I do not remember what friend first lead me to the TED talks. Maybe it was Gardner Campbell. But they are world class speakers and thinkers in accessible presentations. For instance here is Matt Cutts a computer scientist with a intriguing idea of trying something for 30 days. Try Something New for 30 Days As the school year begins this openness to change is salutary. What if one read the Bible every day for thirty days, began a new prayer regimen for 30 days. You get the point. Watch his talk and try TED talks for 30 days. And by the way its free.
Jeff Jarvis observation about the death of business journalism reflects on the transformation of many institutions in the technological age including the church. Seminarians like undergraduate journalism majors face a world where education is not a union card for a stable job in a stable industry. Instead it is a vistas to survey the range of opportunities of a new frontier.
Mike Stroup describes the vista idea in his blog mereHope.
I happened upon Google Translate by accident but now it is clear it was a happy accident. Let’s say you are writing an article and you have a foreign language source that you need a rough translation. If you scan the foreign language source as a RTF (rich text format) then you will be able to feed that into the translation window of Google Translate. You are able to do some tweaking of the Google translation on the website. You must get a good clear scan. However you will want to clean it up, how much will depend on you, in a regular word processor, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or Open Office. Some of you will no doubt say this is still cumbersome; however it is much less cumbersome than attaining real fluency in foreign languages.
Mendeley is a both a social network site as well as a bibliographical index. For instance when I did a search on psalms I came up with 725 references. It shares some functionality with Zotero as a searchable research database. However, the social networking element is not as advanced in biblical studies many of the 725 references have only one reader listed at the time when I built my list.
Zotero is a strong bibliographical tool. It replaces Endnote as a bibliographical management system. At this point it is also free. However, it is, at this point linked to Firefox. One can share it as a database like Mendeley but only with a group that you have already designated. Long remarks, that if an independent Zotero emerges, it may have more bibliographic power than Mendeley which also organizes the material on Dropbox. Zotero has very good word processor plugins.
Dropbox is a cloud based storage system that consistently receives rave reports. However, like the university based cloud storage system the free limit is 2 GB which is not enough to be helpful. The 50GB is $9.99 a month and the 100 GB is $19.99. So up to this point I have not ventured there. Baylor like many universities has cloud storage but the limits are substantial. I may have to move to a Dropbox model.
His suggestion about Evernote was more familiar. I have used Evernote since the summer of 2010. Here I paid the $45.00 a year for the premium service that allows up to 1 GB a month in uploads. On Evernote you can store word processing docs, html, pdf, and videos. Also Evernote allows you to annotate pdfs that are part of your research. Evernote is tagable and searchable. I continue to struggle to find my way in this digital wilderness.
OK, so it’s almost 8 a.m. and I’m at home nursing a feverish child, which at least affords me a little free time to work on some final thoughts about the seminar in between bouts of temperature-taking and measuring out Tylenol. Ruta Maya coffee helps. I’m really distracted by this cartoon my son is watching–cartoon rabbits cavorting about with a rendition of “A Night in Tunisia” for a soundtrack (Hey Jazz and Word, which is your favorite version? I’m partial to Dizzy’s myself).
As our seminar draws to a conclusion, I’d first like to say it’s been a pleasure getting to know everyone and reading their work. A special thanks to Gardner for spearheading this experiment (and kudos to Sandy for requiring me to take the seminar in the first place. Also, thanks for the loaner text book). Wonderful conversation and vicious blogging by all have given me fodder and inspiration for my own writing, which has been a real pleasure to do. Paige is forcing me to continue this post-seminar: I’ll do my best! Makes me realize all that I loved about my days of English-majoring and writing for newspapers. Finally, all of this has given me an opportunity to do something I should have been doing all along: blogging. This has been really fun.
What have I learned? Honestly, at the beginning of the seminar, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I made that clear in my very awkward introduction to everyone. But man, what a learning experience this turned out to be, and a very inspiring experience at that!
OK, so here’s a few things I think I learned over the past semester:
Collaboration = Augmentation. The assigned readings are much less inspiring and cogent without the full participation of the class in the blogosphere (no worries there). Some of my more significant learning experiences came after reading other blog posts–and, likewise, hearing you all reflect out loud in class. Many of those observations, written and otherwise, helped me hash out the real significance of the readings or ponder things I hadn’t thought of. It just goes to show that we’re much smarter together than apart. This is a hackneyed observation, perhaps, in the Web 2.0 world, but I think it’s really true. And NOT to say there isn’t a place for one’s own learning space … Which is what our own blogs are anyway.
The importance of paying attention to the sensual experience of media. McLuhan was the most important author for me in this class. Seemed his ideas just kept cropping up all over the place, including in McLoud’s essay. Ashley’s post “McLuhan said this” is an important reminder about how we shouldn’t take certain academic pronouncements too seriously, but something in his message keeps resonating with me. In terms of education, I think the idea of “The Medium is the Message” is an invitation to explore how various use of technology in education either reinforces or inhibits the learning experience based on the senses with which we engage it.
Mastery of technology is less about a prerequisite “competence” than about a sense of playfullness and wonder. After reading the essays on gaming–and in conversations where the subject seemed to always come back to children–I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least on some level, there’s an important lesson to be learned from how children engage technology (and more broadly, the world). I think the same is required of us to learn new things, especially technology. At the beginning of every technological adventure, we must care less about mastery than about forging ahead Crusoe-style and being OK with being a stranger in a stranger cyberland. I’m not advocating irresponsibility, either; just saying that we should always remember to engage technology with a sense of play (not fear) and experimentation before we attempt to master and control it, if that’s even possible. We adults spend a lot of time pointing out how our youth are so adept at technology, but who’s more concerned about being the “experts,” us or them?
Our stories, and our need to tell them, matter more than technology… which is why we keep inventing new ways of telling them. Strange, isn’t it? After this seminar, my take is that modern developments in computing (and our reaction to those developments) are only really important in terms of what they say about us as humans, and how they augment human nature, not what they represent in themselves. Ashley was ahead of the game in this observation when she wrote about Social Media as an Issue of Trust.
Living and learning is an artistic endeavor, and technology–when used effectively–can help us more fully express that. I’m at a loss, so I’ll just stop there .
Now for the cheesy part! I leave this seminar being really excited about the future–what it holds for us as educators and parents, the possibilities for our children to live richer lives as a result of New Media (again, thank you everyone, especially Gardner, for such a wonderful experience). As I think about all this, my minds goes back to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” the part that says,
I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.
And then I think about my own children, and realize that this is what the New Media will make possible. Now, time for another dose of that Tylenol …
My high school football coach, a real salty old fellow, was a wellspring of quirky aphorisms. Of all the things he ever said, there was one phrase which still rings in my head to this day. Like most of his other pithy colloquialisms, you’d likely hear this one just before the team took the field for a game: He’d gather the team in a huddle, his eyes fixed in a steely gaze, and declare with a raspy twang, “Mens [sic], you know what you know.”
You know what you know.
Had the year been 2010 and not 1991, me and my fellow teammates might have wondered silently “wtf?” in our heads after hearing this strange, awkward phrase. Mens, you know what you know. Part of the amusement of it was hearing coach re-pluralize “men” into “mens,” as he often did, but the rest of it just left you wondering: “You know what you know?” Incidentally, it’s somewhat strange to be told you do, in fact, “know what you know,” which we did (and we knew it). And so that quirky saying became a kind of a team mantra, a reminder that we could take the field with confidence remembering all we had done during the previous week of practice, and simply let our bodies and minds react on the field reflexively like musicians playing music without thinking of the mechanics of their instruments.
You know what you know.
You probably see where I’m headed with this … So as I’m pondering Illich’s “Learning Webs,” I hear it again: You know what you know. Taken in another context, this could be a very bold statement about learning, the self-directed kind (and bear with me as I attempt to make a leap from my old football coach to Plato). I think what my coach said in five words was perhaps more eloquently summarized (or not?) by the dialogue that took place between Socrates and Glaucon in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:
[Socrates] But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.
[Glaucon] They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
[Socrates] Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
[Glaucon] Very true.
… the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already … You know what you know. Or, put another way, as John Lee Hooker (one of my favorite bluesmen) did in “Boogie Chillen“:
One night I was layin’ down
and I heard mama and papa talkin’
I heard papa tell mama,
“Let that boy boogie woogie,
It’s in him, and it got to come out.”
And I felt so good,
Went on boogien’ just the same.
It’s in him, and it got to come out … You know what you know … the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already. Finishing up “Learning Webs,” I began to realize that Illich is not telling us something we don’t already know about our educational system (Gisele El Khoury’s post provides a good summary of Illich’s most salient points); and while I’m tempted to fixate on his condemnation of education and how we’ve gotten it wrong, I’m more distracted–and inspired–by the very optimistic assumptions that undergird that condemnation: That all of us have the potential to find our own way. We know what we know. It’s in us, and it got to come out. How meaningful and exciting self-directed learning can be.
If, like Plato, we accept that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already, then the job of the educator becomes strangely simple (and liberated, in my view): One moves from being a teacher, the “expert,” to facilitator. Educators can let go of that expectation to be sages on stages and simply turn “student’s minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves.” As Illich writes, this is the only way for educators to maintain credibility anyway:
As masters of their art abandon the claim to be superior informants or skill models, their claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true.
It’s hard not to agree with Illich’s concept of deschooling, but I will say that it misses a large point. Maybe I’m reading him wrong, but it seems the concept of deschooling assumes that the best learning should (or does) occur in schools to begin with. For the Christian, personal epiphanies are less likely to take place on Sunday morning than they are in, say, the produce section of H-E-B; likewise, our best learning epiphanies, those “a-ha” moments, are as likely to occur outside of school than inside, but maybe that’s precisely what Illich is getting at.
(Note: Just for the record, I never had a writing assignment in school that instructed me to find similarities between a football coach, Plato, John Lee Hooker, and Ivan Illich. That just happened on its own.)
This semester I continue to reflect on my paper on the Death of the Introduction to The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This semester it seems clearer to me that a profoundly new, that is new media approach is required for the pedagogy of the introduction. The project of writing a new type of introduction to Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament that embraces the move from Gutenberg’s print to a interactive e-book will requires a new media literacy.
This seminar has also been an introduction to an interesting network of scholars. Sherry Turkle is an academic profiled by the N.Y. Times in a Home & Garden piece “Really Thing About Things.” She has been teaching at MIT since 1976. She is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Sherry Turkle provides an apt follow up to the rubrics created by Brenda Laurel. Rob reminds us in his post Lost in Space the shift from philosophical reflection to a more narrative reflection that there are differences in the tone and texture of the readings. When Turkle observes “the games as a window onto the culture of computation” she makes a new contribution to the previous readings. What Turkle does so effectively is attend to the way that the culture of computation acts as an environment with its own sort of gravity.
The now defunct television network TechTV created a documentary (in three segments eight, six and eight minute long segments on Sherry Turkle in their series Big Thinkers.” It is now available through YouTube.com. The first video she discusses objects and the self. Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 1 The second segment has her describe the computer as a “mind machine”and virtual reality. Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 2. The concluding segment one of the interesting ideas she explores here is the way that nurutring prompts intimacy, even with objects such as a doll Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 3
Sherry Turkle and the post Teach His/Her Own reminds us that video games or running are all expressions of identity and the formation of our selves. So some of what is in play in our various posts is the questions of how our identity choices are shaped in a new media world. James Kendrick in What We Talk About When We Talk explores with Turkle how the discussion of video games in some ways a meta-conversation on other topics. He challenges us that it may be a fear of a technological shift that marks the level of anxiety. He implies that the technological shift intimates a political that is power shift. The resistance may have more to do with the political/power status quo more than the technology itself. He and Turkle point to the possible advantages this technology may hold for intellectual development.
When Engelbart and Nelson talk about books embedded in the Memex or Dynabook they do not seem to understand the profound change that the computational culture will make on the very nature of this new type of book. The book is an object. Sherry Turkle has spent a caeer examining our relationships with objects and the formation of the self. Her work challenges writers to build in a network context an object that forms a self. What if this new appliance/book would work like a video game. “The emotional power of video games draws heavily on the computer power within that supports a simulated world and a meditative environment, the David called a place of for “recentering.”” (NMR 511)
A major limitation of the print introduction is the fact that it ends like the pinball game that Turkle describes. The reader comes to the end of the page and must wait until the next edition. The new introduction functions in a new digital world. “As a computational object, the video game holds out two promises. The first is a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops. … The games hold out a related promise, also tied to the computer’s presence within them. This is the promise of perfection.” (NMR 511) The challenge for the writer of the digital author is to provide an experience that can be relived and deepened with recurring traffic. This may not be the perfection that Turkle holds out but it is the incremental improvement and the move to excellence for the learner.
It would be interesting to return to Turkle after a session of Second Life or playing Halo.
While my interest in Xtranormal started out as something of a lark, I’m now trying to think about it more academically: Could this tool be useful in the classroom? Where might something like this fit into our discussion of New Media? One key to understanding the irresistible allure of Xtranormal, I think, is to realize that it affords us a way to do something we’ve already been doing for 30,000 years: Puppetry. In this case, though, digital puppetry. A Google search for “puppetry history” served up a link to a site that looked like it had been attacked by the Geocities-izer, but there was in fact a very telling observation on that site that brings me back to this week’s reading by Sherry Turkle:
It seems to me, man has always been interested in creating and controlling other worlds, as well as in trying to define his own. Puppetry, to me, is an extension of one’s self. It may be motivated by the need to explain, explore, embrace or critique the human condition. It is still, one of the safest ways to act out, act up, entertain, educate, commiserate, wonder out loud, unburden yourself or release your feelings. I have used it, along with my story telling to fulfill my need to see the good guys win and justice done. It has always been both a sword and a shield to me. It is my armor in a world of frustrations and disappointments, when indeed, the bad hats seem to be ahead in this game, we call Life. In short, I have found Puppet Theater to be a wonderful place to find peace of mind and spirit.
As I read this, I immediately called to mind the video game enthusiasts Turkle writes about in Video Games and Computer Holding Power (post forthcoming on that) and how they sought escape in video games in the same manner–and for the same reasons–as our anonymous puppeteer quoted above. Interesting.
Back to Xtranormal… Here’s a brainstorm of some possible scenarios where this service might be handy:
Demonstrating effective interviewing techniques for job applicants or journalists
Role play for would-be counselors and therapists (similar to above, what and what not to say)
A story boarding tool, where dialogue for an original movie scene may be quickly roughed out
Granted, the potential for any video created in Xtranormal to be more humorous and distracting than educational may be a barrier to its adoption in the classroom, but still–it’s yet another resource in the digital storytelling toolbox.
A few things I really like about Laurel’s essays (apart from their liberal use of the word “bastard”): For one, reading Star Raiders transports me back to 1982, when the Atari 2600 gaming system was in its heyday.
How many hours I spent playing the arcade knock-off versions of Frogger, Pac-Man, and Joust, I’ll never know; furthermore, it’s a wonder I didn’t develop repetitive stress injuries in my hands for all the times I tried defeat the bomb-dropping burglar in Kaboom! (anybody remember that one?).
Like so many of the other writings we’ve read, it’s hard to grasp the full significance of the essay on the first read, and so my understanding of The Six Elements is very awkward at this point; but I can at least glean the thumbnail sketch: The application of the Aristotelian model of drama, and our understanding of what makes it work, as it’s applied to our relationship with computers. Interestingly, in our seminar there’s this recurring concept of “agency” that is once again articulated by Laurel.
To my thinking, the agency Laurel’s talking about as it relates specifically to character and thought gets to the heart of our expectations about “the ways in which things should work or exactly how they have gone awry” in computer design (I’m thinking less about computer games than native functionality, though). By the way, Sherry brilliantly explains how we build these expectations into our gadgets, even beyond the point of practical use to fulfill our understanding–or need–for what Laurel might call the full “spectacle” or “performance” of the machine:
It seems that our tendencies towards presupposed existence of spaces which exist in their entirety extend to the outer representations of our machines, not just the inner workings of them.
This phrase alone makes Laurel’s essay come alive for me! Aptly titled “Anthropomorphism,” Sherry’s post once again moves us closer to considering the fine line between humans and computers and our desire to make them into our own image.
Speaking of, another thing in Laurel’s essay that really jumps out at me is the idea of consistency in character, and how–just as in stories–inconsistencies in the user experience violate something akin to dramatic order. Laurel’s example of the spell-check-gone-bad illustrates how even well-intended features in computing can, without our prior knowledge of them, upset this innate sense of order if “this behavior is not represented to you in some way … ” (Where this is concerned, Microsoft is king IMHO. Animated paper clips emerging unexpectedly to *help* you?! But to be fair, Apple’s auto-correct feature on the iPhone is just as disruptive). Laurel’s point is well taken: When agency, thought, and character all conspire against the viewer-user, the result is either a really bad B movie or a horribly designed computer application.
Finally, Laurel points out something that really resonates with me, and it reminds me why I’m the kind of person who never, ever starts watching a movie in the middle (and, I think, why I’m also not much of a gamer since I generally don’t have the time to understand the complexities of modern video and alternate reality games). I think what Laurel is saying is that, whether you’re watching Dr. Zhivago or playing World of Warcraft, full enjoyment of the interactive experience depends on one’s expectations of what that experience should be–via the Aristotlean model, if you like–and then how well the experience conforms to those expectations. To illustrate this concept as it applies to computing, Laurel uses her Macintosh as an example:
My favorite Macintosh example is an error message that I sometimes encounter while running Multifinder: “Excel (or some other application) has unexpectedly quit.” “Well,” I usually reply, “the capricious little bastard!” Providing graceful beginnings and ending for human-computer activities is most often a nontrivial problem …
My favorite part of The Last Lecture, which to me is also the most moving part, is the twist ending: Randy Pausch head-faking all of us into believing that his 76-minute aphoristic speech was intended primarily for the general audience.
Oddly, after yesterday’s seminar–to date, the most poignant for me–I began to feel this same sense of being pleasantly (and movingly) hoodwinked. Something about Bill Viola’s essay and the wonderful commentary provided by my colleagues and presenters Jim Kendrick and Rob Rogers crystallized something in my brain. To their credit, I don’t think I could have teased out as much meaning from Viola without their presentation. Another read of “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is surely in order. To Gardner’s credit, sequencing the Viola essay after McLuhan was a stroke of genius.
In doing the required readings for NMFS and blogging haphazardly, and in listening to presentations and ideas being brought forth about the many topics we’ve investigated, my assumption has been that the proper focus of this class is the New Media itself. Like the typical student, I’ve progressed through readings and discussions with a lingering refrain in my head that goes, “Ok, so that’s interesting. But what’s the most important thing about this? What do I take away from all this?”
After yesterday’s seminar, something clicked. I had a mind splinter all evening and into this morning. Call it a moment of clarity, if you like, but I think I’m at the precipice of real understanding here. The most startling realization for me is that we have, in fact, been head-faked: This class is NOT about New Media at all. It’s about Us (with a capital ‘u’). It’s about our need for finding meaning in everything that we do and see and hear, and it’s about HOW we go about constructing that meaning for ourselves, cognitively speaking. It’s about the human brain–although, “mind” sounds better to me–and how it devours everything in the pursuit of truth and beauty “steadily and without any resistance.” It’s about how memory and the act of remembering IS like art: Every waking hour, we’re constantly editing, rearranging, and combining our memories all for the sake of telling stories and teasing out meaning from life. And it’s about how we instinctively and incessantly project those cognitive tendencies into the material world in the form of media, all again for the sake of making sense of it all.
But this is a class about New Media, after all. So what’s the point? The point is this: For the first time in human history, we have the most complete and elegant mechanism for extending our minds–THE most important part of ourselves–into the material world. Beholding the Internet with all of its attendant weirdness and beauty is like standing back from your own brain as you would admire it in some glass case in a museum: There we are, perfectly externalized in technological form, warts and all! (Only, you’re not looking at just your brain, but a billion others, too).
Marshall McLuhan writes that “We become what we behold,” but I’d wager the opposite is just as true: That what we behold becomes us. As Viola demonstrates with his water wall technology via video in “Ocean Without A Shore,” the better technology becomes, the more it enables us to convey ideas like the thin wall separating life and death, for example, exactly as that idea might have occured in a dream. That’s to say nothing of the fact that, not only can we now map our minds into our own data spaces; we can also connect to shared data spaces and take advantage of collective intelligence and creativity that exists there.
Again, my mind goes back to McLuhan. I can finally understand why modern computing as a medium (although, to be correct, it should be “media” because computers allow us to call on all media at once) is conceptually more important than all the bits and bytes that make it possible–or more important than all the individual tools and services that we as educators and technologists feel compelled to incorporate into the classroom. As for the message:
” … the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change
of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”
The standard response of the technophobe is that computers are making us all into robots. But if like McLuhan we accept the notion that any medium’s message alters the scale of our sense ratios to the extent individual senses are emphasized over others, then the greatest promise of our digital age is that the Internet may in fact help to make us more fully human since it represents our collective brains “externalized in technological form.” It means that learning and creating with New Media means we are doing something more fundamentally innate and human than if we were locked away in our own rooms reading the printed page. And I think this is what everyone from Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay were getting at in their individual essays when they pointed to the power of computing and its ability to more fully replicate our thought patterns and the promise that it could make us smarter by allowing us to collaborate more richly.
Finally, I came away with another notion yesterday that’s harder to verbalize or pin down in a single blog post, but it has something to do with how life is really a lot like art. Every breath represents another opportunity to create, to remember, edit, and rearrange our own stories and ideas in our own data spaces to find meaning. What’s even better is that I can now share my data space with you, just as you can share yours with me.
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