Have added a draft of an essay that outlines a self assessment protocol for the evaluation of a student’s own participation within a subject. Lacks references and a proper edit. But the heart of the protocol is rather turgidly described. This is one of the teaching patterns I use in different ways at different times to help students ‘see’ their own abilities, styles and methods.
Have finally put the 2011 Korsakow student work online. Only 17 this time around, not actually certain how many are being made just now. As with the 2010 work, a widely varying bunch and batch.
From Hannah Brasier, an honours student I am supervising (we’re working in Korsakow):
How do I conceive of and make a slow interactive online video work? This is a problem because there is little work available that considers the slow in relation to interactive online video. Deleuze’s concept of the affect image provides a possible framework and method for how to make and theorise such a work/project. This may provide a method and theoretical model for making and understanding complex multilinear videos in the context of the slow.
The ACH have a simple poll system to determine where to spend their energies for the coming year. I like it. There are two proposals presented, you select the one that matters more. And it just keeps going. It is an elegant way to rank relative importance amongst a group. Quick squiz at the source code of the page and I find that All our Ideas. This is very nice. I want to play with this in class.
Massively Open Online Courses, in the spirit of Stanford’s recent AI course, now one of the flavours of the e-education month. Some associated with the Stanford project have now spun off Udacity and Coursera. The education platform wars are beginning. For someone like me at a piddling regional university, this really is a great opportunity. Some of the grunt work of content can be farmed out to these sorts of eduservice providers freeing up time and resources for real engagement and learning. It is obvious that while these services may address the content issue, they are going to struggle with the epistemological and ontological facets of university education which revolve around learning how to be (a designer, media practitioner, economist, doctor).
Or just use the current ‘flipped’ model, send them to do something like Networked Life at Penn which they do in their own time then in class, let’s do, hey, I know, diaspora (or some similar enquiry based learning action) in our face to face class time. And note to self, what would a course on post industrial media look like in this format? Why?
In the honours research subject I teach I have nutted out a simple rubric which I think is quite effective in helping students to identity what they are doing, why, and begin to see how. The issue in the past was always trying to teach particular ‘methods’ or to begin from something like project or practice based research, and work out how to get them to understand where it fitted with what they thought they were doing. This is just clumsy since they haven’t really had to think about their knowledge practices in this way before. So I have simply flipped it around to make the research problem drive everything else.
I know you will go, “isn’t that obvious!”. But it isn’t. If you are new to research you don’t know about different methods so you don’t really even know how to frame a question about what method you might use. Yet I think it is imperative in research to learn that there are varieties of ways of understanding, doing, enflaming, and therefore answering. That one research question could have very different shapes and answers by using different methods or even theories. But more importantly that all the talk of ‘methods’ gets in the way of recognising that you need theoretical frames to apply, make, and argue and if you can identify and use these then this then segues into the implications of methods. IN my experience most methods courses do this the other way round. Here’s a method, here’s how you use it, use it. Yet we all know that as researchers we don’t use ‘methods’ in this way.
This is particularly a problem in the context of students making things. Trying to conceptualise their making as ‘practice’ or ‘project’ based research seems to require building quite a complex edifice around doing that just seems to complicate the heart of the issue which would appear to be that you a legitimate research question, that the artefact must in some way respond to this, and that you need to use the artefact to provide evidence for your question. I’ve made this very simple by making visible not that it is practice or project based method but simply by asking at the start, what theories do you need to use to understand the question? Now, use these theories to evaluate the project.
So, the six questions:
I have been teaching webby internetty things since 1995. It is easy to just get all technical and teach, well, technical things. But there is an ethics to network practice which any teaching about online stuff needs to include, model, perform and nurture. Don’t like web culture, well we can change that.
Sorry, that was an aside. Here’s a subject for you. The preconditions are:
The aim: to install and host a Disapora server for the cohort and use it. Why? Well you will learn a pile of stuff about how you make things online, both how hard and easy it is. This involves negotiating technical things, social and technical protocols, and so on. Then you’re pretty much running a social networking site. What you do next is up to them.
Here are the steps.
The things that will break this are to solve too many things for the students. Though equally just ‘throwing them in at the deep end’ is as problematic. In a subject such as this I would spend the first two learning blocks (sessions, classes) talking through and building models for how to communicate as a group, how to share stuff, and make sure that it becomes embedded. If this means setting aside specific time every time to this, then that’s what you do. I’d also give everyone plenty of opportunity to be able to identify what they are good and not good at, so they can initiate and contribute to what they want to and are capable of (there are various methods to achieve this, I personally use simple visualisation methods where students graph their previous experiences to identify what they like and don’t like, what they’re good and not good at).
This doesn’t have a specific shape, different groups may form through the course (a tech team, a researcher team, a promotions team, a policy team, a documentation team), and different things may come to matter (sociology of online identity rather than the social graph, server maintenance rather than small world networks). It is driven by enquiry, a specific project, and a simple proposition: get a social networking site running and working (what does ‘working’ mean?). How you assess will end up probably being defined/constrained by your own institution’s demands or requirements, but give them the permission, scope and tools to document, outline and make visible to themselves where they started and where they got to then I reckon good things will have happened. (The rub is in letting assessment make visible this change, rather than merely how much they ‘know’ about something.)
From the Integrated Media blog:
If you wait till inspiration arrives you will not make very much. Good makers make, all the time. They don’t wait. They don’t need to. Not because they are always ‘inspired’ but because they just begin anywhere. You make way more than you keep. When we wait for inspiration we assume that we can and should only make things worth keeping. We don’t do that with words. Nor doodles. And we don’t need to anymore with video, it costs next to nothing to make, use, store. Video is now like our words. (Just sayin’.)
Integrated Media has kicked off. I subscribe to all the blogs and part of the subject involves me writing commentary. More like sports broadcasting at times (actually doing this via twitter is a good looking idea). A lot of really interesting stuff happens in this liminal pedagogical space between the classroom, the student’s writing, and me drawing it back in from the atomised experience of the student to the collective of the cohort. Here’s one from today:
It’s Friday afternoon, I rode 65km on my bike on the way to work (what you might also call school) this morning and the glorious autumn sun outside is shining a bit too seductively off my bike behind me in the office. There’s no segue here, just a shoutout to Thomas, who I editorialised with last week (yes, I responded to Thomas but it really is good for you all to realise that I use this as an opportunity to engage with everyone, so when I riff of ya stuff it’s usually to illustrate something for all 84 of those doing IM and anyone else passing by) when I did the blog equivalent of a clip behind the ear. No, I won’t read all participation criteria, but after writing on and around 20 or 30 if you bother to read here you will get the gist of it. If you don’t, or can’t, then it’s going to always be a struggle no matter what we do, isn’t it? I take it seriously by doing that, at some point you need to too (as Thomas now has). But I should not need to do this individually for everyone, its a tone, a sentiment, an attitude. A milieu. As Thomas picks up, your blog is you. The more like you it becomes, the better it is, the easier it is to do, and the more pleasure it brings. You nurture your own identity here and this, now, is as important an identity as any other associated with you. How many of you, when you google your own name, has your blog as the first thing on Google. What stronger indication of the authority of your blog in relation to identity in a networked age do you want? (Or do you never use Google?)
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