"(Re)Visions of Students Today" - Mark Marino
Judging from "A Vision of Students Today," one of the litany of things students decidedly are is white. Mark Marino points this out in "(Re)Visions of Students Today," (above) his Martin Luther King Day remix of Michael Wesh's original video. Marino explains:
Wesch offers something of an explanation for the omission on his blog , stating that it was a matter of choosing to edit out, "a powerful moment, and the sign itself defies any simple reading."Following up on his highly played and first Web 2.0 video, Wesch focuses this video on how today’s students have changed with respect to their relationship to classroom technologies and technologies brought to the classroom (such as laptops, cell phones, and pens). In the video, Wesch uses superimposed quotations and other comments to make a point that seemed implicit in parts of “Us/ing,” that technologies offer new possibilities but do not completely eclipse or erase previous technologies. I’ve tried to make that clear in my previous YouTube reaction to Wesch (Web 2.0…We Respond To We/sch). In that case, Wesch used a highly mobile pencil. In this case, he juxtaposes contemporary technologies with that pre-eminent display technology — the blackboard.
Further, his students also become display media. Or rather, they show the ways in which they can us any surface, including the walls of the room, as sites of inscription, means of participation, directly contrasting the blank screens of their faces and their reports of less-than-full class participation.
While Wesch raises these tensions and some very valuable questions, his use of students’ images, of human bodies, instead of merely inscription technologies, introduces new issues that the video does not address, namely issues of identity: who are the collaborators, who are faces to represent students today. Overwhelmingly, they are white.
Wesch continues, "We [the class] felt like in some ways the race issue is such a hot issue that it might draw attention away from some of the other points we were trying to make."
Marino's argument itself is interesting, but so is its form and venue. By appropriating the material from Wesch's video, remixing it, and linking it to Wesch's original text as a YouTube "video response," Marino puts a new spin on the age-old tradition of scholars responding to, and building upon, each other's work. Wired Campus' coverage offers the following window into the exchange and Marino's rationale for responding via a video remix rather than a text comment:
He [Marino] decided to [create a video response] rather than just post a comment, so that his viewpoint wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of other responses. He even noticed that someone had already expressed a similar reaction to Mr. Wesch’s video, but that the comment had been largely ignored.This last point made me think of another YouTube video, this one by DMAC 2008's own Richard Miller and Paul Hammond, which makes a similar point about new media's ability to link "solitary scholars" together:
“My little video certainly hasn’t caused a tidal wave, but it has caused conversations on various blogs and message boards,” Mr. Marino said. Besides, he added, “it would be harder for me to show people what I saw in Wesch’s video just by writing it out.”
Mr. Wesch said in an interview that he was excited when he saw Mr. Marino’s video. “I didn’t read it as a critique, but I saw it as adding to the discussion we wanted to spark about the state of education,” he said.
Discuss.
6 comments:
Keep forgetting I can't go back and edit here. Forgive my start at bullet points and then dropping them, organization, etc. I really should spend less time on Facebook and more time actually READING, I might learn something!
Rewrite:
Welp. I'm not going to take a lot of time but I have a few responses:
1) the "We [the class] felt like in some ways the race issue is such a hot issue that it might draw attention away from some of the other points we were trying to make" is, you know, kinda the problem. The idea that they knew about it, shot footage with it in mind, and decided to leave that issue out because it was messy is a problem at the level of warrant. I'm pretty sure the video would have had its impact with that cut in there.
2) Diversity isn't something you can always see or is marked. Trying to say that in two minutes you are going to represent everyone, let alone everyone visually, might be impossible but hey, they could have done better (see point one).
3) Abstractions kill. Institutions are different and have, sometimes, very different populations. My limited career has taught me that.
I have got to drop some of the responses on the Chronicle blog are awesome:
"What a bunch of spoiled brats!
If these kids spent less time they spent on Facebook and more time actually READING, they might learn something!
Did it ever occur to them that the onus is on on the student to show up, pay attention, and do the work?
The professor cannot learn for you.
Stop your whining and open a book!
— Cynthia Jan 30, 09:59 PM #"
. . .
So much for that
You know you work with this person.
How do you explain "solitary scholars" to them?
Thanks James for posting Richard and Paul's video. I came to DMAC wanting to know how to capture the google earth descent. They did it with the capture program that Cindy mentioned earlier--Snapz--though they mentioned other options as well. I also noticed in examining google earth today that if you invest in google earth pro, it has a built in movie maker that will export in a number of different file formats. I wouldn't pay $400 for google earth pro, but would rather invest in a capture program generally. However, if you ever want to do this, you can get a free trial for 7 days.
@Jackie - no problem. If you're on a Mac, ScreenFlow is another great screencasting app. There's a free trial, but it watermarks anything you export.
my reading stopped for the longest at that same comment, doug--"We [the class] felt like in some ways the race issue is such a hot issue that it might draw attention away from some of the other points we were trying to make"--who exactly is the class then? what does that say about the relative degree of privilege each one of them feels entitled to that "the race issue" was just too problematic to deal with instead of a fundamental lens through which they live, interpret, and experience life/research/
scholarship/composing?
most especially in light of the amazing play beverly recommended last weekend, the colored museum, (and additionally in the context of liv's film screening yesterday of 20 straws: growing up gay), my head is buzzing about this issue of who "we" are and who gets to decide who can/will/should be heard or seen or acknowledged.
i think back to the very naive idea that new technology (faigley's utopian notion of how discussion boards would use pseudonyms and automatically erase or mask actual embodied identities) somehow frees people from our messy, mucked up relations of dominance and power. this is a very real concern to me about jumping on the cruise ship of new media. the media are powerful ways to talk back to and re-appropriate limiting institutional and corporate power structures. but they are not without their own intrinsic ideological baggage...
have to stop my little rant here 'cuz "we" (the grad students) are off to get some sustenance. i do hope we talk more about how affordances intersect with culture and identity, if people are interested in this.
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