DMAC 2008

Things I Have Learned

2008-06-10T00:43:00.004-04:00

I learned a few important things about multimodal compsoing these past few days. Well, I learned a lot, actually. More importantly, however, I also remembered a lot of things I had forgotten about composing in general. There'a a lot that I have come to take for granted composing in print. Before I get some much needed sleep I want to get some of this down. Here goes:

I wasted a ton of time with experimentation. Having an outline would have helped a lot. I do a lot of the work of invention while I write my papers and arrange as I go. Either I'm just more practiced with this technique in print composing or outlining is more essential when composing multimodal texts.
If I ask students to do this kind of work, I'm going to have to give them a lot of time and reinforce the fact that 11th hour work is really difficult.
Writing (or composing) an abstract helps a lot. While finishing this thing up tonight I realized that the paper I hope will grow from this "trailer" will be much better for the work I've done here.
Richard and Paul were correct: working with problematic assets takes time. I need to learn how to interview better and come to the interviews with a very clear idea of what I need as far as assets.
Trauman's mp3/DV camera hack (hooking the Edirol to a splitter and then running it though the microphone input on the camera) was excellent. The sound quality was almost unbearable in the DV clips, so having the mp3s was infinitely helpful.
Side note: The Edirol/DV hack let me cut down long responses to interview questions. I used Audacity to edit the "ums" and "ahs" out of middle of the audio and synced up video clips with uncut audio at either end.
Shooting long interviews give you a lot of interesting things to work with, the problem is working with them.
Splitting clips first and then keeping the split clips in iMovie is essential. Trying to drag long clips into the timeline and then splitting them here caused all kinds of problems.
iMovie really is a drag in a lot of ways but it would have been easier if I had taken the advice I hand out all the time: RTFM.

So, that's it. I hope you like the project!

2008-06-09T11:07:00.000-04:00

Recommended RSS Feed--The Chronicle's Wired Campus

2008-06-09T07:39:00.003-04:00

From today's Chronicle:

New Wiki Helps Humanities Researchers Find Online Tools

A new wiki provides a directory of online tools for humanities scholars. The site, which uses software that lets anyone edit or add to the material, covers more than 20 categories, including blogging tools, specialized search engines for scholars, and software programs that can record what is on a user’s screen.

The site, called Digital Research Tools, or DiRT, is run by Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University runs a similar collection of resources called Exploring and Collecting History Online, or ECHO—Jeffrey R. Young

Um, did you forget the URL? Yes, yes you did. In a news piece about a new online site. Wow, that’s just hardcore!

— Jeff McNeill Jun 6, 06:52 PM #

URL seems to be
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/

— Liz Jun 6, 06:59 PM #

Recommended RSS Feed--The Chronicle's Wired Campus

2008-06-09T07:39:00.000-04:00

HELP WITH GEOMAP!

2008-06-08T21:47:00.002-04:00

Shannon and I are trying to create a Google interactive map as an element in our collaborative DMAC project, but can't figure out how to upload images to the google map -- we have images on Flickr, this blog, and the desktop, but none of these locations seem to be transferring the image. Flickr and Yahoo seem to work together to create a geomap, but Yahoo isn't as aesthetically appealing as google -- and so google's the goal.

Any help would be greatly appreciated -- via this blog, via e-mail (arounsa@u.washington.edu), or in person tomorrow morning.

1000 thank yous,

Angie and Shannon

testing for geomap. (please ignore)

2008-06-08T20:55:00.002-04:00

No failure? Well... no guilt, maybe.

2008-06-08T16:17:00.002-04:00

For any of you who talked to me last week, I came into DMAC wanting to continue my research on digital identity, to create a model text for my students in the fall, and to learn to create kinetic typography animation in hopes of teaching it.

Two out of three isn't bad. If this was baseball, I'd be a heavy hitter.

This is Kinetic typography (and no, I didn't make it :)):

I tried to create something similar. I worked on this on-and-off all week (I didn't get much time to work with it while gathering assets, but I'd say I put in four hours). I spent what I believe was eight hours yesterday, and I came up with a sort-of-disappointing 26 second introduction for my video.

I learned how to do it, but I'm bad at it. I also learned-- in a much more valuable way-- that students couldn't ever be asked to do this in a comp class. It's too time intensive and requires jumps to at least two different programs.

I was ready to throw my hands up and say "well, $#!@! I wanted to try to do an extended piece like this and I've failed." But then I realized how good this was for me. I'm scared to death of the phrase "digital native" (see me and Doug ranting to hear more about that), but I believe I'm what people mean by that. I've always had a computer around, and video games, and gadgets, and I pick up technologies quickly and tend to be productive within a few days.

What I went through making that chunk of animated text (which you'll all get to see on Tuesday, or you can see tomorrow if you come looking for me) is a constant reminder of the frustrations that can result when you see the project clearly in your head but cannot execute it.

I accidentally put myself in the "oh no! The tech is ruining my life" position, a place I haven't been since I first learned Photoshop using a library book back in the 90s.

I'm glad, though. I would rather, of course, have mastered After Effects and Flash and made a totally amazing project (I do have hubris, after all :)), but I think going into a semester of teaching digital composing-- after a year off-- it was good for me to know frustration.

And I'm positive now that I wouldn't teach with Sophie as it is. I would never subject students to the level of frustration I had last night if the frustration was coming from the technology and not the composing.

2008-06-08T00:14:00.003-04:00

Wow. Lawrence Lessig is a god. Not only was he instrumental in the genesis of Creative Commons, but now he's training his powerful mind and creative rhetoric on Washington.
T
Here's a video he released today. I'm inspired. It's not much more than a simple powerpoint, but the argument is clean (a little convenient?) and so is the design. A great text for a class discussion about what it does and doesn't do.

Click To Play

Here's the url:

http://freepressvideo.blip.tv/file/971633/

FYI: I'm going to have to do some checking, but I think the blipTV site he uses to host his sites works the same way as YouTube, but with much higher quality video. That's because it uses Flash as the player instead of YouTube's player. This is a great opportunity to talk about which parts of the production process are free (YouTube's uploading and conversion software) but profit-generating still, and which are not (Adobe's Flash exporter). Lot's of issues at play here. Anybody want to jump in?

Also: Here's the link inside the Lessig movie, in case you missed it:

http://change-congress.org/

race/ethnicity and technology/new media studies: personal perspective

2008-06-07T11:01:00.003-04:00

So yesterday we talked about race and technology and someone asked why we were focusing on that for a specific session and not any number of other issues. I like to consider these two issues as my proverbial “wheelhouse” as an academic so I thought I should probably speak up to this community about the issue. I have a tendency to think in terms of my own research being a second year PhD student so I think this is a good opportunity to try and do a better job here articulating why I think race/ethnicity and technology/new media should be addressed constantly. I have avoided addressing issues of “access” here because, as a group, I feel we have a pretty good handle on that issue. I’ve tried to end each statement with a question I feel is something that each of us must ask ourselves individually and as a community of scholars. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. Here is the list bits of what I wrote as a much longer post. That length seems to be messing up blogger so if you would like the more elaborated version head over to my DMAC blog and look for the post with the same title here.

1) The stakes are higher for people of color dealing with technology in front of other people.
2) New media, like literacy, can be used as a form of violence.
3) Scholars can learn from semiotic systems other than print based that are closer to the rhetoric structure of new media.
4) Identity is information and behaves like information in digital systems.
5) New Media doesn’t do us any good if it just replicates unjust power structures and is continued to be used to dehumanize folks.

Writers House discussion on Monday

2008-06-07T08:57:00.004-04:00

Greetings DMACers:

Paul Hammond and I will be discussing our work on Writers House Monday morning. Now, not that any of you are lacking for ways to fill the time between now and then, but....should you want to take a break from working on your own projects, we'd like to invite you to watch the video we made about Writers House nearly a year ago.

The video is, admittedly, too long at 8 and 1/2 minutes. (It's not impossible that I'll realize my longtime dream of producing a heavily edited version sometime between now and our presentation and, if I do, I'll post the 6 minute version later!) But, we've found during our voyages into on-the-fly composing that having many models of how this work might be done to bounce off of is useful.

For our presentation, we'll be focusing on the kind of composing we hope to foster in Writers House. And, of course, we're happy to respond to questions and queries off-blog and post-DMAC, as they occur.

richard and paul

please test out my blog!

2008-06-06T14:51:00.001-04:00

Anyone --

If you get a minute and have the interest, please visit the blog I'm doing for my DMAC project and test it out and tell me what you think. You may find it at http://comppile.org/watchblog

JW

Campaign to Make Textbooks Affordable

2008-06-06T09:46:00.002-04:00

http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/

Sign the statement here!

DMAC PSA

2008-06-05T11:29:00.011-04:00

Yay for finger exercises

2008-06-04T18:42:00.002-04:00

I just wanted to say that I've really enjoyed the finger exercises. I'm going to use these the next time I teach, definitely. I particularly enjoyed the Audacity exercise and Cheryl's visualizing your design exercise today. Also, Scott's breakout on Flash was great--much more useful than the Flash workshop I took a few years ago as a grad student. Theirs didn't have an exercise to work through and mimic, but Scott's session had a great 30 second project (like a finger exercise) to work through. (And it was a cool project, too!) So yay for the finger exercises, DMAC admins!

Edublogs.org / Uniblogs.org

2008-06-04T08:50:00.005-04:00

I just wanted to post a link to the blog platform that I have had students use in the past. Edublogs.org (and their companion site, Uniblogs.org) is free, uses an open source blog back end (WordPress), has scads of helpful support forum threads (many by students themselves), and gives them some free space to upload files.

The other nice thing is that there are "Pages" and "Posts." Posts scroll and are good for traditional blog posts. Pages are static and listed in a menu so we used them for portfolio materials.

Here are some examples of student projects from last semester:

http://rddandsecurity.uniblogs.org/
http://jjackson.edublogs.org/
http://kls66.uniblogs.org/

OBAMA!

2008-06-03T22:55:00.002-04:00

OBAMA!!!!!!!!!!

MULTI-OBAMA!!!!!

Teaching conversations

2008-06-03T22:54:00.003-04:00

I've really enjoyed the teaching conversations we've had in the past few days. I would like to offer to talk to anyone who wants to discuss creating digital assignments, the care and calming of students new to digital projects, and other subjects of pedagogical interest. I've been using digital technologies for as long as I can remember and have learned the hard way--and the easy way when Scott and I were on the same campus--what can overwhelm both instructor and student as well as what can bring both the excitement of learning. I'm more than happy to share with any of you what I've learned. And learn from you as well!

Marcia

Is it just me?

2008-06-03T20:55:00.002-04:00

Hello Everyone,

Alright, I have my plan in place for my project, but I am having trouble figuring out visuals to go with audio for my movie. Maybe this is an epiphany that I lack visual literacy. Does anyone have advice? Also, whoever made the wonderful film with the tatooed woman with the tatoo in different hues and then in full colour ... can you tell me how you did that?

Apologies, I have nothing profound to say about multimodality - except that it rocks. MP, Casey, and I thought about joining everyone in the Holiday Inn lounge for the tuba player, but we decided to work instead.

Jennifer

A Sophie Thought

2008-06-03T20:40:00.002-04:00

I thought this might be amusing given Phill's post about Sophie (which I agree with much of).

Wikis

2008-06-03T20:26:00.003-04:00

In his session on wikis, Dickie brought up a really good point (well, he brought up several, but I'll only relay only one). He mentioned that some folks at the WAC conference had begun to refer to Google Docs as wikis. While each functions similarly, Dickie was (rightly) hesitant to call this new species a wiki because of the baggage brought with all its associations (Wikipedia, obviously). In my recent work, I’ve taken to calling these sorts of environments “versionable” writing spaces and includes any species like wikis/google docs or any other open-content writing environment. In find this sort of recalibration interesting because it reminds me that we must be constantly aware of the processes for which we engage these applications—collaborative spaces, saved drafts—and that we cannot get tied to a specific application, even if it was the genus creator.

Speaking of specific applications, I don’t know how many of you use wikis but here’s a really great site where you can compare any number of available wiki (versionable, heh) applications. according to price, allowable size, interface, etc. Be warned, there are many more wiki-like applications out there than you probably ever wanted to know about.

~CB

HOW TO CVS Video Camera Hacking for PC & Macs

2008-06-03T08:36:00.002-04:00

HOW TO CVS Video Camera Hacking for PC & Macs

Quick Sophie thoughts

2008-06-03T07:41:00.003-04:00

I'm so completely torn about Sophie.

On the one hand, I completed a project about a year and a half ago where I needed to use video snippets as block quotations, so I had to do all sorts of acrobatics with iframes to create a web document that could work for the professor. Sophie would have made that project a lot easier on me (and would have saved me having to go to a friend to learn how to make my website auto-run when the prof inserted a CD-- such a pain to insure that thing was going to work!).

But on the other hand, I cannot imagine using the version of Sophie we played with yesterday with my students. *I* can accept bugs and quirks and multi-saving and the like. I've been tinkering with computers-- as many of us have-- for as long as I can remember. I know what it means to play with something open source that is essentially in beta.

I also know how frustrating it can be for students to learn a new technology, and I know how quickly the technology can overpower the instruction if something doesn't go just right. Having taught with what would be considered very stable technologies (Photoshop, Dreamweaver... dare I call iMovie and MS MovieMaker "stable?"), and less stable tech (GIMP, Second Life, NVU, Audacity), I have come to realize that if there are more than one or two little hiccups in the early going it ruins student confidence.

I can just imagine my students from the spring semester of last year with Sophie. They were a good group, but they looooooved to jump ahead of me. When Cormac told us that trying to do things while the software was loading would result in bad things, I saw that class locking up multiple machines.

I just couldn't subject my students to that.

So while I like the idea, and might use Sophie myself, I think it's going to have to get to at least version 1.5 before I feel at all comfortable putting it in front of first-year comp students. It's not that I don't think they could learn it; I'm positive they could. It's that I am pretty certain it would drive us well away from the work of composition and into tech support. :(

Not to be the ray of sunshine at 7:30 in the morning, mind you. :)

Alexandria Library 2.0

2008-06-03T07:27:00.002-04:00

There's an initiative afoot at Harvard, where some alums are trying to get the university to use some of its endowments to advance social causes overseas, such as supporting schools in Africa.

As admirable as the Harvard alum initiative is, I think global education would be transformed if Harvard, Stanford, UT, Princeton, MIT, the University of Chicago, and [fil in the blank] committed enough of their resources to provide universal access to a digital library with holdings equal to the holdings at the nation's top university libraries. When we consider the question of education in the 21st century, we must contend with restricted access to evolving insights and understandings. With the unrestrained increase in subscription rates for online journals and the slashing of state support for higher education, one doesn't have to cross the ocean to find the have nots; with the advent of wireless global distribution, creating a global Alexandria Library 2.0 is worthy of consideration.

rspin

2008-06-02T18:50:00.003-04:00

Wow, this was a frustrating day with Sophie. A lot of lessons to be learned, and a lot to remember to tap when I'm teaching. I will come at it fresh tomorrow, with some confidence because I loved the video project so much. We need to find the balance between breaking multimodal assignments down for students to get a handle on and providing so much information that there's no room left for them to make valuable mistakes.

Can't wait to see everyone's videos!

DDO

Blog Technology

2008-06-02T10:41:00.001-04:00

I hope I will be able to add a comment to this post that includes a bit of html. Who knows, though. I might fail :o)

Going Multi-Modal

2008-06-01T22:57:00.001-04:00

Hi everyone—

My project’s finally done, and as I told my sister, it only took me 15 hours to finish a 60-second video. Somewhere near hour 12, it hit me that while I showed several activities that could be considered multi-modal, when I tried to build images, those images more often than not featured reading good-old fashioned alphabetic text as opposed to any alternative types of text. In the opening clip, I surf the internet—clicking, but still reading a form of print; view a map—read an alphabetic text to explain the little lines and geometric shapes; use a cell phone—access by putting in number and texting is, of course, all composing and reading alphabetic characters. No matter where we academics go, the written word follows.

My inability to create the sophisticated work I wanted to compose made me think about the multi-modal assignments that I’ve made in composition courses—web sites, public service announcements, visual arguments, audio essays. While the students have composed with new tools—everything from PowerPoint to Flash—in the end, for me it’s all about the ways words and images interact with and represent ideas. Even the few assignments which forbid students to use text with images asked for a written explanation of what the student hoped to accomplish and how they structured the visual so that images replaced words as the medium of exchange. And usually, just like me, they turn up slightly short of conveying the complex ideas that they have in their heads.

All the meta-writing the students do justifies the assignments, in my view, but colleagues both in and out of English don’t see the background texts—proposals, progress reports, justifications, evaluations—they just see the multi-modal products, and don’t hesitate to tell me that “Art can do a better job. You shouldn’t waste valuable time when these people can’t even write a decent paper for their academic classes.”

READ: you’re playing around with simplistic projects when you should be doing your job—teaching them to evaluate and produce essays.

I have no intention of giving up my “play.” I’ve come a long way from my graduate school thinking (1979-1984) that academic discourse is the only true goal to accomplish in a writing course. And I’ve always maintained that having fun is essential to learning. But as an emeritus faculty member, doing post-retirement teaching which is unconnected to tenure or promotion, I have the freedom to look annoyed with those colleagues and go on my merry way. I’m glad that there’s such an emphasis on educating “the others” (shades of LOST) at DMAC.

I think this is the point that I’d look straight in a student’s eye and gently say, “I think you’re starting to ramble here.” Forgive me. I’m new to blogging, and it’s late. But the video is finished!

Sounds

2008-06-01T21:53:00.003-04:00

On my morning run this morning, my Ipod played Suzzy and Maggie Roches' song, "Sounds," and I found myself thinking of a lesson about listening and sounds. It's a song that asks the listener to imagine the sounds associated with Matthew Shepherd's death (sounds of the beating and sounds he made) as well as those made by his mother when she found out what happened to him. Something about NOT giving us the sounds but asking is to imagine them makes the song all the more powerful.

I think I might use it with students to get them thinking about sound and all that it offers beyond the printed word.

Trish

2008-06-01T21:49:00.002-04:00

Dear all,
Well here I am, finally getting around to being a Sunday-night blogger. (Gosh we old guys are slow!)
Just a couple of things, the first one short.
It's been a strenuous pleasure returning to DMAC and encountering folks who are in the same situation I was in last year (well, okay, not quite the same--I have yet to meet anyone in DMAC [or, for that matter K-Mart] who knows less than I do about technology). But one thing I can assure you: for all that you are conscious of learning, you'll soon discover that you've unconsciously learned even more. Sitting at that computer screen, in any of the Denney Hall rooms, you are deeply imprinting things you know and things you don't yet know you know. But this will all kick in this week--and you'll likely be both surprised and delighted (not to mention inspired and energized [yes, ye"s, I know what you're thinking--"Just what does a guy that old mean by 'energized'; we're not exactly talking the battery bunny here..."]).
The second comment is a little bit longer, so please feel free to scroll down to something more interesting. This is about "French Manicure," something I thought to bring up after our communal hearing, but which seemed to take the lively and thoughtful discussion in a too-different direction. The room's first response was properly emotional and formal (how we all responded immediately to what we had heard, and how we began to think about its construction). But I was also struck by the "technical" (for want of a better word, since I'm sure I lack the right vocabulary for all this) issues I suddenly felt during my own hearing of the piece. Cindy mentioned that we lack "ear-lids," but "French Manicure" has convinced me that we don't lack "ear-pupils." As I listened as carefully as I could to the piece (and thanks to Trauman for reminding us of the inevitable "interferences" [my quote marks] of the actual speakers and sound quality we were confronted with), I found my hearing constantly re-adjusting to the range of sounds it was encountering. For example, the accents of the Vietnamese women were all so very varied that I could not just "decide," when the documentary shifted to Vietnamese voices, to now "hear" Vietnamese. As we moved from speaker to speaker, I found that my hearing took about four or five seconds to inform me "Oh, that's 'n' for her, even though it was 'm' for the previous speaker." No credit here to the hearer--I think our brain+hearing might just be ready to parse out the nature of hearing, especially if we're really trying to listen.
And this raised a completely new issue for me in terms of the making of multi-modal pieces (though I am not yet nearly sophisticated enough as a technical maker of multi-modal pieces to begin to understand or exploit it): it's not just about "I think some music here will be good and make them pay attention" or "Having a voice over-ride the images here will be vivid." The "French Manicure" piece made me think that it might help to think about the audio layer of multi-modal creativity as imagining the "listening work" we hope to prompt our audiences to. That phrase--"listening work"--strikes me as a helpful way into what we're trying to achieve with the sense of hearing as we create our pieces. What audio-interpretive collaboration we're inviting the hearers of our pieces to do...
Enough! This is too speculative and too amorphous to be useful right now, but I hope that it hasn't (wait a second--it's late on a Sunday night, and if you're actually reading this I DO hope it has) inspired you to sleep.
So, do sleep well.
Tony

Discussion Board or Community Blog?

2008-06-01T18:45:00.001-04:00

Hello DMACkers

So there I was last night, staring at the ceiling fan in the moonlight thinking about our DMAC blog. Such smart posts from people who are invested in a lot of the same threads that I am.

When I think of blogs, I think of a single person posting reflections or updates related to some or all aspects of their daily lives. A blog might focus on a person's identity as a professional, a parent, a student, a DMAC participant, etc. More complex examples might put more than one of these identities into conversation with each other. The next logical progression, I think, is that someone covers many themes or identities within one single text. For me, that's part of what makes a blog so great. Other than the fact that a blog is public, I don't see how that might be different than working through those things in a diary. So I guess what I'm suggesting (and I'm about the million person to suggest it) is that blogging adds the potential for public disclosure as well as audience response to a personal diary. So why do I foreground this commonplace?

I want to know how these notions and assumptions are complicated by multi-authored blogs like this one for DMAC 2008. Specifically, I thinking about how this blog, to which we're all contributing for the next week or so, functions (or has the potential to function) differently that a discussion board or message board?

Is this a case of a new technology adopting and relying on the conventions of the already-existing technologies in order to gain purchase/traction? If so, then how do you see it playing out once it gets on its feet? (These questions are each about multi-authored blogs, not single-authored.)

I look forward to your responses, and I'll be especially curious to see if you post as a “new post” or a “comment.” :)

See you all tomorrow.

Trauman

The Difference Between DV and DV-NTSC

2008-06-01T17:38:00.002-04:00

On Friday our group had a question about the difference between DV format and DV-NTSC which we capture all our video on. Everyone, myself included, assumed that the NTSC simply referred to the standard Western interlace screen format and would have no bearing on our final output.

I have found--painfully--that depending on what kind of editing you are doing, the formats do matter. For instance, if you are mixing in video captured from your iSight or are converting jpegs into movie files, iMovie will use DV. So, if you are, like I am attempting, combing footage into a single video track, you will get some weird rendering effects. Basically, the DV format will turn the DV-NTSC video into the end of the day, signal test screen with the multiple colored pixels.

However, I should stress this is only an issue if you are combining different formats into one track through filters. This does not obtain if you are simply putting clips side by side. Also, there are workarounds for this. You simply need to convert one format to another.

Monday evening's event

2008-06-01T10:46:00.003-04:00

I realized this morning that my house number is covered up by a sprawling smoke bush. Here's a visual of the house to help you find it (when the smoke bush was a bit smaller).

A suggested video for teaching about copyright

2008-06-01T09:40:00.002-04:00

I use this video when I teach students about copyright, public domain, and fair use. It strings together snippets of Disney videos to illustrate points about these topics. Really fun stuff.

And I suggest for anyone looking for something to do, Gen emailed about Shakespeare in the park. Last night I saw Macbeth and it was a fun night out. A word of caution: If you're taking the bus, like I am, they stop running really early on Saturdays and even earlier on Sundays. So it was a $20 cab ride back from the play, which is in Schiller Park in German Town, but well worth it.

2008-06-01T08:35:00.003-04:00

Hi all,

At last I'm feeling marginally less overwhelmed.

Last night, my confreres and I were talking about our responses to the Kitchen Sisters' Lost and Found Sound piece, and I said that I feel like I need to develop strategies for both myself and for my students to facilitate the ability to listen, just like I do when I approach an alphabetic text. And I'd love to talk about the structure of their piece and the choices they made and the differences those choices made to the end product. That's what's had me thinking.

And now on a different note, while I'm struggling with my video, I'm also loving the absorption and concentration I'm able to achieve. (Love those noise-cancelling headphones!) I never feel this way writing; writing has always been a slow, painful process--even blogs and emails. I think I must be getting the tiniest taste of what my husband (who's a painter) experiences when he's in the zone. By the way, he uses text as a kind of substratum of the overall painting. The text is from his critical work (he does reviews for ArtForum, among other publications) and the editing process. That's one of his pieces at the top of my post.

Gettin' all digital,
Donna

Communities Virtual and Embodied

2008-05-31T22:31:00.003-04:00

I'm somebody who spends an incredible amount of time doing email; it's a liability of my job. I've never spent much time in the bloggosphere, as a reader or a writer. I love sitting around the table here at DMAC, with everyone working away, folks solving problems collaboratively as they emerge. I'm gonna do my best to give this a real try to see what the virtual community that is produced via the blogging offers. I'll be trying to find my voice in this environment. Right now, I just feel awkward, which is ok. Means I'm in a position to learn rather than perform.

Heheh. Seriously though . . .

2008-05-31T18:09:00.000-04:00

Who is e1337en6115h :)?

Kairos and Fair use

2008-05-31T10:05:00.002-04:00

well, I had a long-ass post, but blogger ate it. So here's a short one. Here's a link to Kairos' copyright policy. Note the filename ;) http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/copyleft.html

I'd be happy to talk to folks about our Fair Use/Copyright statement, as well as how other journals (and other spaces, such as MediaCommons) handle same.

C

First post

2008-05-31T09:20:00.001-04:00

Dear Folks,
Just wanted to let you know that I've finally made it to the DMAC blog penitentiary, and hope to add to the fun from now on.
Tony

Creative Commons and intellectual property-- reflections on fair use

2008-05-31T07:58:00.002-04:00

Today's readings led me back to an interesting thread I noticed a number of people picking at during Computers & Writing this year: how loosely can we read fair use? I know that in my classroom I've started teaching students to look specifically for Creative Commons work (and to understand the different designations for each, which the comic for today explains much more succinctly than I ever have-- that'll be a handy link to keep around), but frequently my students want to use their favorite songs (it's music in particular, I find, though also copyrighted images) in their digital media compositions.

I'm sometimes hesitant to remind my students that they shouldn't use copyrighted music or images, as I don't want to stifle their creativity (and some of their work is driven by specific musical choices), but I also wonder if I'm doing the wrong thing by not making an even bigger deal out of their choices and the potential ramifications.

I also wonder if the law-- or at least the de facto interpretation of fair use-- will change in the next decade as more and more of the folks from my generation and younger generations start to ascend to positions of relative power. As I believe someone pointed out the first day (sorry-- I wasn't looking when the comment came-- it was someone to the back of the room), there's a much different sense of ownership over digital media among younger people (I've noticed there's even a jump from me to my students; they find downloading tv shows, movies and music to be a regular-- and seemingly perfectly fine-- activity). I wonder if that will change the way ownership over media is viewed, particularly in academic settings (where it seems our students should be allowed to use whatever they need to learn).

Mark Marino's Response to "A Vision of Students Today"

2008-05-31T00:26:00.009-04:00

"(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:

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 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."

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.

“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.

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:

Discuss.

defining vernacular

2008-05-30T23:21:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking more about our discussion today about knowledge and power, and as I am formulating my thoughts on the subject, one question I have for the participants in DMAC is--What do you mean when you use the word vernacular, either in terms of the discussion this morning or in general. I'm curious what definitions people are working with.

Lessons learned from first "finger exercise"

2008-05-30T23:16:00.002-04:00

At times I was so frustrated doing the 30 sec. audio clip that I mentally engaged in saluting the project with my own finger exercise :( What I would differently the next time includes: 1) more careful editing so as not to cut off first, last, and sometimes even middle syllables of words; 2) make my answers and encourage my co-interviewers to compose their answers in more succinct sound bytes with pauses in between new ideas; 3) don't delete when I am frustrated and rushed; 4) use what options the Audacity provides more skillfully. Sigh . . .

2008-05-30T21:41:00.002-04:00

All day today, I kept thinking about an essay called "The Pencil Revolution." (You can pretty much guess what it's about.) The author encounters the pencil with all of the ways it (new technology) complicates our lives and creates new societal problems.

In light of this clever essay, there are questions that I would like to see us discuss with students and faculty resistant to the idea that technology is inevitably bound up with what we do.

What is technology?
What makes it technology?

I don't think students see writing as technology and I think we should talk about that. It might be a good place to start.

Trish

I hope this link works and takes you to the essay I mentioned:

http://www.johnhanna.us/pdf/PencilRevolution.pdf

Two Quick Points

2008-05-30T21:40:00.001-04:00

This morning’s discussion covered most of the topics I would have liked to discuss here, but I do want to mention two unrelated points in the readings. First, one of Daley’s interesting observations about multimedia practices is the effects that emerge serendipitously from most successful products. That a product is “most successful when it emerges in a large part during the process of creation” may not be an risky claim since, after all, this is certainly true of any print-based product; however, her gesture towards an “‘an ecology of experimentation’” is one that may be more pronounced in multimedia production. After two days of work in unfamiliar media, I have certainly found the need to be more flexible and have realized the restriction in being too sure when producing a text. I hope I’m not the only one who’s counting on what Daley would call a “collision of intelligences” in tomorrow’s (and Sunday’s?) editing session! On an unrelated point, Brandt’s attention to the role that social relationships play in literacy acquisition is apt and is exponentially furthered by the attention she affords to the material technologies of those practices—typewriters, family bibles, metal alphabet boards, chalk slates, etc.. Since each of these material technologies are often embedded within social system (family, church, work), it will be rare that any can be used strictly as an instrument to exert any expressive desire. In considering this material dimension, Brandt further complicates literacy acquisition and should remind us that instructing students in using any technology should account for this type of relationship to what we may consider neutral equipment.

"Grading" and Digital Multimodality

2008-05-30T10:33:00.002-04:00

Brought up in the session this morning was the question of how instructors should "grade" digital projects. Caroline and I (Aurora) were talking about this very subject on our way to Columbus Wednesday night. Caroline gave a presentation at C's and I gave one at C&W: both presentations focused on encouraging students to produce digital texts which did not (necessarily) privilege alphabetic textual production. In both sessions audience members seemed to be particularly interested in how we, as instructors, had "graded" our students' projects--when the texts were obviously deficient.
I consider myself to be a pretty tough instructor (don't believe me, check out my rating ^_^) and I balk at the idea that my standards "fall" when I allow students to explore digital multimodality: the idea that effort counts when it didn't before. The thing about accumulating literacy is that it takes time: I can throw down a grade on a 3 page alphabetic narrative like nobodies business, but I pause, squirm, and revisit (sometimes more than once) the grades I assign digital projects.
Grading works for instructors the same way asking students to compose, say, a narrative through video, works--it's hard and uncomfortable. And it should be!
I think, no matter what we assign, that grading, with little variation, falls somewhere in the following schema: time + difficulty of topic x literacy = product. Depending on how much importance we assign to any piece of the equation and where we, as instructors, believe we fall on the novice-expert continua should determine how we grade any piece of text.
Isn't that what DMAC is all about? Gain some expertise so we can go back and share, teach, learn, grow, create?
I guess a part of me thinks it's a little silly to dismiss student work as "effort" or "deficient" when instructors and students alike are still trying to gain and understand the very literacies
saturating our lives.

What does everyone else think about grading and the digital? Obviously, answers are as wrapped in our pedagogical stances as the materials we discuss.

who else is liveblogging DMAC?

2008-05-30T10:08:00.003-04:00

Doug posted the URL to his individual DMAC blog (which, Doug, wouldn't link for me, but I found a version in your profile... perhaps it's my morning wonkiness which is making it not work for me). Here's mine: http://www.ceball.com/blog/.

Anybody else liveblogging (which I am guessing just means keeping public notes of your DMAC experience on your personal blog)? Let us know.

Video Session Examples

2008-05-30T09:41:00.000-04:00

Big Love Opening

Six Feet Under Opening

The Wire Season One Opening

The Wire Season Four Opening

Here is the link to the theatre department that Dr. Moss mentioned

2008-05-30T09:09:00.000-04:00

OSU Department of Theatre. In the right hand side, you can click on The Colored Museum to find out more. George C Wolfe is one of the US' best playwrights in my opinion. Treat yourself.

Response to Brandt's "Accumulating Literacy..."

2008-05-30T08:51:00.001-04:00

In this essay, Brandt argues that literacy technologies have always been changing, but the speed of that change increased dramatically (exponentially, I think) over the course of the twentieth century. Whereas, technological changes may have been experienced as transitions from one dominant technology to another, in the twentieth century, those technologies tend to pile up on top of one another. She calls this a "surplus of literacy" (665). She notes that this surplus of literacy raises the expectations in breadth and depth of literacies, which (citing M. M. Lewis's The Importance of Illiteracy, 1953) emphasizes notions of illiteracy, too.

Secondary Threads

Brandt often frames the shifts in literacies in what I recognize as Bourdieuian terms (she's explicit about it once, 659).

She notes how media has always, as early as the radio and film of the 1950's, affected the way we think and enact writing practices (656-657).

She notes the importance of artifacts laying around which keep those older tools of literacy from dying off.

Connections to Other Conversations / Concerns

In terms of twenty-first century technologies, Brandt's observation about the "piling up" of literacies seems to be approaching its own asymptote in digital approaches to multimodalities in our Composition classrooms. With programs (like Premiere, FinalCut, MovieMaker, or Sophie) designed to incorporate voice, music, video, and pictures, these various literacies seem to be at work simultaneously within a given text. I don't think this is what Brandt was getting at, but her argument offers and excellent argument about how, exactly, literacies tend to pile up. The intratextual simultaneity of modes is one possible historical and logical extension of her article.

Also, she herself suggests that she comes to these observations not only through interviews with several subjects, but also by paying attention to how these discussions revolve around material conditions of literacy (651, 652, 654, 659, 660, 665, 666).

My live blogging experiment . . .

2008-05-30T07:56:00.001-04:00

If anyone is interested in my takes for the folks back home, you can check out my very sloppy version of a DMAC blog over at Digital Media and Composition 2008 LIVE!

I can't help but wonder...

2008-05-30T07:38:00.000-04:00

As I step back for just a second from my own "rah-rah! Computers and & Writing" position and think about the impact of some of the videos we use to show our work to other people (and I think I'm hypersensitive to this due to a presentation I made at C&W where I showed some of my own video work), I wonder if maybe we don't scare some of the more "traditional" print-based alphabetic text composition instructors.

I've seen "The Machine is Us/ing Us" before, but I hadn't ever really stopped to think about that opening sequence with the text being erased, and erased, then totally erased.

It's one of those "Phill has to get to campus" under-developed thoughts that I'll keep chewing on, but I wonder if maybe what we find exciting and compelling isn't always the best way to present ourselves to everyone (ah, yes, thinking audience before drinking the morning coffee-- I am insane).

Visual Dictionary for the Deaf

2008-05-30T07:00:00.001-04:00

May 27, 2008

Signing Up for a Video Dictionary for Deaf People

As many as two million people in the United States use American Sign Language, but not every user knows what every one of the thousands of signs mean. And there is no dictionary in which to look them up—sign dictionaries are organized by the written definition of the sign, not by the physical movement.

Now a team of researchers at Boston University is working on an interactive video project that would allow someone to trace an unfamiliar sign in front of a Web camera and have a computer program interpret and explain its meaning, according to the Associated Press.

The researchers, working with a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are trying to capture 3,000 ASL signs on video. Their goal is to develop a “backwards” dictionary that will allow people to look up any unfamiliar gesture.

If a deaf person signs to a someone who doesn’t understand the sign, that person could sit down in front of a computer, repeat the sign into a Web cam, and the program would identify possible translations by recognizing the sign’s visual properties. —Josh Fischman

today's discussion

2008-05-30T06:45:00.000-04:00

It strikes me today that so much of our conversation revolved around the concept of intellectual depth. If we look at literate products or products that work to convey meaning on a continuum--say the move from a children's book to a Foucault text--more images results in less intellectual depth, or, as we talked about this morning, the attention needed to engage and understand the meaning being conveyed is greater with the alphabetic only text. So, where does that place our multi-modal compositions in a dsicipline that has centered itself heart and soul on privileging literacy. Part of the prejudice towards the emphasis on multi-modality is the fear that it won't result in intellectual depth from our students or even the projects of our faculty. However, we are talking out of both sides of our mouths. It is difficult to say a famous painting or sculpture or film doesn't have intellectual depth. Also, although the specialized language, another sign of disciplinary legitimacy, is in the process of being developed or gathered from other appropriate disciplines (such as the vocabulary of film), emerging practitioners of multimodality are just becoming familiar with it. It seems the rhetorical goals for convincing the skeptical is to show that the multi-modal projects being produced by students and faculty are intellectually complex and have intellectual depth and to work towards using a common language to talk about and persuade others about the type of communication work that multi-modal presentations and presenters can do.
Hope this is coherent. Just felt a need to convey a gut response from the morning's discussion immediately.

Brandt's Accumulating Literacy

2008-05-30T01:31:00.000-04:00

I was intrigued by the concept of accumulating literacy as a synchronic/vertical phenomenon, not simply one of diachronic addition of skills. I think that notion is especially important when approaching and assessing digital composing practices. In a recent class that co-taught, students were assigned to create photo or imagistic arguments in GIMP or Photoshop. I delivered the Photoshop tutorial. The students availed themselves on the features of Photoshop and GIMP, but, as one would expect, marshaled an assortment of rhetorical strategies imported from classical, linear argumentation, the associative strategies of hypertext, the recursive scanning of comic book layouts, and the production conventions of television advertising.

I also found the concept of "surplus literacy" (drawn from The Importance of Illiteracy) tantalyzing--something that I would love to study further, especially given our circumstances in the academy; our status, as Bradt briefly alludes as the dominant dominated class whose attainment of distinction relies on a surplus of literacy, or at least, a surplus of interesting stories that are refinely told.

Hello Mother, Hello Father...

2008-05-30T00:58:00.000-04:00

...things are great here at summer camp! We had arts and crafts today but if I can't get this audio piece down to 30 seconds, you're all getting lopsided ashtrays and hand-stitched wallets instead.

I wonder then how much of my day today was spent “working” with Audacity and how much was spent “playing” with Audacity. Today certainly didn’t feel like work; the stakes were manageable, the activity was fun and experimental, the rules and constraints imposed by the assignment and tools were reasonable and allowed room for creativity and self-expression. Personally, I find that I accumulate new literacies more easily and retain them with better facility when I first encounter them as toys rather than tools. So, other than the fact that I can harness it as a tool for teaching composition when I get back to Pitt, what about learning to compose with Audacity was work?

This made me think about the role of play in accumulating new literacies. I wonder then how introducing such technologies into the classroom impacts my students’ perception of those technologies. Once they enter the classroom are they any less fun to experiment with? And, if they are “less fun,” what happened that made them that way? Further, what is it about new technologies that allows them to be more readily accepted as objects of play rather than, say, a sheet of paper (although we all know how much fun pen and paper, themselves, can be when incorporated into play)?

I think the answer here is one of positionality. In Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Stephen Johnson discusses how game designers create environments and challenges that lead players to happily perform all manner of mundane, repetitive tasks by positioning those tasks as part of play (which should be fun) and not work. The games Johnson refers to and new multimodal discourse technologies both make familiar process such as composing strange in a way that is difficult to do with print-based monomodal essay writing. Despite my best efforts to position activities like journal writing, drafting, and other kinds of prewriting as low-stakes environments for experimentation and play, those forms still occupy the same spaces as the “work” of the class (assuming that the “work” of the class manifests itself in the final draft of a paper printed and handed in on sheets of paper). In my opinion, part of the exiting potential of multimodal composing is that students, in learning new to use new digital tools, will hopefully learn new critical and theoretical tools as well, accumulating a new set of literacies that can benefit them in their work outside of the classroom. I wonder, however, how effective an pedagogy that makes the work of composing strange will be as students increasingly come to our FYC classes already equipped with skills such as audio production that have had the fun drained from them by the new work of the classroom.

On another note, we have our very own DMAC Facebook group! Join us!

New literacy

2008-05-30T00:22:00.001-04:00

This morning, Cindy asked us to consider the kinds of literacies that students would have to have in order to be successful makers of meaning in the early 21st century. I think my favorite thing to emerge from this discussion was the notion that we can no longer think of literacy practices in our classes as analysis OR production, reading OR writing, that students will need to think about (and be taught) both simultaneously as one literacy practice. This is an issue that has been near and dear to my heart for my entire teaching career. I have to believe that often, our students think we're bonkers when we say, "This is a literature class," or "This is a writing class," or when we make such an issue out of the fact that we're going to do both. Most of the time, I think they get it. Yet, we shift them blame on them for separating the acts. I'm guilty of it myself.

The DMP (and its earlier shapes--The Apple Project and Computers in Composition and Literature) at Ohio State has always been about production--asking students to use technology to make things. In 2002, when the mission of the DMP began to shift toward digital media studies and multimodal composing, it was a necessity to foreground the "production" for one simple reason: the technology that would allow teachers to imagine a course where there was no separation between analysis and production wasn't a reality. We taught a lot of video analysis, for example, but we didn't know how to make video production work in our classes. I wonder now, though, if we are at a moment when we need to stop making these distinctions and assuming that the work we do will always involve analysis and production in tandem.

Can't help but think . . .

2008-05-29T22:35:00.000-04:00

of how folks always go about, and some of you might have to argue, how multimodal composition is in competition with a more traditional form of writing or its instruction. Y'all who are struggling now and sticking with it. I think moving though modes of composition actually make you better at single modalities like writing.
"Writing" in audio makes you better at knowing what writing is good at.
2 cents here.

folklore and multimodality

2008-05-29T22:07:00.000-04:00

As a folklore grad student, I know relatively little about composition theory compared to the rest of the group, I think...but I am very excited about how what I learn during this workshop can inform my understanding of folklore and help make the field more engaging for my students. I mentioned this in my mini-interview today, but I find it interesting to think about how as a folklore instructor, I urge my students in their analyses of narrative performances (telling jokes or contemporary legends, for example) to pay attention to the meaning-making parctices that extend beyond language. I'll show my students a video-recording of a performance in context and then show them a transcript of just the words and ask them to point out what gets "lost" when the performance makes its way onto the written page (things like volume, pitch, accents, whether people are standing or sitting in relation to one another). When I send students out to audio and/or video record such performances in their own fieldwork projects, I ask them to think about these "textural" aspects of such performances when they ultimately generate their analyses. With all this focus I put on paying close attention to the multimodal aspects of performance, those communicative features that extend beyond the realm of language, it is a bit funny to think about how I ask them ultimately to explain the meaning of these elements in an 8-10 page paper. It will be a fun exercise in this class to think of assignments that allow for alternative modes of composition in my folklore classes.

2008-05-29T21:53:00.000-04:00

I swear I'll be a better blogger later, but right now I'm trying to figure out Audacity on my pc.

Riding the learning curve,
Donna

No Going Back Now

2008-05-29T21:38:00.000-04:00

Even after just Day 1 of DMAC, I can see how this will change the way I view my teaching and my assignments. I'll admit to feeling a bit intimidated and a bit anxious to "lock down" my idea for the final project, but I suspect those feelings will subside as we become even more engaged in these activities and new modes.

It's also comforting to know that the goal of DMAC is to guide us in creating projects that satisfy our own goals and interests - whether individual or institutional - so the standards are ones we establish for ourselves.

And, hey, I'm already blogging, which is new for me.

Nicky

Lost and Found Sound

2008-05-29T20:56:00.000-04:00

I continue to be amazed at the evocative power of audio. When I first listened to one part of the Kitchen Sisters recording, I decided to purchase the entire audio book and listen to all of it. The story about the Vietnamese manicurists seems analogous to Brandt's notion of accumulating literacies. Language and literacy embody cultural knowledge and relationships, and it is interesting to hear how these immigrants interpreted U.S. culture through popular music before coming to the states and how they adapted economically through manicuring businesses. The sound narrative captures that cultural exploration and integration.

I also want to plug the rest of the recording on the audio book. One story consists of a series of arranged phone messages that offer a character portrait of the L.A. resident who receives those messages; another story tells of the generational Mohawk tradition of ironwork, both before and after 9/11; still another story tells the history of the Memphis recording industry--Sam Phillips the white person who has often been remembered historically in merging the folk music traditions of both black and white cultures, as well as another black man whose story stands beside his but is more likely to be overlooked in folk music history. These were the innovators of their time who worked from the grassroots with small budgets. The other stories are equally compelling.

I will end with a link to a You Tube video--the medieval help desk--that comically depicts the struggle with teaching and learning new literacies and the accumulation of literacies through time. One could say that we have moved from the scroll to the codex and now back to the scroll. If you haven't seen it before, it's worth your time.

2008-05-29T17:47:00.000-04:00

Although I have thought and written about multimodality for some time, how amazing to apply the principles myself. It made so many aspects of what I do and think about come alive. Though I will admit to feeling more lost than I did before (and intimidated).

I enjoyed reading Takayoshi and Selfe and Brandt readings. I will use Takayoshi and Selfe reasoning in their chapter and Brandt's work helps understand cultural stories behind literacy.

Future Home of DMAC 2008 Conversations

2008-02-05T14:35:00.000-05:00

This blog will be the a public discussion forum for the participants at DMAC 2008. To learn more about DMAC you can head to http://dmp.osu.edu/dmac.