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I wrote this piece for my department's Autumn 2010 Almanac, an internal publication organized by grad students. I'm happy I can also share it here. Coming soon: a more pragmatic report on using elgg for my course website.
Going Native
Last February, the first annual Digital Media and Learning conference convened at UC San Diego. Sponsored by the Digital Media and Learning Hub (a project of the Irvine-based University of California Humanities Research Institute) with major funding from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, this event marked an influential intervention into current discourses on education. With doomsayers proclaiming that 21st century technology poisons our children and idealists touting the potential of today's "digital natives", the debate over media literacies demands sustained critique. At its best, the DML conference, through a serious engagement in its theme of "diversifying participation," stimulated nuanced and pragmatic conversations about productive places for technology in the classroom. But in my opinion, the role of higher education in this enterprise remained ambivalent and indistinct, no doubt in part due to MacArthur's emphasis on childhood. While many projects in the orbit of instructional technology and the digital humanities (including HASTAC, the Duke-based Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, also funded by MacArthur) build bridges between educators in different milieus, there are important institutional disjunctures that strain these alliances.
Not least of which is the university's equivocal relationship to humanities pedagogy -- especially now, while the field tries to weather a crisis of legitimacy. Is it humanities research or liberal arts teaching that is most valuable, and how do we make a case for either when privatization drives higher learning toward IP and professional training? Our cultural and economic mania for technology renders new media central to these negotiations, as every interested party struggles to incorporate the possibilities of digital platforms (or, more cynically, to cash in on the hype). Accordingly, the discipline of media studies is in a unique position to mediate (so to speak) the conflicting investments and imperatives converging on the scene of higher education. master tea original flavor low prices We have an opportunity to demonstrate the merits of a critical approach and contribute to emerging praxis in creating, transmitting, archiving, and representing cultural production -- and yes, teaching it to college students.
You Got Production in My Studies!
This commitment to the stakes of media literacy animates my development as a teacher. Now, the discourse of literacies is not without its problems, and the dispute rages on about whether (or, more realistically, how) computers, video, and mobile devices belong in the classroom (and in young people's lives overall). Technology is certainly not a magic bullet that revolutionizes education by its mere presence, nor are today's students impossible to engage without internets and gadgetry. But judicious deployment of digital tools can support old-fashioned pedagogical principles like participation and assessment, as well as connect learning to our contemporary milieu. 2 step coc/cocaine detox program for persons over 200 lbs I would argue that the humanities do have a responsibility to demonstrate relevance, and that it is my job to help students make meaningful links between the theoretical traditions of my field and their own personal and social experiences.
Most of my courses cover topics related to television and cyberculture, formations with particular ubiquity in these life experiences. Here, a reflexive approach that facilitates learning through and not just about these media seems essential. Experiential pedagogy involves students in using the artifacts that we're studying and in thinking critically about this use. I would not teach online community, for example, without a course website that allows us to explore and evaluate representative systems in a structured way. Moreover, I encourage students to engage with media form, aesthetics, and infrastructure as creators, not just as users. Written composition is no longer the professional world's primary skill, and competence in multimedia rhetorics is something I would like students to take from my discipline, as communicators as well as critics. buy single panel coc/cocaine home urine test kit For these reasons, I often incorporate at least one visual or multimodal project into my classes.
Of course, non-traditional assignments bring specific challenges. It can already be hard to cover adequate topical material in a quarter, much less master technical capabilities within a studies course. Budgeting scarce resources, from time to expertise to equipment, is often difficult. I have found that offering students individualized guidance plus a suite of resources appropriate for various levels is more effective than attempting to systematically teach aptitude. With this launchpad plus guidelines emphasizing the recommended steps in the process of completing a project, Stanford undergrads seem more than capable of self-directed and innovative problem-solving. Most importantly, I stress that creative work in a studies course is evaluated based on its rigor, originality, and intelligibility and not on its technical polish. zydot ultimate blend orange flavor buy. With today's vernacular tools, it is eminently possible to devise a compelling online artwork using only simple interfaces. In fact, the changing landscape of today's media industries and social web depends on facilitating this sort of "user-generated content".
The Medium is the Message
Much credit goes to my students for excelling at synthesizing their talents and viewpoints with critical texts in inventive art-making. In Introduction to Digital Media, I asked them to collaborate in groups to "create a multimedia web-based work that engages with the theoretical perspectives we have studied." As an example of the provocations that are feasible through accessible platforms, I would like to highlight "Novus Reproba Verum" by James Johnson, Patrick Kelly, Stephanie Ogonor, Mandy Sa, and Alfredo Sabillón. This experimental, parodic "un-art movement" has as its nucleus a basic html web page built in Google Sites, comprising a manifesto, artist bios, and links. The bulk of the project expands hypertextually in a distributed, ephemeral network of sites and interventions by these ficticious artists, levaraging Blogger, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook, YouTube, and more to embody the collective's mandate to be "the only reputable source of digital misinformation." The personas imagined by individual group members include Chevo Mnomno, a retired priest who copies film reviews and blogs them with a different title swapped in; Stacy O’Keefe, a poet whose works are generated by computer code; Mitch Paxton, a radical who defaces famous images and texts and promulgates a YouTube hoax about the death of Susan Boyle; Oni and Ur, lesbian lovers who sell realistic sculptures of bombs (actually found photos of real bombs) on Ebay; and a pro-art heckler named Joan Chebert.
The dispersed, parasitic, and dynamic form of "Novus Reproba Verum" elaborates course questions about online identity, authorship, archiving, and agency in ways that are both entertaining and critical. Performative stunts like the fake Susan Boyle memorial video and Oni and Ur's militant feminist feuds in YouTube comments mobilize familiar web destinations for unpredictable interactivity, manifesting rather than just describing the implications of digital architecture. This ambitious accretion of appropriations and incitements intersects many of the internet's compromised binaries, including real vs. fake information, human vs. computer intelligence, art vs. nonsense production, legal vs. illicit creativity, and publishing vs. filtering content. The project is thus exemplary of how multimedia work can give students the opportunity to experience and manipulate the characteristic constraints of media as a means to learn about and critique them.
In Transmedia TV, my students were equally adept at appropriating media footage and techniques to create video projects. Even beginners were game to use consumer tools like iMovie and the department's dedicated Kodak cameras to produce thoughtful and thought-provoking visual essays on topics ranging from television's product placement to YouTube's spreadable memes. In the coming academic year, I hope that connections with campus groups like the Stanford Cardinal Broadcasting Network and alliances within our department will further support my development of experiential curriculum in media studies. In particular, I have plans to incorporate video commentaries leading to a TV presentation into Introduction to Television Studies and experiment with pedagogy structured around remix in spring's Copy This Class. I believe that Art & Art History's unique interchange of approaches and resources offers opportunities for teaching media through media that are invaluable to my growth as an educator. With its theoretical, aesthetic, and historical orientation and contact with active art-making, the Film & Media Studies program makes possible a distinctive response to humanities challenges in the context of Stanford and academia at large.