|
U-blog, I-blog |
||
 |
||
|
I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
 |
|
The Toronto School of Communication The McLuhan Program Blog alerted me to a new site about the Toronto School of Communication. Twyla Gibson, a senior fellow at the program, has published excerpts or synopses from her dissertation (2000), and the site provides a quick visual and textual outline of the ways in which the Toronto School (Havelock, Innis, McLuhan, and others) drew from Plato and each other.
Blogger refreshed I had a couple of good conversations this past weekend with friends who don't blog and hadn't seen many blogs. Both could immediately see the potential for engaging students in conversations, in the intellectual work of searching the web and sharing what they find with others in a class or a non-academic community. Those positive responses have inspired me to get back on the TeachingBlog--even though I had never intended to neglect it this long! I simply haven't been logging on from home to do any surfing this semester--and my son is always playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. My students have migrated to Blackboard, preferring the one-stop-shopping of a course management system, and frankly, who can blame them. Weblogging will find a home in education, but it will have to dislodge or tustle with those damn course management systems.
News Story about Purdue Bloggers This article from Purdue's students newspaper was quickly filtered on Kairos News, but I thought it worthy of more attention. Samantha Blackmond, who I have filtered this summer, describes her array of teaching techniques and technologies. In other words, she does a nice job of putting weblogs in the context of class room discussion, journaling, email, etc. Does make me wonder how much we can cram into our classes. The article also cites a recent survey that found 4.12 million blogs on the Internet, but 2.72 million of them abandoned. We won't be able to judge blogging's success by the # or permance of blogs; they need to be understood, I think, as a process and a technology/genre deployed at specific times for specific reasons. There are no expectations that eveyone journal all the time, and the genre is not considered a failure because people pick it up and then abandon it.
Time and Blogging One of McLuhan's Laws of Media is that a new technology obsolesces, or pushes aside, another technology--if it takes hold culturally and individually. John Lovas at De Anza College identifies TV as the pushed aside technology in his life. I suspect that when I ask students to blog, they feel the opposite impulse or pressure: instead of gladly pushing aside TV or some other activity, they resent the time away from a preferred activity (including human interaction).
Brian Massumi I just started a new book by Brian Massumi, Parable of the Virtual. A scholar who writes books with that title has to have a web site, right? "There is a certain hubris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inventing. But the hubris is more than tempered by the self-evident modesty fo the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, aset aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking‹and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however a small way, however really abstractly‹well, just hang it up. It is not that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a questin of right and wrong‹nothing important ever is. Rather it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you are busy critiquing you are less busy augmenting. . . . Like all strategic questions, it is basically a question of timing and proportion. Nothing to do with morals or moralizing. Just pragmatic. " (13) "I have tried to take seriously the idea that writing in the humanities can be affirmative and inventive. Invention requires experimentation. The wager is that that there are methods of writing from an institutional base in the humanities disciplines that can be considered experimental practices. What they would invent (or reinvent) would be concepts and connections between concepts. The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simple: don't apply them. If you apply a concept or system of connection between concepts, it is the material you apply it to that undergoes change, much more markedly than do the concepts." (17) Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Thoughts on McLuhan and PowerPoint (399) Donald Kunze, an Associate Professor of Architecture at Penn State U, claims that McLuhan had "it" right all along--a man after my own biases. Kunze uses McLuhan's notions of hot and cool media to analyze PowerPoint. When presenters simply offer text that they then read, the presentation is hot on hot--intensity without audience participation (participation in the sense of closure). Kunze suggests that a move towards highly graphical, image-driven presentations can increase audience participation--the cool(ness) effect. Hot and cool are slippery terms, but Scott McCloud in understanding comics points out that television and comic books are the pre-eminent cool mediums. PowerPoint is certainly comic-bookish in nature.
National Institute on Media and the Family (110) If you are looking for a pattern in media effects, you might want to check out the National Institute on Media and Family's website. You can find well developed studies on media habits, content analysis of teen oriented music, ratings of video games, etc. I know some of you are thinking about writing about the effects of violence in music on children/youth, but the effects of lyrics likely have to be considered along with factors like other media consumption and the child/youth's personality.
Comic Book Art Reviewed (110, 399) My father sent me a link to a review of "Comics for Grown-Ups," by David Hadju, published August 14, 2003 in the New York Review of Books. This review essay is relevant to all my current pre-occupations. It is an example of a formal review for my English 110 students who are working on reviews; and Hadju happens to use the music industry as an illustrative parallel for the serious comic book industry. In Visual Culture and Language, we just finished reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. While McCloud doesn't get a mention in this piece, his mentor/role model Will Eisner does, and Hadju echoes the argument McCloud makes--that comic book art needs to be taken seriously. To top it all off, Hadju reviews Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, and says this graphic novel is part of a growing trend in music, graphic novels, and the Internet: the "recording" of daily life, the mundane, the nothingness of our lives. Yup, he means blogs.
Music in Wired (110) The October issue of Wired features the "Superproducers," and my education in contemporary music continues. The Neptunes, Nigel Godrich, the Matrix--these producers and producer-teams are hailed as the brains behind the current musical major-domos. The piece ends up being photo-heavy and text light, but what the producers say might provide an interesting spin on a hot new idea in composition circles. The idea that writing in a digital era is actually a bit like being a DJ (mixing and spining others ideas, rather than making an original composition) takes on a new twist in a writing classroom. Students might be the DJs, but instructors might be the producers. "We find direction for the artist a lot of the time" says Lauren Christy of The Matrix. "Producing is diplomacy," says Nigel Godrich. "If you have an idea you really want to follow, sometimes you need to trick them into doing it. You have to be political and shrewd and cunning." On file-swapping, the issue is has a couple of juicy graphics on the real problem in the music industry--CDs being too expensive. Also a story about "BigChampagne," a company tracking all of your downloads--not to bust you, but to help somebody sell something to you.
Blog stuff to remember A guide to weblogging.--student directed. An online workshop -- teacher directed. I'm taking good filters and making them bad--see Kairosnews for the good stuff.
McLuhan and Manovich, again Nice review of Manovich's The Language of New Media by William B Warner in Telepolis. Warner sees Manovich's work as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan," and he goes on to do a nice job of summarizing McLuhan's basic premises (the medium is the message, the medium is the massage, media exist in an environment in which we need to pay attention to all media). Warner also quickly identifies with main critiques of McLuhan's work: that he is a determinist, that the probes are "facile" and "anecdotal," and that McLuhan seems to adopt a quasi religious perspective on the ways in which electronic communication are like primitive communication. I particularly like this summary of the critiques because all three points are off base, although the concern about the probes is not one I had read much about. Definitely something to keep in mind as I conduct my own probes.
CDs I listened to on the way to Mpls and back (110) "The Eminem Show." I have heard songs and seen Eminem on SNL, but not listened to a whole CD before. The first cut, "White America," floored me--wonder why that didn't get radio play ; ). Eminem's racial politics struck me as angry but insightful; his gender politics were hard to listen to. The relentlessly autobiographical nature of his work might be consistent with hip-hop, but also caught me by surprise (I know, I know, get my head out of the sand). X-treme blogging, broadcast to millions: we are clearly a society that is willing to listen to, and share, personal stories, on a grand scale. The White Stripes, "White Blood Cells." Fun and jangly--new to me, but like a lot of music I have listened to. A bit of Velvet Underground, Kinks, and an obscure Canadian band named the Enigmas. Didn't get a strong feel for where they are coming from lyrically: after Eminem, the pop-sound just didn't carry a strong, clear message. The Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots." I was getting close to the Twin Cities, so my concentration started turning to the road. Mello and interesting--I'd like to figure out what the techno-japanamation connections and interests are for this group. David Byrne, "Uh-Oh" and "David Byrne." I listened to "Uh-oh" twice on the way back--Byrne is all-over the place musically on this collection, but he always goes to such interesting places! Some danceable big horn pieces, some quiet sharp pieces. I'm starting to pick up some important motifs in his work: getting stoned while watching television (not sure how literal he is being--television can stone the straightest of us), postmodern playfulness ("Twistin' in the Wind" as follow up to "Road to Nowhere")--as if this one wasn't obvious! The self-titled had no horns that I picked up, and seemed to be relentlessly inter-textual: reworking some of his old work, reworking the Velvet Underground, reworking the Beatles. Harder to listen to than "Uh-Oh," but definitely will be getting some further attention from me. |
|
|
Home | About | Recent | Archives Copyright Kevin Brooks, 2002-03. |