vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

The Second Post Industrial Media Afternoon Tea (draft)

I ran one of these late last year, and am in the process of editing the contributions into an ebook, and a colleague and I are also working the video of the event into an interactive video essay. The model works very well, and so a second one is being planned for mid March while Andrew Morrison (Oslo School of Architecture and Design) is visiting us.

Critical Practice? A second Post Industrial Media afternoon tea.

What: A series of responses, riffs, ideas, appropriations and critiques around the concept of ‘critical practice’ in the context of post industrial media (more or less using the outline below as a framing proposition).

How: Participants will each make a 5 minute presentation in relation to the concept of ‘critical practice’. This will be followed by a moderated open discussion, debate and conversation amongst all participants. All will be recorded for reuse in an academic publication. All participants will be invited to submit essays of approximately 1000 words in length that reflect their presentations. These will become an electronic anthology.

If you would like to participate (all participants get to contribute a 5 minute position statement and a 1000 word essay reflecting/restating this position statement) please email Adrian Miles (adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au) or Laurene Vaughan (laurene.vaughan@rmit.edu.au) by the end of Wednesday, March 8.

AN ANECDOTE
At a gathering of senior academics last year a brief discussion was held around using existing Technical And Further Education (TAFE) subjects to teach specific technical ‘skills’ to students enrolled in degree programs. As a response it was suggested that in an age of information abundance, married to rapid technological change, learning the specifics of (for example) an individual piece of software was not a particularly relevant, progressive or transferable skill, and that the development of a ‘critical practice’ provided a legitimate alternative. Unfortunately, half the room understood ‘critical practice’ in terms of its now traditional theoretical definition, and most of the rest of us were none the wiser.

PROPOSITION
Critical practice in the context of post industrial media refers to the abstract tacit knowledge that those adept in working within contemporary media formations, tools, and flows possess. It is abstract to the extent that it relies upon deep patterns of understanding that are transferable across a wide variety of contexts, being unbound to any particular practice or thing. In addition, being abstract it is amenable to change if and when required. Such abstraction appears to be amenable to thinking of ‘critical practice’ as theory. On the other hand, these patterns are always and only constituted through acts of making and doing, they are, quintessentially and primarily applied, and so are a practice. However, how and to what extent are they, or can they be critical?

This symposium aims to investigate just what such a ‘critical practice’ is, in the specific context of media and communications tertiary education where a historical distinction (and disjuncture) between theory as ‘thinking’ and practice as ‘doing’ continues to haunt teaching and curricula. What is it to treat theory as tacit knowledge, and does this provide a framework by which to engage with, critique, change, or simply make different the imaginary gap between theory and practice, thinking and doing? We invite reflection, examples, disagreements, engagement with this.

BACKGROUND
1. The ‘critical’ in critical practice
Critical practice is a concept that has a long and firmly entrenched place in the humanities academy. Ever since Catherine Belsey’s “Critical Practice” was first published in 1980, as a part of Methuen’s hugely influential New Accents series, critical practice has been understood to be the application of French inflected high theory in the context of the literary. Here ‘critical’ has connotations of critique, of an applied engagement with existing knowledge and ways of doing that fundamentally challenges and changes the role and function of theory. Theory shifts from something hermeneutic and descriptive towards a mode that believes it can offer engagement through the doing of theory to the world.

Critical practice, outside of the vicissitudes of any particular theoretical fashion, provide a ‘meta’ role for theory to adopt. Theory reflexively discusses itself with great self confidence, and so becomes a particular sort of abstracted practice. This abstracting has allowed theory to become mobile, labile and promiscuous. It is distant enough from any applied, specific object of study to provide a framework that can be used elsewhere and differently, so as theory becomes unstuck from its object it gains significance and authority. It has become nomadic yet its ‘criticalness’ has been retained.

2. The ‘practice’ in critical practice
Practice as a research method is best expressed by Frayling’s canonical distinction (here simplified) between research for, research about, and research through. The first is the research that we do in order to be able to do something (what is the population of Australia? , why did Kodak go broke?). The second is where we choose to make something the object of study (what do designers do when they design?, what can Freudian psychoanalysis tell us about this film?). Each of these two sorts of research can be undertaken by researchers from outside of the field being investigated – I can learn what the population of Australia is even if I am not a social geographer, sociologist or statistician, and I can study a film psychoanalytically without having to be either a psychoanalyst or a film maker. The third mode, research through, is the only mode that is specific to practice, and so is the form of research that is realised in and through a doing, a tacit research.

As a consequence any discipline that wants to use practice as a mode of legitimation for the creation of knowledge is required to ground this activity deeply within that practice in-itself, quite apart from any artefacts that may be its trace. This would seem to require a heightened specificity as a critical practice because it is strongly situated within the individuality of the practitioner and their specific field, and appears to offer little, outside of the vagueness of ‘practice’ itself, that provides the basis for a critical practice.

REFERENCES
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Frayling, Christopher. “Research in Art and Design.” Royal College of Art Research Papers 1.1 (1993): 1-5.

Desert Island Research Readings

I just sent this to staff in my school, but WTF, let’s take it off the reservation:

The new honours program is about to start with over 30 students, including four from other universities and two from elsewhere at RMIT. Staff have, to date, provided over 40 possible research questions/topics for students, so thank you!

The next step is to try to ‘seed’ research strategies for these students in a way that can accommodate their diversity of disciplines, practices, skills and abilities. Which is where I’m asking for your help. I am wanting to compile (and share) a ‘collection’ of the key research methods texts/essays that we rely on. Very simply, what was/is the one thing you have read that you would always recommend that is about doing research (aka Desert Island Research Reading)? It might be about a specific method or something more general (a specialist essay on action research or your favourite book on How To Write a Better Thesis). If you want to suggest two, knock yourself out, but I’d really appreciate one to start with.

How? Well send me the citation, and ideally a couple of sentences about why it matters to you and if there are specific disciplines you think it is relevant to. Personal is fine. I’ll collate them. You can either email this to me (adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au) or use the google form I’ve created.

Some Weaving

This post outlines how I’m using iftt (if This Then That) to weave some services together into a single point of publication for a couple of subjects.

To get a nice streamlined workflow for teaching this semester. No, start again. I’m the usual contemporary information and knowledge farmer. Network literate, having my professional and much of my personal stuff deeply intertwingled, what Weinberger in his recent book characterises as the ‘publish then filter’ model. So in my teaching I do things like subscribe to my student blogs via RSS, reblogging with commentary as required. I have a delicious tag that I tell them to keep an eye on, and so on. Some do, most don’t, if only because to learn these literacies takes time and effort and reward, and, well, it doesn’t always happen.

This year I’m making things simpler for me and them. Though I will also show them how it’s done. The recipe requires a decent CMS (I’m using Posterous, more on why shortly though as I test all this I might revert to a custom wordpress installation), a RSS client and service (I’m using Google Reader either in the browser or possibly with Reeder) and ifttt.com.

Now, this is sort of simple but a bit complicated at once because of the current limitations of ifttt, which is that when you register a service like a blog (eg Posterous, Tumblr or WordPress) it will only recognise one blog, regardless of how many you have set up with the one log in at each service.

Step One

Create an individual email account just for the one subject. I do this so that I can use this to create an account (and identity) in ifttt and posterous (or tumblr or wordpress) because my ‘normal’ account on iftt is already doing work sending stuff to one of my blogs so I can’t press gang it into more (well, I could if I had one subject in tumblr, one in posterous, one in wordpress, but I haven’t opted for that). You could use gmail for this, I just set up accounts via my dreamhost account.

Step Two

Using the email account from step one create an account on ifttt.com and your CMS of choice.

Step Three

Use ifttt to write your recipes. In my case I have two. The first takes anything that I have tagged with a specific tag in my delicious account and posts it to the blog:

I’ve customised the message a bit:

This means that as I add stuff to delicious (which I can do when browsing the web with browser plugins or from within my RSS client/Google Reader) I just add the course code as a tag and, hey presto, it appears in the course blog.

The second ifft recipe takes anything directly from my RSS feed that I’ve tagged with the course code and publishes that to the blog.

I’ve also customised this message so that it is clear it is reblogged:

Why two? Well there are ones that I want to reblog for the students to see that I don’t want to bookmark forever in delicious (and vice versa).

Step Four

Customise your chosen CMS as you see fit, and exercise caution so the hose you’ve built is more like a garden hose than the spillway of Eildon.

Problems?

Well, semester hasn’t started yet but so far:

• Reeder doesn’t appear to allow me to tag posts in my feed, so may have to only use a browser to read RSS
• my blog client (ecto which is good but hasn’t been updated for a long while) doesn’t know about posterous or tumblr and I gave up trying to find API information about how to post from a client
• MarsEdit knows about tumblr, not posterous, but I think I prefer Ecto anyway (and what’s with it being $45 or so in the App store but $39.95 from them? Is that the App store cut?)
• But posterous does allow email posting, so that can be my blog client where I copy and paste urls from student posts and write commentary on them (I don’t reblog these, I just link to them and write about what is going on in there)
• posterous also makes it easy to let students be contributors if they want, or they could just subscribe via RSS
• Or I just use a self installation of WordPress like I always have…

Peer to Peer Learning

I’m very interested in developing a peer to peer learning system that is able to reward and make visible reputation. A bit like the way Yelp wants to be able to use an algorithm to promote more qualified reviews over, well, mere opinion (an article in today’s Age mentions this). For postgrads there is a simple quid pro quo to giving and receiving feedback, but I think there are ways to make this less instrumental, more ethical, rewarding and productive. It is also part of an effort to rethink academic labour and its metrics. Everyone seems happy that publishing counts, but only counts one end – the bit with my name as author. The other half, the peer reviewing and editing that happens, is essential but in many ways invisible. In a system like Yelp (or Quora) my reputation is able to grow on the basis of my feedback, surely this has relevance in academia? And in postgraduate research education?

New Media Writing Prize

Bournemouth University has a very good media school. Well, better than very good really. And they run a new media writing competition. This is a very good idea, and if it keeps going has the opportunity to become something very special. Think Man Booker for new media. Flattered that I know two of the finalists too.

Bournemouth has the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice. I think I need to try to visit. This is so in line with what I am doing, trying to do, thinking in terms of media pedagogy, the post industrial media project, and the new honours.

2015 Second Riff

A second riff on thinking about where a School of Media and Communication could be by 2015. We will:

• have a scholarship program for students from developing nations in the South East Asia – South Pacific region
• have a critical group of teacher researchers leading a rethink of media and communications in a university of technology by imagining what such a thing would look like if it were created now, not back in an era of industrial media
• let students be co-creators with staff in knowledge making
• have students involved in curriculum development
• invite students to undertake staff training
• have an annual student run unconference that is available online to all
• not be in a building that has the colour scheme of a 1960′s hospital
• have students curating the atelier on a regular basis to show what they do
• be known for innovative practice in terms of the artefacts we create and how to teach and do, not just for our ‘content’
• have a program or intensive course that is dedicated to experimental teaching and research in media and communication

2015

There’s a bit of a project underway in the School of Media and Communication (where I am found) which is to think about where, what and the like for 2015. Where would we want to be in 2105.

First off, the time frame is too short since if we are serious about genuine change it just takes longer than this. I was involved in the rebuilding of the curriculum in the Bachelor of Communication (Media) degree, and more recently the new honours program (of which I’m the Program Director). The media program threw out our entire curriculum, and then rebuilt it. I reckon it took us 2 years to work out we wanted to throw it out, and to get an idea of what we wanted in its place. In that time we still had not really worked out the third year of the program. It took another 18 months or so to go through all the regulatory hoops required for such an amount of change. Then we started teaching it, tinkering as we went.

So, 2015, is only 3 years away and in that time I guess where I would want the school to be is in being well down the path to fundamental change in its curriculum and probably pedagogy. I don’t care that much what the programs are called, they can keep their current names if necessary, because I think that sort of rebranding, even it if produced some new whiz bang degree of new-you-beaut-this-is-the-model for media and communication studies at university this century, if the how and why of the pedagogy is untroubled then the model is deeply broken.

However, I don’t think this is possible in three years. A university department is slower than an oil tanker to turn around. There is the dead weight of the administrative compliance regime that pretty much doubles the time to do anything, and then of course there is the issue of simply finding the time, energy and goodwill to engage with the idea of change. Academics, even radical thinkers, are surprisingly conservative about a lot of things, and curriculum and pedagog is one of them, so in three years I would think change would be started, but not implemented.

Hence an alternative could to be trial something quickly, at the margins, in an agile sort of way. What I was thinking was having a lab like environment which might be available to a common cohort of students for one year (two semesters) which was just, well, educationally out there. Engaged, making, multidisciplinary, process orientated. Risky. Not for all students, and certainly not for all staff. Somewhere to test and see. If it works then it can be expanded (and if it doesn’t it gets changed, or reversed). Students would stay in their existing degrees, so not a lot has to change. Then I realised that each degree is made up of specific subjects with very specific learning outcomes and so even this is actually quite hard to do. If not impossible. It is like the apparatus of the university requires you to make something, plan it, without ever having the opportunity to test it, then implement it (which is actually the testing of it). If it fails there is no fall back available, the program simply is terminated. It is the antithesis of the creative, innovative practice that underwrites all those examples universities are fond of using to illustrate to us how they would like us to be! (This realisation can very dramatically erode your morale and desire to be an agent for change in an institution like a university. Even where it doesn’t the experience of continually banging your head into this sort of arse about inertia can wear you down to the point where you just surrender, opting for the course of least resistance because to try to achieve change is a black hole of a truly Kafkaesque universe.)

So, if necessary, set up an experimental degree program in media and communication. Even call it that if it helps to give you the wriggle room needed. Open to all. Not tied to any discipline or practice. Make knowledge. Make knowledge objects. Leave a trail. Of critique, making, intervention, and discovery. Turn the university upside down so it becomes about learning and research at the same time in the same event. A Bauhaus for media and comms for this time – but not the sort of stratified curriculum and model of the Bauhaus. But that is where I would want the school to be headed for in 2015. From this, then let it work its way out so that other students, other staff can participate, get the idea, and take it home. So it could have teaching internships for school staff, 1 or 2 a semester, with the requirement that they take something from this place back to their own programs to implement.

That was my first riff.

Quantity and Quality: University Education

Used Keynote to record a version of my presentation at the Teaching and Learning with Vision conference last week (great event, btw). Below is an iDevice happy version of it. Click to play.

Click To Play. Download (23.5MB)

Making Little Academics

I’ve been busy talking to myself lately as I nut out a presentation for an education come technology conference I’m presenting at in November. As a featured presenter I’m allowed to be speculative, and hey, I’m anything if not speculative. (Oh, and yes, I really do talk to myself sometimes to let ideas lead me, if you don’t talk to them how on earth are they going to answer?) In general I want to think about some recent ideas about content and process, but translated into the language of quantity and quality, though really it is thinking out loud joining the dots between being an educator and providing thick description of my own processes about why it matters and why things should change.

I got to be an academic because my teachers recognised that I was smart. It was my teachers at university who got me my first sessional teaching, and they recommended me because I was smart. Except smart here means something quite specific. It means smart like them. Smart in their image. Not literally, but I was smart in the way that academics, the academy, could and did recognise. I enjoyed teaching, I’ll admit partly because I got to show others that I was smart too, and one of the characteristics of my particular sort of intelligence is my associative thinking, which as a teacher means I’m good at explaining stuff by using examples from anywhere and everywhere. (But note, this lets me be good at ‘explaining’, see what’s already happening, teaching = explaining.) So, I ended up an academic. Not because I trained to be one, and I certainly have not trained to teach since, but because I was smart in a way that other academics in my discipline recognised. It is this that confered membership.

This is normal, all professions (and trades) socialise members in their own image. It is one of the ways in which you learn to become that job. I self selected the university because I like ideas, arguments, my own opinions. I like to write, and I enjoyed performing these things as a teacher. Everyone, more or less, who teaches at a university has a similar story. We were all excellent students, we pretty much already (in most cases) identified with the values of the university, which as students we expressed in writing really complicated essays, but also in those other badges of hope – we would have done the set readings, found more, always have questions because we really did want to know, and were probably in the minority of students who used foot or end notes and some sort of referencing system, real or imagined. Just the sort of student that, as an academic, you like to think are your best students (which you also humbly like to imagine is your doing). So, like other professions, we self identify to the imagined norms of the habitus, and are acculturated and socialised to a set of beliefs and practices that are part of the very identity of the profession. We choose to belong, even when we critique it (we could after all just leave), and before you know it we end up with a world view where we make assumptions that these academic values, the values of the academy as the academy, are what the experience of being at university is really about. I chose to be an academic, and to participate in these values. Just like everyone else here.

Well, not quite everyone else. In fact most of the people at university are not there because they have self selected to be ‘academic’. These are our students. Very few of my students, and I’m going to assume this is the same for most others who teach undergraduate courses (the bread and butter of universities in this country) actually intend, identify with, or what to be academics. They are at university for quite different reasons. They are there to become socialised (to keep that language happening) into a profession, perhaps a discipline, but certainly not to become academics. This even includes some who go on to to do PhD’s. Yet so much of what is taught, how it is taught, what comes to be valued, is, at the end of the day not about what counts in what will be the future professional life world of the student, but is what matters to the academy, to us as academics.

For example, this is one of the reasons why essays matter. In my own broad area of media studies essays are, by far, the dominant assessment form. Most of my students, once they graduate, will never write an essay again. They may write scripts, business proposals, funding applications, reports, press releases, blogs, social media streams for a variety of professional reasons, but not essays. They may write reviews, speeches, pitches, and corporate presentations, but not essays. Why do we insist that essays are the canonical form (when so many other possibilities are available)? Because it is the form that matters to me, as an academic. It is my form. Not the professions we align ourselves to (even though my institution’s self defined marketing language claims we are ‘real world engaged’ and have ‘industry relevance’) – don’t even get me started on the artificiality of the research PhD.

My students do not come to learn how to write better essays. I like essays. Though I prefer to write them as hypertext. I like reading them, writing them. But I’m an academic, one reason I’m here is because I like doing such things and this pays me a salary to do it, but it is a circular and foolishly tautological claim to assume that my students are here for these reasons too. So much of what is presented to me as ‘good teaching’ is in fact making the mistake that training our students as petite academics, mini-me’s, constitutes a good university experience. Rubbish. There are so many ways to encourage, model, teach and assess critical thinking, creative thought, and an engaged making that falls outside of a form that privileges very narrow assumptions about literacy, argument, causality and authority. But, you know, dinosaurs are slow.

Just a Riff (Teaching Your Elites)

I was at a really interesting seminar the other day which was largely about writing and the cinema. Was too short. But some of the incidental conversation was troubling. The visitor was pointing out how many of the undergraduates (as opposed to the postgraduates) struggle to get what is being discussed, or why it matters. There were supportive nods of heads and comments about how one or two would get it, the intent being that these are the ones who matter. This is self serving romantic nonsense that is the university myth we all hold dear. Imagine if primary and secondary school teachers had this understanding of their role and value as educators, and if your child wasn’t one of those one or two. The problem I have with this is that I was once one of those students. I relished the university experience, but the university didn’t teach me how to relish it, it didn’t teach me how to be ‘theoretical’, I came primed and already ready. Most of my peers, as with most of my students, don’t get ‘theory’ in the way we academics do, but we teach it as if they should and those that do get HDs and those that don’t get confused. When do we stop and wonder how to teach to the other 22 in the room? Surely that is what constitutes good teaching? All of us can wheel out our HD students as evidence of our teaching brilliance, except these students will almost certainly already be academically inclined and this will have had little, if anything, to do with us. This is another version of the ‘little academics‘ model, a Lacanian mirror phase moment where we misjudge the reflection of ourselves in these students as an imprimatur of our own ability.