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June 27, 2004
miscellenaous moments that once were nomadic
Several asides come minor moments.
Several of the previous posts were all done from Zurich airport via a bit of paid up wireless time. Several of the ones prior to that were courtesy of the free wireless provided at the University of Lugano. With the rise of more significant mobility courtesy of wireless, and mobile phones, it would be nice to add a location category to a blog. This post was posted from Zurich Flughafen, or Lugano, or Heathrow (where I'm writing now but there's no wireless just found it). But this should be some sort of metadata that is already available (semantic web anyone?) so I just pick it up automatically. Imagine a RSS feed that just provided some geographic information that you could then use as you wished (in the same way that my blog knows my system time and date and I can configure that in all sorts of useful ways).
My flight from Zurich was over an hour late departing. I had plenty of time so wasn't in any danger of missing my connection to Singapore and then Melbourne. But there was a wind shift so as we were joining the landing queue we had to move elsewhere. Then we then lost our gate at Heathrow so did the tarmac bus ride thing. Then the truck with the stairs to get us off the bus was delayed. So, imagine a 727 full of tired and no slightly stressed passengers (many were about to miss connecting flights), the captain apologises for the third time, then says that he's aware there are some passengers with a very tight connection to the Glasgow flight, so a special bus has been provided. And then "but I wouldn't be too worried, Trevor and I are flying that plane."
The delete key pad has just broken off my tiBook.
I just saw the new MPEG 4 video cameras here at Heathrow (where the duty free prices at Dixons are always crap). Cheap, capture to flash memory, low rez but purpose built for blogging. Here they're around AUD450, which is more than I can afford (and more than they're worth frankly), but won't be long now before we have a decent vogging camera. Cheap, small, personal, and easy to use formats.
ps. This didn't get posted from Heathrow because they only sell blocks of access in 1, 3, and 24 hours. I'll be boarding in 30 minutes, just want to send a bit of mail and post to the blog. I'd pay for the hour except it's 5 pounds sterling, which is something like $13.00 in the colour of money I'm paid in.
Instead, I've posted it from Changi, where I can purchase half an hour.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:21 PM | TrackBack
networked knowledge objects
This is something that presenting at EdMedia helped me clarify, in particular the conversations I had with Sebastian and Lilia:
I am going to have my students make networked knowledge objects. Networked knowledge objects express some of the properties or qualities outlined in the network literacy manifesto, and they are also deep learning artefacts that are made by connecting different media objects into composite wholes. These wholes are always provisional, that is partial and retaining their authority as parts, while still participating in the new wholes that form parts of. It is the deep learning equivalent of intertwingling, or small parts loosely joined. The learning is expressed in what is found or made, what is joined, how they are joined. They represent complex, experiential epistemological claims that make particular sorts of claims. These knowledge claims are different to those made by exams, essays, and other teleologically orientated knowledge expressions.
Individual blogs are nearly such objects, individual blogs using rich media are closer, blog ecologies are.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:31 AM | TrackBack
post conference wind down up
On Friday night over dinner our minor blogging posse toasted our meeting and wondered out aloud what an appropriate toast for bloggers ought to be. I suggested permadrink.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:20 AM | TrackBack
mountain walking
On Friday Sebastian and I didn't so much try a blogwalk as a mountain wander, discussing process based learning. blogs, teaching and learning strategies and the like. We went up the Monte Bré funicular, and then walked down to the village of Bré and then into the mountains proper. We ended up at the summit of Monte Boglia, around 1500m, and the view was simply awesome. This is the sort of place you ought to go to to think.
While we were resting two others walked up. As we got up to leave someone calls out "Adrian". Turns out the other two walkers were also conference escapees, and one of them knew me from InterMedia Bergen. I don't know if that means it is a small world, big world, or only that of course there'd be a couple of Norwegians up the top of a mountain. But it was an intriguing intersection of worlds.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:18 AM | TrackBack
June 25, 2004
post panel
A couple of hours after the weblogging panel. Things to remember; transparencies set in OS X in keynote or powerpoint don't translate to PCs (obvious in retrospect since transparency relies on the Quartz rendering engine). This destroyed my slides. Don't read a theoretical paper, just talk to 4 or 5 key ideas and leave it that. People will fill in the gaps themselves, or will ask. We started with a good crowd, ten minutes into my talk we lost a quarter. Too theoretical, and complex, partly as a result of reading the presentation. This lost too many people
which was unfortunate. Sebastian came next, did a much better presentation, and then we finished with Lilia. It was a lot of material so we had a break then returned with an audience of probably 20 and had a very high quality 50 minute discussion that could have gone for considerably longer. As Sebastian said, the audience might have been small but it was a high quality audience.
Key outcomes: a high level of interest in the possible use of blogs, confusion about how or why you would use them, questions and problems about how to encourage, foster and nurture their use with disinterested or resistant students, confusion and a difficulty in showing the distributed nature of blogging (something that I have to add to my presentation). It is clear that outside of Mortenson and Walker's original essay on blogs the literature is surprisingly thin (outside of blogs) on a pedaogical 'plan' for the use of blogs that a novice blogger might use. The specific problem with this is that blogs are very much like design education - you have to learn by doing it.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:19 AM | TrackBack
June 24, 2004
Lugano
Well, I don't have a lot to link to but safely arrived in Lugano. Humid, overcast, pretty. Enormous conference, rumoured to be 1500 people here, but it's spread across two venues and multiple sessions so it seems much less crowded than it could be. Have hung out with Sebastian and Lilia working out how to run our symposium come panel tomorrow. Heard some interesting things but, well, all academics should learn more than they know about being teachers I'm not sure EdMedia is the place I'd send them. It's interesting how disciplinary boundaries lead to lacunae. (More on this when my battery isn't about to die...)
As I said. It's a pretty place. Quiet, small, I think my model of Switzerland so far is that it is a boutique. And you have to careful because you might break something.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 21, 2004
away
I'm leaving for EdMedia today so there may be no activity here for over a week... I think there might be some wireless available at the conference, so if there is I'll post from Lugano, otherwise, its academic conversations, serious mountains, and probably chocolate.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:40 AM | Comments (1)
June 18, 2004
from fibreculture
An interesting thread has been going on at Fibreculture, which like so many lists now seems to splutter to life intermittently. This is my reply to Danny which continues the conversation. I've included it here because different people will see it, and I wanted to keep what I wrote. The original email is archived online.
On 18/06/2004, at 8:30 AM, Danny Butt wrote:
>I'll disagree with Adrian here and say that I don't think basic code
>literacies are a core part of a critical humanities curriculum in the
>new media environment.
not sure how what follows is a disagreement :-)
>In the early stages of HTML, yes, to engage with writing in this new
>medium you needed to know HTML. So for your 1997 hypermedia module, go
>for it. But now, to customise templates in a content management system
>effectively one needs a lot more knowledge than a few HTML tags. As web
>production tools increase in complexity (in order to make it easier for
>people with no interest in learning those tools to publish with them) I
>see diminishing returns on the amount of technical knowledge acquired
>by a humanities student. If you know >b> >i< >p< >br< and >h1-6<, i.e.
>one class worth of stuff, you can use many online writing systems
>effectively.
>
use them to publish, but use them to design/build with? I think what has been common to the posts here is that blogs and CMS's and all the rest of the mess is not about publishing. It is about writing. The paradigmatic shift that these technologies enable is in letting people write, not consume. (Why does every university still include 'delivery' when they mention online learning. Education is not bread and if you want to see why it doesn't work just think of why you would even use 'delivery' as your metaphor.)
I have just intro. blogs to a group of design postgrads. Few have any html experience. The blogs don't work for them. Why? Because they have to be able to design in them as well as write. As someone like John Thackera (or Richard Florida, or Ken Wark, and so) would say, these days it is not just about writing or publishing but it is about writing as a designerly act. This includes choosing colours for your website, images, layout. but it also includes more general acts of considered making (who to link to, when, what to write, why).
If you can do the basics in a class, that's fine. It is still teaching basics in terms of a markup language and its principles of content versus layout (fundamental to all blogs and their CMSs, here the distinction between markup as declarative versus markup as descriptive is crucial if you don't want to corrupt your design via your CMS). Basics equals some notion of a literacy in a skill or language. The difference might be in what constitutes the basics, but it isn't a disagreement.
to return to the design postgrads and their ilk. if you don't understand basics of markup how would you insert a blogroll from blogrolling.com into your blog template? Or the appropriate code from technorati, geourl, allconsuming.net and so on. These are not *accessories* to a blog but are what constitute this as a different paradigm of networked writing. Emergent, distributed, complex patterns of part to whole. YOu only get to play in this sandpit if you can include the toys in your CMS.
>Another pet peeve, endemic in interdisciplinary spaces like new media,
>is curriculum encouraging "experimentation with design" without
>covering design principles as taught by people with expertise in that
>field. I agree that it's useful to know principles of design and
>programming, but I think they need to be taught with a)
>accountabilities to the professionals in those fields and b) with an
>understanding of the importance of specialisation, some reflexivity
>around the limits of DIY, and experience of the *collaborative*
>practices that occur in the new media environment.
>
agree 100% here. Design is a specific professional practice. My common and well voiced complaint to many in the trad. hypertext lit. community as they moved into flash and co was to work with designers. They're writers, not designers and it shows.
In media at RMIT we are building collaborations with design students. this is because they're better than media students at design. It is also to teach media students that they have to learn how to talk to designers, to respect design as a professional practice/discipline, and how to collaborate. which is not to tell a designer that you want a yellow logo in Arial tomorrow morning.
>That requires interfaculty collaboration in program design in a way
>that in my experience most universities don't facilitate that well. In
>many ways, it'd be good for the humanities to stick to writing (I know
>that sentiment is not likely to be popular here :7)
Well, I wouldn't want to hypostatise that too much. Simplest response from me would be "what is writing". It is changing, fast. Most humanities academics and students can't see past the essay. That's ok in an antediluvian kind of way, but is probably why they lost the knowledge wars some time ago. How many scientists/engineers, and today, designers, feel obligated to write essays? What forms do they use to legitimate knowledge? Who are essays for outside of the humanities academy and its particular ideologies of learning?
cheers
Adrian Miles
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:32 AM | Comments (2)
June 17, 2004
a videoblog essay from .no
Jon is currently writing an essay about videoblogs. He keeps an impressive blog and with his interests in education, blogs, and media it should be an excellent read. Perhaps he could be prompted for an abstract? :-) Unfortunately while I was working at InterMedia I never met Jon, though we were both in Bergen. Pity and not sure why or how that happened. Smaller circles in a small community.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2004
videoblog wiki
Over at me-tv.org there is a videoblog wiki. I recently set up a wiki where I was going to start putting a lot of vog related stuff but now I'll use this one. It is an excellent initiative and it is time to really kick start this thing along. Unbeknowest to me turns out there is another manifesto too. This is a conversation I will return to.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
Possibly useful
This is an article in First Monday on blogs in the classroom (found via weblogged-ed). This is useful for the knetlit project, as well as the paper I'm finishing up on blogs as reflective, disruptive practice as part of EdMedia 2004.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
moops
Aisling Kellher and co at MIT are working on a Nokia interface for vogging. They've got a mupe server up and running and some test movies to have a look at.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2004
Videoblog email list
At http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging you can join a video blog email list. jay Dedman in Manhattan has set it up, and when I subscribed there were ten on the list. Its charter is broad, largely to facilitate discussion about video blogs with particular interest in things like compression problems and those sorts of things. Sounds geeky? I guess so, but compression and bandwidth is to vogging what leading and kerning is to typography.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2004
Singin' in the Rain.
Miles, Adrian. "'Singin' in the Rain': A Hypertextual Reading." Postmodern Culture 8.2 (1998). This essay is mirrored at: http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/singing/
This is available at PostModern Culture (subscription only) at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v008/8.2miles.html.
From the introduction:
This reading represents an experiment or heuristic exercise meant to discover possibilities for interpretation (not just of film but of any complex text) in multi-linear, hypermedia presentation. Forced into an artificially singular sequence, the components of this reading might seem elliptical and repetitive; they are designed to be explored from various perspectives and in differing combinations. Though it has an argument and an interpretive agenda, this is not so much an essay as a text in the deepest sense: a fabric of ideas deeply and multiply connected.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)
Old Genre, New Tricks.
McNeill, Laurie. "Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet." Biography 26.1 (2003): 24-47. (This is available via JHUP's Project Muse if your library subscribes - subscription only link.) The abstract:
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2004
thunder cuts
Talking at dinner I asked if funding cuts had caused staff redundancies where a friend worked. Jasper interrupts anxiously and asks "What are thunder cuts?" obviously wondering what aspect of violent nature he hasn't yet been told about. How big could the world be when you're five?
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:21 PM | Comments (2)
June 09, 2004
EdMedia on blogs
I'm participating in a symposium on blogs at EdMedia 2004, in Lugano later this month. It is about blogs as disruptive technologies, and I'm feeling rather intimidated by the collection of panellists assembled. This is my abstract, though as the piece develops it is mutating appropriately:
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:50 PM | Comments (3)
ecto and qt
Ecto has done it! A red letter day for vogging. The ecto client now supports uploading of QT, this includes recognising the poster frame of a movie, writing an embed tag and so on. This rocks. Unfortunately, though I've installed the new client it isn't working for me. Must be karma.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2004
pulp rss
Am trying out PulpFiction , I just don't read other blogs properly so am going to rely on RSS and Atom to do this better, if not properly.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)
what you learn from public exhibition
I've got work in a large retrospective show that is being run by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The show is 2004 Australian Culture Now and apparently I'm one of the one hundred and thirty artists represented in what is supposed to be (from the pr): "one of the most ambitious surveys of contemporary Australian art in recent history". All I'll say to that is they are ambitious if they reckon my minor video sketches ought to be in it.
So, I went to view my work in this exhibition context, where it is being delivered into their space from its usual server location, and realised several things.
Having the controller visible is a good idea because it provides very simple visual feedback to your users about what is happening (since the controller provides a download bar). Very simple I know, but in a gallery context where they are pushed to the media rather than surfing not providing that feedback means the public have no idea of what might be happening. Embedding download bars where you have child movies is probably a good idea, for the same reason, which is something I've added to the Danish Snow + Sound vog so that as the child movies are loading viewers understand, hopefully, that data is being downloaded. Finally, by having the controller visible it makes very apparent the activity of child movies, simply because you can pause the playback of the parent movie but, in the case of the Danish Snow + Sound work, the embedded child movies keep playing. So, though I've been recalcitrant when it comes to interface stuff in the vogs I've seen that this does cause many more problems than it solves.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)
Snow from the Train, again.
I've repeated the Snow from the Train vog, but unlike the original one this version now has a soundtrack. I had originally intended to load and play the soundtrack as a childmovie track, but since the two video panes are already running as child movies the playback I was getting on my overburdened 550MhZ tibook just didn't seem that impressive. So I've just included the soundtrack as a part of the parent movie and looped it.
Of course, this could just be imaginary on my behalf, I don't know enough about QuickTime to be sure if childmovie tracks do produce as significant a performance hit as I notice, but to my non-programmers mind it makes sense that it would - you're asking the QuickTime Player, which is optimised to play 'traditional' content, to load, display, and manage external content from several other sources. I imagine you could write a custom player application that was dedicated to playing childmovie content, but the generic QuickTime player is just that.
So, the new vog. It is identical in structure to the earlier iteration, except a single narrative voice over has been added. This has been included because I wanted to make a version where additional context was provided through the traditional model of narrating. This is from a wish to return to a more discursive series of vogs that continue the recent themes and also narrate the world. No, that's not right. Also narrate my world. Though here narrate looks more to the essayist style inaugurated by Chris Marker rather than the voice over associated with instructional documentary.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
The hats, continued....
I've mentioned here before the de Bono six hat exercise (there's an excellent outline of it here). This year I've introduced a version of it into our new first year curriculum. I'm teaching something called Editing Media Texts, and in this course students are working on editing (and thinking about what editing is) in text, image, video, and sound. As they've been working on making a storyboard about themselves, then using the same images to make a comic page with at least 6 panels, and finally a collage, I've introduced the hats as a way to get structured feedback from and to each student. The version I've used here does not use the blue or white hats, which don't seem particularly productive at this point or in these exercises. This is how I've presented this (keep in mind that de Bono has an entire book about the six thinking hats!)
what is good about the work? What are the benefits in how it has been done? What do you think it tells us about the person? What do you like about the work? This is about the benefits of the work, what is good.
red
this is all about intuition, hunches, immediate responses. Here you should learn to listen to your immediate feeling. Is it good? Does it excite you? Is it dull? Does it fail to hold your attention? It is about these feelings and it is NOT about rationalising them. This activity teaches you to learn to listen to your immediate responses, and to be able to then place them in a larger framework (the other colours). These responses are important. Remember, here it is immediate and intuitive, it is not about rationalisations.
black
this colour is about caution and judgement. This is criticism, why doesn’t it work? How does it not fit what is needed or supposed to be done? What problems can you see with it?
green
this is for creative thinking and responses. What do you like in the work and what things does it suggest? What else could be done, or done differently to improve the idea? What would you do? Green can be provocative, what about this? What about that? Recognise what ideas are being proposed, point them out, and wonder and ask hard questions about ways in which it could be done differently to improve it.
In the first case each student's work is individually presented to the entire class (by me, the student says nothing) and each student 'wears' one colour. They can only respond according to the criteria of the colour, and my role as teacher is to not let a red comment become black, and so on. In a class of 15, this means a student gets 14 bits of feedback and each is structured from a range of views. It also means that all students hear different sorts of feedback, see the variation in work, and develop a vocabulary from which to provide commentary.
For the next student's work presented, everyone moves one 'hat' along, so by the end of the class everyone gets several goes at each of the different colours. This is a very demanding task, and with 12 students it pretty much takes all of a two hour workshop, and by the end everyone is quite worn out.
The benefits are that students develop a critical vernacular that is informal but structured, which can then be developed through other practices. The task explicitly separates personal commentary and feedback, so that the criticism being provided is defined by the role defined by the hat, and is not then treated by either party as 'personal'. After this entire class exercise I have performed the same structure between pairs of students, and they largely started from red, moved to yellow and then green all by themselves. Obviously the colours aren't of specific import, they're just tags to help identity the process, but I was impressed with how readily they were able to comment on each others work using these skills. Contrast this with my third years who when asked to comment on a piece of work struggle beyond "I like it", "because it's good".
The next thing I need to develop, then introduce, is a more structured and engaged way of dealing with creativity as a general practice, oh, and I need to learn how to give better structure around the graphic work that the students have done. None of us are designers so I struggle with meaningful feedback about work.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2004
the biggest thing that a five year old imagines in the world
A friend telephoned Anna during dinner. All we could hear was Anna's side of the conversation, a series of emphatic "Really?", "Oh my God" and "No?". I thought it must be news of a close friend who's new child is due. Jasper, however, with the world view of the five year old, turned to me excitedly and asked "Have they got a new puppy?"
Neither as it turned out - the friend had just lost their job.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)