critical creative collaborative

Play Along Culture: “Cathedral,” Rec Room, Home Studio

December 5th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

rec room r.i.p.

Do rumpus rooms even exist anymore? Been awhile since I was hanging suburban basements, but I wonder if the once popular rec room (or rumpus room) has gone the way of the dodo, usurped by the home office or studio and a whole new set of expectation about how and why we recreate.

Frequenting online music sites, as I sometimes do, I notice numerous references to the “home studio”—as in for sale: mint condition Les Paul, only ever used in the “home studio.” Following the links back to YouTube, there is evidence that new hybrid, prosumer (blended consumption and production) spaces are flourishing. The rec rooms of yesteryear seem to be giving way to these “studios”—spare bedrooms and basement living spaces that are fitted out with all the gear (instruments, amps, mics, mixers, recorders, and cameras wired up to a laptop or PC) needed to play along with your favourite performers, and in so doing, to produce DIY audio-video recordings as you do.

These home office/studio spaces offer haphazard collections of gear and furniture that are reminiscent of older rec rooms; yet, they are designed to function in a categorically different way. These studios are not the spaces of active consumption we grew up with: they do not seem to be well equipped for rowdy TV watching, loud partying, or general rough housing. Instead, these spaces seem to favour relatively passive forms of production: individualized recording rehearsal sessions in which one plays along with a favourite track.

Rock and roll, it seems, has left the garage for the youtube channel.

play along

In this week’s ENGL 100 lecture, I talked about “play along culture.” I lit on the idea as was looking for a way of unpacking Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and thinking about the text in relation a chapter from John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture.

Surfing the web, I was looking for video clips for Thelonius Monk and Glenn Gould, two artists who exemplify a productive approach to the tension between performance and recording. To me, their very different mystiques rest on an uncanny ability to flout the grid, to produce recordings that seem to fly beyond it. In the process, I stumbled across the video of the young man playing bass along with Third World’s “Reggae Ambassador.”

Initially, I was struck by the uncool way this performer uses his t-shirt or pillow case as a buffer between his naked torso and bass. As I listened, however, I was taken by his ability to more or less insert himself into the groove. He’s not bad, I found myself thinking. I started to enjoy the track, almost in spite of myself. The other aspect of the video that struck me was the number of associated videos linked to it. I have seen hours of instructional videos on youtube, and am aware of numerous amateur players uploading videos. Usually, however, these videos mingle with those of the “real performers”—the amateurs’ DIY recordings intermingle with live footage and music videos from the pros. Next to this, this play-along artist’s offering, there was a full stream of amateur bass player sharing their own interpretations, or rather recreations, of famous reggae bass lines.

In the context of thinking about my lecture and Carver and Seabrook texts, the notion of playing along took on new meaning.

“Cathedral”

Carver’s now canonical “Cathedral,” the title story of his 1983 collection, offers an exquisite representation of late 20th century life, which culminates in a trenchant critique of the hyper-mediation North American culture. The story revolves around the relationship between an unnamed narrator and a “blind man,” Robert. Robert is a friend of the narrator’s (also unnamed) wife, and he comes to visit the couple for an evening.

After dinner and copious amounts of alcohol, the narrator and Robert retire to the living room where they watch television and share “some cannabis” (104). The wife joins the two men on the sofa, but soon falls asleep. When she goes to bed, the men stay up watching TV: “Something about the church and the Middle Ages” (105).

In the silence between voice overs, Robert asks the narrator to describe the documentary and what he sees on screen. It is apparent that the narrator understand little about what he is watching. When asked, he is unable to relate anything more than the information provided in the voice over. He confesses, “I’m not doing so good, am I.” And when Robert encourages him, the narrator relates that “he tried to think of what else to say.’They are really big,’ I said. ‘They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes.’”

The narrator is frustrated that he can’t do much better than this: “‘The Truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Catherdrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.’” Robert responds, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it.” And then he asks the narrator to get a heavy piece of paper and a pen and the two work together to draw a cathedral. Getting down onto the carpet the “blind man . . . found my hand, the had with the pen. He closed his had over my hand. ‘Go ahead, bub, draw.”Hand in hand on the carpet the two men work toward a deeper (spiritual?) understanding of their subject matter.

Carver’s narrative ends on a deeply ambivalent note, and yet in so doing, it sets out a paradigm that seems to be increasingly familiar and relevant today. Making the shift from passive consumers to active producers, the narrator and Robert effectively transform the living room. Off the sofa, they play together; sharing the controls, they redraw the catherdral’s sacred seat in the midst of the narrator’s mundane, deeply secular living space.

Deep Ambiguity, Serious Play

Trying to make sense of this play along paradigm and its potentially applicability to Carver “Cathedral,” I came across the work of Kiri Miller, an ethnomusicologist whose research looks at new forms of game play: Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto. Miller’s blog playing along and recent Oxford UP publication Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance trace a link been multi-user games and online music lessons as important forms of embodied learning.

As a gloss on Carver’s wonderfully ironic, erotically charged ending, Miller’s work seems to add an interesting angle on thinking about the transformation of literary studies. If Carver’s narrative encapsulates the demise of literary culture, it does so in a way that foregrounds reading as a physical, material, embodied practice. Superseded by television, and perhaps Robert’s audio books, the printed literary text may have ceased to play a vital roll in the social or personal lives of these characters. Like the cathedral, the printed word has come to take on historical, rather than immediate relevance. And yet, it is as writer and reader that the two men embrace. In the glow of this late night documentary, their awkward connection hangs. Uncertain of the different meanings each character might take from the event, uncertain who will remember what in the morning, Carver’s readers are taken to the un/comfortable edge of voyeurism, to this place between watching and doing.

Seeing their shared pen as a prototypical joy stick (phallic pun intact), I’m tempted to say the story takes us up to the historical beginnings of video gaming. Working together, the efforts of narrator and Robert in someways prefigure the radical transformation of living room or rumpus room into new kind of play space—in which the consumption and production of culture converge.

The trick is to enter this space with a kind of critical openness. To this end, Miller throws herself into her research, playing along with the millions of gamers and performers she seeks to study and learn from. In this way, she finds personal meaning in what might seem on first blush to be fairly lowbrow culture. In a blog post from her fieldwork as student of the nextlevelguitar.com online program, Miller writes that

the total absence of performance anxiety is one major difference between this learning experience and the private piano and voice lessons of my teenage years: after all, I’m alone in my living room. Except that I’m also not alone, because at any moment I can click over to the NextLevelGuitar forum and seek advice and encouragement from other students, or send David a question, or do a YouTube search to see how other guitarists hold the instrument or the pick. And if I want an audience, I can post a video of my playing to the NextLevelGuitar “Audio/Video Showcase”

At the time she posted this blog, Miller tells us that there are “1,894 posts in that section so far, and a wealth of crowd-sourced feedback.” I could get to like this “real guitar” thing.

Mobile Media / Changing Educational Landscapes (An Overview)

November 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

As a synopsis of Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscape (Parts I, II, III), I would like to highlight:

5 Things to Consider in Changing Educational Landscapes

1. Changing (verb transitive):

Changing is both an adjective and a verb. The imperative facing educators is to figure out how we engage with this change in positive, meaningful ways. Within an art and design context, how might we actively transform educational spaces?

2. Outside is In: Multi-sited Teaching and Learning

Mobile media push the impetus for teaching and learning beyond the confines of a single “brick and mortar” classroom, lecture theatre, studio, or lab. To respond to changing economic realities and social situations, learning spaces need to be conversant with the movements of students (and faculty) across multiple (local, national and international) sites. Consider how our classrooms work withor includes the bus, train, airport lounge, or coffee shop.

3. Learning Cross-Platform:

Moodle, WordPress, Buddypress, flickr.com, Youtube,tumblr, twitter.com, Facebook.com, wikipedia, to name a few platforms among many others—are instrumental in changing educational landscapes. However, they were not all created equal. Educators need to consider how / why / when we work with different proprietary and non-proprietary (open source) solutions. Effective eLearning requires a knowledge of multiple platforms (and of the potential strengths / weaknesses of each), often within the auspices of a single course. There are seldom single solutions.

4. Co-Create:

The changing landscape is dramatic and involves many actors. Too often, we approach the situation from the top down, using technology solve simple problems. We need a variety of approaches to complex solutions. While they may not be the mythic Digital Natives we often hear about, students have extremely valuable ideas, insights, and skills that can help radically transform the educational paradigm. We need to follow the lead of Mike Wesch, who uses youtube.com and student produced video to teach “subjectivities,” rather than “subjects.” Or Jon Beasley Murray who, rather than restricting their use of the internet, had his 300-level literature students produce their written work on wikipedia (link).

5. Go Live: Teaching Out Loud

This is a time of great social change and rather than hiding ourselves away while we try and figure out the answers, as scholars have done historically, educators need to think (blog, podcast, document) their transformational research in public venues. This is not instead of academic publication but part of it. Part of the co-creational approach is sharing our thinking with our collaborators: students, colleagues, community members, the broader public.

This is an overview of my longer, rabbling posts on the subject. For more details and useful links, please read the following:

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part I)

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part II)

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part III)

November 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Part III of three part series on Educational Landscapes (Overview) looks at some of the new strategies I call on in my teaching. Many of these approaches are mediated by recent advances in mobile and social media.

III. Beyond Participation: Engagement

To help focus discussion on active, positive change, I’d like to draw on Eric Gordon’ thinking on engagement (Emerson College faculty page, personal website). Gordon brings the principles of game design to his research in civic engagement. I’m particularly interested in how this work undertakes a shift from participation to engagement. The difference between the two, as Gordon describes it, is that participation can be relatively passive and may not require much thought or action (beyond clicking a mouse, say), whereas engagement require a level of intellectual, emotional, or creative investment, and ideally action over time.

Think about “liking” something on Facebook as basic form of participation, not to say that these types of simple gestures lack important social potential. Liking (or not liking) can depend on snap judgements, blink. Meaningful social events—learning or interaction with an art work, for example—usually require significantly longer forms of engagement. Engagement involves returning to a situation or problem, and is what is need when we want individuals to actively undertake civic duties or other kinds of social actions—for example, helping to clean up a municipal park or to contribute to discussions about educational reform (check out PlanIt).

From his work on using social media to create meaningful social situation, Gordon offers Six Principles of Designing for Engagement.

What is the Reason for Engagement?
Who is Listening?
People Comprise Locations; Locations Don’t Comprise People.
Design for the Community you Want, not the one you know.
Face-to-Face Matters
Design for Distraction

These ideas may be fairly obvious for people who have done community-based learning or art projects, but they are also important in helping us to break away from the habit of depending on technology to solve our problems. Gordon’s work makes use of mobile and social media, but it does so in ways that actively seek meaningful involvement from different groups.

For me the question is how do we creating engaging teaching and learning situations, whether we are in a university, a gallery, or studio. To this end, I have begun to seek teaching and learning opportunities that build on the following:

The Multi-sited Classroom: students carry on their learn across a number of sites and are often in motion between these sites. As educators we need to provide them with better opportunities to get the most of their situation. For me this, involves thinking of the classroom extending beyond a single place, or set time. The classroom—or better space of learning—can more effectively engagement if it is approached as a series of opportunities to connect with course materials and to participate in an extend conversation around and through these materials. Think of the lecture hall or studio expanding to include the bus, the ipod, the library, the coffee shop, the job site. This is not to say that we can replace our studios, lecture halls, classrooms with ipod or mobile phones, only that these and other devices, practices, software allow us to make better use of students time and energies between scheduled classes.

Help students find affinities: Mimi Ito’s research with digital youth culture suggests that there are key differences among youth when it comes to connecting online. She suggests that

Facebook = Friends you had in Highschool

tumblr = Friends you wished you’d had

The students who have figured out how to thrive and to develop useful professional skills are those who search affinities and affinity groups. How do we do this in the classroom? How can I learn to work with or activate various social groups networks in the classroom.

Understand when and where students listen: in lecture the students may be asleep, but there are other times and places they are fully awake. How do we/I bridge this gap? Putting more course materials into mobile formats helps with this. I am consciously building a mobile media archive.

Informal Learning Matters: Seek out opportunities for students to draw on their prior knowledge and social engagements. Without diluting course materials or outcomes, it is possible to build assignments that encourage students to connect their “outside” interests with the core material. This is particularly useful in process-based or skills-based courses and assignments.

Learning is Co-creative: Mike Wesch’s work with his media students at Kansas State is inspirational here. Wesch talks about teaching “subjectivities” rather than subjects and creates courses in which his student participate in the creation of content: for example, youtube videos about social media. I’m also inspired by Jon Beasley Murray’s use of wikipedia to activate a 300-level Spanish Lit course “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem,” in which he had his student write their assignments in wikipedia and made there grades contingent on the level of uptake their writing received. There are plenty of opportunities to use new and social media to work with students, rather than simply trying to teach to them.

Go Live: Historically, academic thinking has happened in highly protected, exclusive spaces and has circulated across specialized groups. This is type of professional practice is import; however, the affordances of digital and social media mean that a lot of our work can be shared. Linking online discussions and research to teaching and learning situations allow students to understand where we our coming from and may in some instance find useful affinities with our interests. While I understand the history and importance of Academic Freedom and the crucial role universities play, I don’t think that it becomes us to obfuscate intentional. Sharing twitter feeds and delicious links are relatively easy steps toward maintaining a level of transparency and accountability. This blog and its various feeds are vital aspect of my research, teaching, and learning.

Part I: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Part II: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part II)

November 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

This is a continuation of a discussion presented in Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Overview and Part I). For a synopsis, see this overview.

Myth of the Digital Native: put it to rest

Before I discuss mobile affordances, I thought I’d touch on the idea of the digital native. This is a topic others have discussed, but I think it is crucial to how we approach the problem of changing landscapes.

This term is troubling–culturally, ethnographically, and pragmatically. While our students may have grown up using computers, many lack sophistication, few are capable of critical self-reflection. They need opportunities to think through complex issues of identity formation, knowledge creation/validation. and network building.

The idea of the Digital Native is often based on a misappropriation of Marc Prensky’s 2001 argument about the divide between “Digital Native, Digital Immigrant” (pdf). The reification of the Digital Native not only risks dubious essentialisms around questions of demographics and language acquisition by asserting an analogy between those born before the 1960s and second language learners from immigrant families—Prensky suggests both share an “accent” of sorts. It also avoids difficult questions about the social differences that mark digital culture across age, gender, race, and class distinctions.

Experts are beginning to come to terms with the magnitude of cultural changes created by a shift in communications technologies. 10, 20 200, 500 years(?) How long until we understand the scope of the social impact of these new technologies. After all, we’re still grappling with effect of the printing press.

The study of digital culture and mobile media studies are growing and contested fields of research. Careful consideration of their importance to teaching and teaching is beyond this scope of these posts, even though they do influence my thinking. My main concern with is that we need to understand the disparate, often contradictory skill sets students bring to bear on post-secondary education.

On a pragmatic level, as Prensky (along with a host of others) suggests, we need to aware of the shifting cultural space of education and the dramatic impact of new media on the classroom. This a point Cathy Davidson makes clearly in her discussions on rethinking education beyond the confines of industrial learning.

My concern is that too often we make assumption about the students abilities and facilities and in so doing, fail to carefully consider the deeper pedagogical implications of teaching in this networked and mediated age. To wit, I like to recommend to students that they check out the digital tattoo, a website/tool set up at UBC to help students understand their digital identity and to protect themselves.

It is incumbent on educators, artists, curators, and other cultural theorists to be vigilant to the actors and networks changing around us. I invoke Bruno Latour’s ANT (actor-network theory) (reference), because it helps me to think about the landscape of education in a very broad sense and to new configurations of human and non-human actors and the myriad links between us.

The increasing diversity of students can not be thought of or approached separately from the proliferation of hardware and software that is reshaping our teaching and learning environment, our lives. The laptop, cellphone, ipad, digital projector, ipod, as well as moodle, tumblr.com, wordpress, buddypress, twitter.com, posterous.com, facebook.com need to thoughtfully and carefully understood in terms of a web of intricate association.

II Looking for Affordances

To move this discussion back into the realm of the practical and pragmatic, I’d like discuss Mobility Shifts, a recent conference at the New School in New York. This conference brought together digital educators and innovators to discuss mobile media and open access to education. The organizers said, the conference was motivated by a crisis in the US system of post-secondary education (higher tuition costs, escalating student debt, and a struggle for universities to remain relevant).

To highlight the main ideas, I would like to quote from John Belshaw’s blog post:

5 key trends for the future of education

Openness – This has been going on for a while, but there’s a real drive towards open access for academic research in particular.There is a feeling that education and public services should be open and transparent.

Greater insight into the knowledge creation process – This is similar to openness but pertains to the creation of articles, books and other material. It’s not just the output that should be shared, but the context of how it was put together.

Mobile learning. – The big movement at the moment outside the conference is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) but the focus at Mobility Shifts was upon mobile for ubiquitous learning. It’s not so much about the mobility of the device but the multiple ways in which the learner is mobile.

Alternative forms of assessment – This is a big one with Mozilla’s Open Badges leading the way. Because assessment often drives the structure of learning, this is key.

Rethinking the classroom environment – This goes hand-in-hand with the curricula redesign necessitated by alternative forms of assessment. How should we build new (or reorganise existing) classrooms?

http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2011/10/mobilityshifts-5-key-trends-for-the-future-of-education-guest-post.html

Without going into a play-by-play of the different conversations presented at Mobility Shifts, I’d like to point to a number of people / projects helping in thinking about making positive changes to the landscapes of education.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it suggests a few interesting and, for me, watershed projects.

Trebor Scholz: Mobility Shifts organizer, collectivate.net, and editor of Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (online)

Shin Mizukoshi: Mobile Media theorist and specialist at the Univ of Tokyo (Hastac link)

John Willinsky: Standford Professor (link) and advocate for open source academic publishing, involved with the Public Knowledge Project.

Bob Stein and the future of the book are radically transforming the way we think about and experience books.

Mimi Ito: Cultural Anthropologist and author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (pdf). Ito’s work helps us to understand the diverse experience shaping young peoples use of social media.

Mike Wesch: Prof of Anthropology at Kansas State University (see digital ethnography). Wesch is well known for his youtube channel and ground breaking (co-creative) work with students.

Cathy Davidson: Duke English Prof, author, geek, educational mover and shaker (fast company article). Check out. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press June 2011 publication date). 2010. [web]

Matthew Gold: One of the creatives of the CUNY Commons, a buddy press built multiuser blog the multiple campuses of the City University of New York.

Geert Lovink: digital editor, publisher, activist (see Institute of Network Cultures). Lovink’s understanding of the need to support writers on the level of content while respecting the human/emotional side of academic publishing is important.

Eric Gordon: Professor of Media Studies at Emerson and Director of Engagement Game Lab. Gordon’s approach to engagement vs. participation is extremely useful and will be more fully discussed in Part III of this series.

Closer to Home, I should also mention

Brian Lamb (blog) and BCCampus. Both have had an important influence on eLearning in BC and on my own teaching and learning directly.

Part I: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Part III: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Mobile Media: Changing Educational Landscapes (Part I)

November 13th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

This three-part series (Overview) looks at the impact of mobile media and social media on post-secondary teaching and learning.

Joy James invited me to the UWO to talk about my research at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and my discussion draws heavily MobilityShifts.org, a conference I recently attended at the New School in Oct. 2011.

Part I looks at my thoughts changing landscapes of education.
Part II discusses mobile media affordances—key projects, people.
Part III focuses on engagement and the potential for reshaping our teaching and learning.

Introduction

A modal thing: When Joy James invited me to present, we talked about focus and possible titles. She suggested Changing Educational Landscapes, and I really liked the modality of “changing.” I liked changing as adjective and verb. In the context of mobile media—or media mobilities—I like the imperative mood, the command to change educational landscapes.

I also like that the various senses of these changes—adjective and verb—require collaborations that bring together educators, artists, curators, community organizers , and other professional communicators.

Background / Deqq.com Experiment:

This talk comes out of a pedagogical experiment Joy and I began at Emily Carr two and a half years ago. We were interested in trying to activate a “back channel” in an English 101 lecture and wanted to complement Moodle (Course Management Software) by adding a social media channel.

Deqq is a proprietary application developed by Vancouver-based digital agency Work at Play for the entertainment industry. Joy and I understood Moodle to be an integral part of our course delivery, and we reasoned that this extra open channel might allow students to offer a different form of feedback.

Deqq, which allows students to log on using twitter and Facebook, is based on channeling discussions from social networks back to a central site; we wanted to use it to facilitate a sharing (microblogging) of ideas and media in and between lectures, more or less on the fly. The experience of tweeting a youtube link, spontaneous thought, or request for clarification of terminology is very different from posting to a closed Moodle forum. Joy and I strongly believed that the Deqq channel would shift the lecture dynamic in positive ways.

Our pedagogical intervention failed. Students liked Moodle, but that they didn’t want or need another social media platform. We had a few positive adapters; however, the majority of the ENGL 100 students were either vociferously opposed to being “guinea pigs” (their term) or entirely non-plussed.

As research, as a scientific experiment, our project did work. It worked very well to demonstrated key limitations in our own thinking about student needs. It taught us valuable lessons about how or how not to build student involvement.

Without going to far into this research project, I might say that the problem was one of execution: our hearts/minds were in the right place, but we weren’t prepared or didn’t understand how to engage with the students. Nor did the students understand the change in relation to the expectations they brought to the course, particularly about the nature and space of a university lecture.

My UWO presentation represents a continuation of this research. It set in motion a larger, vital dialogue around the problems of more fully engaging students in shifting the educational paradigm. How we can work together—students and teachers—to create new spaces of teaching and learning that reflect the world/s we live in.

(If you want to read about this experiment in a larger context of social media in the university classroom, Pieta Wolley’s Georgia Straight Article might be helpful. It draws heavily on an interview I did with her).

I. Landscape

A teaching studio without walls: the ideal spaces presented to us are increasingly hybrid spaces of old and new technology—formal and/or informal teaching studios with lots of shiny tech and moveable walls. La gaîté lyrique in Paris is my favourite examples of this—based on images and ideas presented by its Managing and Artistic Director, Jérôme Delormas.

These idealized media spaces have the potential to dramatically reshape our teaching and learning environments. There is little doubt they are changing our imaginary landscapes. The Media Lab at MIT, the Critical Media Lab at Waterloo, Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art and Technology, Emily Carr Intersections Digital Studios, Western’s ArtLab—all impact our understanding of what is possible in terms of a new office/classroom/studio space.

Nevertheless, as much as I like the idea of la Gaîté lyrique, I understand that my attraction to it is tied to a hybrid, digitized brick and mortar fetish. The multipurpose teaching, learning, exhibition, screening, dance environment and media library, as exciting as the possibilities it presents are, runs the risk of becoming a quaint aspiration in the not-so-distant future. Without long-term support, funding for people as well as spaces and machines, and a well-developed sense of programming or research potentials, there is a danger that these spaces will stagnate—remaining fixed within a particular, outmoded sense of utopia.

mobile media change landscapes

The great potential of mobile media has less to do with things and buildings (though these are both important) and much more to do with a cultural shift. The real question is not how are we going to construct new buildings—new classrooms, new lecture theatres, new galleries, new university. Instead we need to ask how we are going to adapt our expectations and practices to embrace multi-sited learning.

What can we do here and now, with relatively little spending to engage the student on a bus—in the coffee shop, or between shifts at Starbucks or the Keg.

The social and economic reality facing most post-secondary students, particularly in an art school, is that they do not have a lot of down time. For better and worse, they are “jacked in” to the net. If we expect to compete with the barrage of tweets, txts, status updates—forget about email, its irrelevant research tells us—in any sort of meaningful way we need to change the way we think about teaching and learning.

Part II: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Part III: Mobile Media Changing Educational Landscapes

Maraya | Refection: NIC talk

October 27th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

How we look at the city or cities, as is the case with Maraya, is fundamental to how we go about living in them. The perspectives we bring to bear are crucial to understanding our role in an ongoing urban transformation. This was a key point in my “Maraya | Reflection” talk at North Island College (Oct. 27, 2011), part of the Speakers Series connected to the Emily Carr / NIC External BFA.

Vancouverism

For background, I showed a short video introducing the Maraya project and Vancouver and Dubai nexus with which it engages. The video (linked below) features Stanley Kwok and Trevor Boddy, along with M. Simon Levin, Henry Tsang and I, and was made by grad students Alan Goldman and Ahmad Konash.

Maraya Video Promo

As this video suggests, Maraya attempts to engage (or gauge) a new form of urbanism. Architecture critic Trevor Body suggests that “Vancouverism,” as it is called, is a response to Manahattanism (Vancouver Sun article; see also Boddy’s exhibition website, which pushes noun to verb: Vancouverize).

This new urbanism, of which Vancouver’s False Creek North and the Dubai Marina are prime examples, uses urban density to attract offshore investors. In Vancouver and Dubai, and increasingly around the world, waterfront neighbourhoods are seen to provide the basis for new economic programs built on the development and marketing of luxury real estate abroad.

Capitalizing on earlier networks of transportation and trade, Vancouver and Dubai have transformed themselves from colonial outposts to global players. In these model cities, residential mega-projects are produced as nodes in international networks. Their uxury condos provide haven for well-heeled migrants, globally mobile elites, who may not be interested in settling in a new city per se, but who are keeping their options open while looking for safe places to park their money. One might think of the empty, uninhabited condos in these cities as safety deposit boxes in the sky.

Down Shots
Maraya began as a wager. As a research project, we wanted to assess the nature and depth of the connection between these sites in Vancouver and Dubai.

Lookinh at these cities together allowed us to think about 21st century urbanization in new and exciting ways. The problem, from an artistic or aesthetic point of view, had to do with how to represent these links and the larger patterns they signify. The branding of Vancouver and Dubai has been very successful and it is easy to get lured into certain ways of seeing.

Likewise critical response to the urban disparities underpinning both cities are important and have had significant sway internationally; it is difficult to think about the politics of Vancouver without violent images of the Downtown Eastside or of Dubai outside of photographs of exploited of migrant labourers.

These are important points of discussion and need careful consideration. However, there is a danger in recirculating imagery that seems to conform to a kind of stock image bank. The appropriation of particular images/ideas often accompanies a kind of knee-jerk criticality that functions to establish or sanctify the position of the artist/critic.

Understanding the these two cities are linked and that they are part of a global flow of ideas (good and bad) and capital, we felt we needed to take a different approach. Thinking about how cities are now built by flows of digital information (email, jpgs, quicktime movies, CAD drawings), and the fact that Vancouver’s Concord Pacfic Place was touted as one of the first fiber optic neighbourhoods in North American, we decided to look down and sought to glimpse the a metaphorical of flow of urban information beneath our feet.

Stopping people in their tracks as the jog, roller blade, dog walk around the seawall or marina walk was pleasing to us. Showing images of people along this global sea-walk who are all looking down was even better.

Strand and Rodchenko

Paul Strand Wall Street, 1916.

This approach allowed us to draw a connection to the photos Paul Strand and Alexander Rodchenko, the great urban image-makers of the early 20th century. Strand’s photos of Manhattan and Rodchenko’s of Moscow have helped establish a powerful urban lexicon. Their images provide a visual counterpoint to de Certeau’s wandersmanner who walk the city like ants, or letters on a page, constantly rewriting an illegible urban script (to paraphrase de Certeau’s “Walking in the City”).

Shooting Down on the city allows us to view:

Resist the normative horizontal axis of view used in real estate advertising and urban branding; glass and steal towers shimmering above an urban waterfront—Dubai Marina or False Creek— are becoming sine qua non of contemporary urban development and its affinity with leisure.
The play between built environment and faceless individuals in these images creates an interesting dynamic that challenges humanistic representations of the city as the product of a rational order (human being).
Otherwise invisible patterns of movement: the flow or paths of different groups suggests an energy or meshing of gears, and points to larger machinations of urban development and socio-political change.
The street / seawall as a stage, and to focus on a salient feature of new developments and we believe a vital social space in the transition to new a new urban locus.
Vantage point of a powerful, global elite: and to think about our relationship to these expensive boxes in the sky. Looking down, we get to see how we are seen from above and to think about who we might respond.
Alexander Rodchenko, Workers, Orchestra, White Sea Canal, 1933

Paul Strand, New York, 1917

: Alexander Rodchenko, “Gathering for Demonstration,” 1928

What We Want / Expect from ENGL 100?

October 17th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

What follows are the unedited responses from the ENGL 100 students to the question: what do you want / expect from this course? The students worked in groups and emailed their answers during class

2:30 Lecture

We would like to be able to gain a sense of clarity from both the readings, as well as being able to express our thoughts, reactions, and understanding easily.
— Nikki, Nick and Kaede

Learn/educate ourselves/be critical/look at text and understand what the author is saying/more depth understanding of lit

Write better / How to find and search/select literature / Link english and art – use english as a language to talk about art / Articulate ideas / Relate materials read in class to world issues we face today
Mia, Cadence, Xch’e’

Michelle, Ana, Nigel, Beichen
We feel that there needs to be more coherence between the lecture and the seminar in order to reiterate themes and ideas crucial in developing our analytic skill-set.

-better understand how English as a language can be articulated: being able to connect different pop culture themes
Mikhayla, Lucia, Yanki

our expectations were that we would have engaging classes and in depth explorations of readings.
RJ, Charal, Teresa, Georgia

hilary, vanessa, krissy
NAP TIME, we’re tired.

We want to learn interesting things that are relevant to our other courses in Emily Carr. We want the learning process to be more active as well.
Brandon, Christel Emily, Tom
cover a broader topic but more sociology based, and world issues that are revevant to our futures
Molly, Casey, Patrick, Darren, Debbie

Jessica McDonald, Lucy Webber, Wang yating, Simone Jarvis
A list of expectations: -What is discussed in the lecture will be tested.
-Knowledge on Current Events
-More discussion on the course pack.

Better way of understanding concepts and ideas presented in a more academic style. Also how to relate this to our future career and our everyday lives.
Brynne and Lexi
Develop more like Gregor samsa

more engaging, more structure towards assignments and during lectures, that glen makes us laugh more and sleep less
hermosa amanda
Sofia Will, Farrah, Sean
- We all want o be able to critically think and read deeper into literature.

Overview of literal culture from contemporary perspective
How to express ideas
How to write
More interaction among students
Syllabus on-line with lecture
Liz, Stephanie, Bridgitte, Brent, Remon, Shannon

Marcus and Jihee
To expand on the tools and tone of my writing, enjoy modern influences.

We want to read interesting literature, learn how to write and read better.?From: Arielle, Ashlee, Amanda, Bohua.
We want to improve our writing skills in responding to and writing critical analysis.
Farhad, Blake, Connor

1 pm Lecture

In our english course, we would like to gain new insight about the world and society around us through unique mediums.
-Jess, Bernard, Wendel, Avery

We would like to be able to gain a sense of clarity from both the readings, as well as being able to express our thoughts, reactions, and understanding easily.
Nikki Nick Kaede

Our opinions split.
1) I want my vocabulary to widen. Basically improve English
2) Write better and read faster
3) I enjoy the real world scenarios that pertain to english, I want more connections to everyday life through English.
4) to analysis many readings that i can apply to life and expand my mind to all the wonders of the world
5) I expect to realize some new eye opening philosophy that will change my view of the world.
Anthia, Michelle, HAzel, Alex, Oleksiy

To improve creative thinking and formal eloquence.
Lyndsey, Oliver, Karine, & Rachel

Passing grade / It has to be in the English language / Boring writing assignments / Exciting reading / Difficult but possible / Education / Challenge / Be able to understand what I?m reading, / Connection to the real world / Interesting / Relation to art, because that is why we are actually here ?
—Maria, Yngrid, Matthew
P.S. We expect you to be interesting.

Nap time
Sam, Nathalie, Holden

We would like to improve our writing, be exposed to different kinds of literature, and better our understanding of what we read…it would also be nice to pass.
Addison, Danielle, and Becca

We want and expect a higher form of english so that we may create proper analysis of ours and others works as well as understanding, reading, and writing english at a higher level.
Gina, Tony, Shelly

Improving reading, writing, research and critical analysis skills through exploring diverse, controversial content.
Naime, Chantal, Carly, Justine, Sarah

We would like to improve our writing, be exposed to different kinds of literature, and better our understanding of what we read…it would also be nice to pass.
Addison, Danielle, and Becca

From Alison Westdorp, Kathleen Gros, Geoff Campbell, Tommy Richardson
We want to develop critical thinking and to have mind-expanding experiences.

We want it to be passable and straightforward. And fun I suppose. With content that we can relate to, and that the seminars connect with the lectures, so that when students talk to each other about the seminars things are the same, because it seems that the seminar is taught so differently with the different teachers, there is no solidarity.
Yadira, Francis, Pat

English should be comfortably engaging as well as challenging outside of a conforming highschool structure that lacks personal expression.

What we want from this course: To learn more about critical analysis and how to come to our own conclusions.
From Tara Dwelsdorf, Connie Munoz, Richard Heikkilä-Sawan

“Aside from the obvious expectation/hope to pass, we are searching to pull information of value out of each seminar/lecture, while engaging in discussions, relevant to our artistic growth.”
Blake, Edwin, Cherry, and Paul

Katie,Megan,Heather
we want to form a better group discussion biased on the material we read, in Lecture!

Improving our abilities to interpret and express ideas.
By Jayden, Bernada, Watson (Jane)Kaho and Chayarop (Dol)

To gain analytical skills, through studying literature, that will inform our artistic practices.
-Reid, Robyn and Joey

Materials that can be applied to our own artwork and to be able to express ourselves more clearly through the English language.
-Madeline, Jasmine, Thalia, Johnny,Christelle

GPA high enough to get into second year WANT. Readings that we can connect to/apply to our lives and fun to read EXPECT
Nathania, Flavia, Justin

How to communicate our ideas in a more conceptual way and to better appreciate the relationship between text, artwork, artist, and audience.
Julian, Viveca, and Quinci

Our expectation of this course are to go over all the readings to better understand the themes so that we can draw back on them in our daily lives and future education.
Jamie, Lauren, Tiana

We want to learn critical thinking skills, larger vocabulary, and practical knowledge to help us in the real world
Max, Megan and Pam

Basic skills of approaching general english.
Cailyn, TJ, Isabel

We want a deeper contextual knowledge of Literature to better understand and create our own signals and improve communication.
Paula, Bob, Serene

We want and expect muffins.
Sam, Nathalie, Holden

http://www.muffinrecipes.net/
Sam Nathalie Holden

critical creative collaborative

Maraya | Refection: NIC talk

Pages

Categories

Archives