ad which is almost viral which is Scorsese channelling Borges cinematically. The premise is to preserve a film that hasn’t been made by making it but by making it as it would have been if it had been made. The ending is particularly droll.

Retreat Pictures

The research retreat at Daylesford, where we developed the post industrial media project, has some pics.