fly away home

So, I've moved house a little. I'll leave housesparrow here, but she is now living a duplicate life over on wordpress as ladybird one space for thought one space for collection.. follow the link http://suballard.wordpress.com

fear of a networked planet

Everything is ready to go. I'm going to upload the keynote presentation as a movie here... without sound.




But there is a larger spectre haunting this project ... the network itself. How reliable can a network not be? What are the provisional plans for total network failure? It seems that the handy control-command-4 (eg. screen grab) key command may be my only solution.
However I need to more carefully anticipate life in offline spaces... so tonight I will think through how to turn an online portfolio into an offline one (just in case).

moving house and sharing widely

Things have been a bit quiet here as I work up an online presence over on wordpress.
It will be ready soon, but first I want to work out how to embedd some sample teaching materials, as well as thinking about the share, share widely resarch projects by Trebor Scholz. I'm beginning to make a connection between this project for the GCTLT and the SHrUB research project I have been doing with Rachel Gillies and Pam McKinley. (Well, they have been doing it all really, but I have been watching very closely.) Anyway my contributions for today also come via Trudy Lane, as Trudy and I are co-chairing the first LEF Aotearoa (Leonardo Education Forum) fourm at the ADA conference in a few weeks so there are some really nice convergences happening here. http://symposium09.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/

Share, share widely – Trebor Scholz & Tom Leonhardt

Started in 2004, sharewidely is an application of The Distributed Learning Project in the field of new media research. The tool enables open knowledge exchange in new media research and production. Individuals as well as groups of researchers and self-learners can create, share, edit, find, and re-use content related to media art. The project is for all who are engaged in media art and theory. more ...

http://www.sharewidely.org/

Thoughtmesh – Jon Ippolito

ThoughtMesh generates tags to connect scholarly essays published on different Web sites.

http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/

What I like about both these initiatives is that they are coming from teachers, and practitioners of digital media. So they are coming from those who are engaged daily with students. But more significantly these projects are driven by a philosophy that is critical about the tools/ softwares and hardwares that we engage everyday. The ubiquitous nature of media processes must be acknowledged in any engagement with these materials. It is this directness and commitment unpredictability that I want to capture in whatever system I engage with in these networked forums. I am suspicious of any quick fix or single solution. Even open source solutions come with their own politics.

structuring the sphere

I've been working on drafts for the presentation, the short outline is here.
I'll work on each section over the next week.

a concept of experience - engaging the trash.

For the duration of this project I have been searching for a way to explicitly connect my existing knowledge base or contexts with ones that in many ways are less explicitly familiar to me. Or to put it a different way I've been wanting to connect the depth of critical and cultural theory that I engage every day with the educational theory that I practice but have not always obediently read. I have not wanted to do this in a facicoius or superficial way. This evening I read an article that has finally given me a set of tools to move more confidently within educational theory.

Yasuo Imai, "Walter Benjamin and John Dewey: The Structure of Difference Between Their Thoughts on Education" The Journal of the Philosohpy of Education, vol 37, no.1, 2003. 109-125.

In this beautifully written article Imai unpacks in parallel the educational thought of Dewey and Benjamin and demonstrates how central to both is firstly an understanding of the concept of experience and secondly the application of a concept of media to the classroom environment. Imai begins by highlighting the differences between the two thinkers but it is in the second half of the article where notions of experience and aesthetics are played out that I can find a historical location for my own understandings. I'm gong to summarise and paraphrase badly here, but as this blog is a tool for me to record my late night thinking, I reckon that's ok.

In "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917) Dewey writes of experience as interaction. This is because he is making an argument against a dualistic understanding of reality in which dreams and madness are separate to the real cognitive world. All are experiences, and "experiencing is just certain modes of interaction"(Dewey cited in Imai 111). "What we experience is what the world can be." (Imai 111) Dewey does not say that there is no such thing as objectivity and subjectivity but that experience and interaction come first.

Benjamin's philosohpical disagreements were with the broader issues of Kantian aesthetics but also with the problems of technological determinism that saw the artwork separated from its means of production, and thus from any auratic content. In "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" he writes about how everyday the urge grows stronger to grasp the image by means of its likeless. We want the to come closer to us, we want to posess it, it is no longer framed and distant, of course this is the fault of cinema and photography, NOT for Benjamin a bad thing. The decay of the aura allowed all sorts of things to occur ... workers could be mobilised by the movies, distraction allowed them time out from their jobs and the ablilty to be able to think. (Ok I'm summarising really badly here). Cultural context is not about subject or object but also about interaction. (Imai 112)

The surprise for me is in the closeness of Dewey's argument about the means of production. Dewey says that the worker has been reduced to hands, they no longer have an aesthetic relationship with the objects they produce. He argues there needs to be a close combination of action and reception in order for there to be an integrated end. Integrated ends and means for Dewey equals aesthetics.

The difference between the two is equally important. Dewey wants to criticise and modify everyday experience based on his understanding of the integrated aesthetic experience. (Imai 115). Benjamin on the other had sought a change in the very nature of this aesthetic experience ... and central to that change was his concept of media.
(we are getting to the classroom really soon).

Imai gives the example of "children finding secrets in everyday trash." Their experience leads them to connect their find to the activity of play. Benjamin "denouncesd the kind of education that is geared to predetermined goals. ... The conception of education that Benjamin offers in contrast is of a space where children can unfold and develop through mimetic activities and improvisation, without being restricted by such restrictive linear methods [that predetermine outcomes or goals]" (Imai 116).

This rings true for me, and then Imai goes a step further in his analysis "When a child's mimetic activities unfold in such a space, the material of the activities - trash, for example - is a medium of activities." (Imai 117). Benjamin has written how a meduim communicates in itself ... this has been taken in all sorts of deterministic directions by theorists like McLuhan, and even contributed to the debates around remediation. But what interests me here is that Imai shows how Dewey also develops a notion of media that is based in materiality. "Media are themselves something material through which immaterial contents are communicated" (Imai 117). I don't actually agree here that the contents are immaterial, but would say that they are a different kind of materiality.

However, the implications of this understanding of media are that if we understand educational materials in terms of methods and ignore the media or the materials we separate the contents from the communication ... that is the "materials appear as mere means through which children should be led to the 'idea'." (Imai 118). However in searching through the trash..."the material itself emerges as the contents of perception or the substance of activities, namely as media." (Imai 118). To put it extremely simplistically, teaching materials are a media not a content. The trash is not engaging because of its content but because of what it might become, of its mediality. By including this notion of media within the classroom environment a sphere is created which is improvisational, and that relies on the experience of those who inhabit it. It is the classroom understood as a sphere of experience.

"The legitimate content of instruction in Dewey's view is constructed from the learner's activities and actions activated by the motivating power of the teaching material, not from teaching material that exists in its own right and has inherent significance independently of the learner." (Imai 120) . Dewey thus defines education as the reconstruction of experience. It is interaction. "The process of interaction is merged into a process of experience"(Imai 120) Further more this experience is aesthetic. "Art works as media are to aesthetic experience what teaching material as a medium is to educational experience" (Imai 121)

Imai goes deeper into the analysis of this relationship between Dewey and Benjamin, but for my purposes it is this idea of media within a sphere of experience that is cricual. As media change so too do the experiences, and the learning environment.

In the senior electronic arts lab we engage the trash everyday.

unrelational things

Or how many web 2.0 applications can I have operating at once ... and WHY.
Everyday I post out 3 events that are happening internationally in the field of media arts to my senior students. (I call it my global electronic spam). I do this on a group email list. And I often save the posts to my folder called "interesting things." I go back into them, I follow the links, I compile resasrch materials, I teach directly from these resources.
BUT
Now I've joined facebook. And I started to think maybe these resources would be better there ... is it a better research aggrogator? I'm addicted to delicious, and wonder if in the comments / notes function there are the tools I need. But these things still come at me in email.
And there are other lovely tools out there. But are the tools the answer?
They are somewhat unrelated to the material, but I guess also central to it.
more thinking needs to be done here.
su

power to the point or key to the note

I have started formatting a series of keynote slides and realising that it is possible to miss a lot out.

"Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought."
Anne Michaels The Winter Vault Bloomsbury, 2009, p.74

Still problematic for me is how to integrate the established voices in educational theory. I'm reluctant to go to a beginners guide, or wikipedia.

On youtube is a fantastic video of Gilles Deleuze teaching at Vincennes in 1980. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ndNVjS0svI It shows a classroom in action. There is little eye contact, the students are obviously using their EARS, they are listening. Deleuze barely takes a breath. He is in the middle of the room, students are close and intimate.
What is truely fantastic is that most of the students have tape recorders (and cigarettes). They are recording the class. New Media are not so new.

outlining

Ok now trying to get 'concrete' with this.
I have decided that the best way to preent to the panel is to host it as a conversation. This connects also to the work I'm doing at the moment with ADA as we head towards the materiality and criticality symposium in June.
So how to host a converation? I'm reading an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, he has hosted some fantastic conversations, released as books but also conducted live at conferences. there is a crafted casualness to his questioning approach that shifts the discussion away form an intereview and more into the realm of conversation. In this context I am both the host of the conversationa dn the interviewee. Need to think about:
- scale
- relevance
- clarity

The best way to do this may be to design the hour and a half in concentric circles ... the lab ... histories ... futures ... networks ... .
This allows a series of stopping points and overlaps.
This can develop into a series of headings and inside these a grouping of ideas.
This also allows me to integrate theoretical approaches within the groupings.
A first attempt:

1. undergraduate history - women'sstudies - haraway - situated knowledges - positionality
2. current networks - collaborative research - massumi - newmobilities - workshop - equality - curriculum development - the lab
3. flexibility - research/ teaching interface - delicious - communities of learning - MFA supervision
4. electronic arts - academic leadership - principles - criticality - assertiveness - assessment
5. improvisation - making and doing - theory and practice - multiplicity - blogging - media ecologies
Each of these groupings represent a pathway that begins with a situation / location and moves towards the realisation of a particular strand of my practice.

Next I'll expand each of these and think through how they will mobilise my presentation.

what is a network anyway?

Two things going on today that are related to this process of preparing a presentation on my teaching / pedagogy. Rachel and I had a preliminary meeting about our "round table" for the art educator's conference and started to think about how we might present some ideas around web 2.0 without adopting a how.to approach. Once again we are turning to models or case studies that are drawn from our own practice. Rachel set up a fantastic wiki for digital.literacy last year and that has been an important starting place for me to think through web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. My experience has been limited and dubious (I'm really not the right person to be hosting this round table) but I do have a passion for networked resarch tools, and have been using delicious with senior students for 2 yrs now - as you can see over there... - so hope to be able to contribute something from this angle. But I'm worried that online searching and reading is more about using what you find than finding things to use. I hold onto a skepticism about user-generated content and have sat through one too many conference sessions on prod-users (although I think Axel Bruns does some fantastic work in this field) to really be able to celebrate web 2.0. I started to think about what we have lost since google took over our search engines and anyone could upload a photo...
There is the loss of the mystery and the shock of the dive (or surf as it was known) into the unknown. Works like Simon Penny's Babel replicate some of that surprise but outside of art contexts searching has become a process of finding what you already know is out there ... "there must be a you.tube video on that"... "someone will have written a tutorial on that" ... instead of a magical mystery tour into the unknown.
Second thing today is the opportunity to present to the panel in a conversational rather than top down way. This is exciting as it fits with my teaching philosophies and will enable me to actually practice what I preach (so to speak). I'm think about preparing a visual document that can be talked to and discussed with the panel, as we move through a sequence of key concepts. This also links into the work I'm doing with ADA as we prepare a conference format for June. We have outlined some basic principles... remote/ networked/ materials/ conversations/ ... that will become clearer as the remote keynotes are worked through.
Today then my key words are networked and conversations ... which of course form a definition of a 'learning community' a way of doing things where nodes interrelate and move and shift ... in the 1960s a networked learning environment would have been called a cybernetic system ... this was a different kind of ecology...

"creating environments that tolerate ambiguity"

This phrase comes from Keith Ballard, probably the strongest (and yet implicit) influence on the development of my teaching philosophy. In his work there is an emphasis on performativity, drawn not only from feminist theory, but from a broader engagement with social justice and the complex act that is teaching and learning.
When I am thinking about media ecologies in the classroom I am thinking of ways to describe a sustained engagement with, and respect of, students and their desires for a critical creative practice that is balanced with the need to interrogate cultural and media practices as well as engage the ambiguities of technology.
Yesterday when talking with Robyn, we framed this in terms of positionality, something that Haraway repeatedly stresses. Haraway says: we must see from somewhere. Seeing from somewhere is always ambiguous, for it is not about knowingwhat someone else sees, but about knowing the investments of our own position.
Key to this is thinking through what I mean when I think about establishing a collaborative working environment. Teaching in the LAB is conversational, critical and directed. One-on-one meetings often spiral out becoming group discussions that return to individual works and experiences. The door is always open, and students from other sections are joining us.
I have just read Max van Manen's essay "The Language of Pedagogy and the Primacy of Student Experience" (1999) in it he discusses being attentive to what might seem to be mundane classroom experiences, and revisiting them through the eyes of the student. Nothing is ever truely mundane, and often decisions have to be made quickly. Van Manen discusses relational values - something that is very familiar to me through Nicolas Bourriaud's work on relational aesthetics - art is an exchange. Teaching is an exchange: both occur with constructed environments. The LAB is a constructed environment... it is relational, ambigious, respectful and engaged. Key to Van Manen's discussion are some case studies of assessment and feedback.
Crucial is an analysis of outcomes based assessment and a kind of commodity culture. I think I'll read this through again and use it to begin to address this aspect of my presentation.
Somewhere in here I'd like to reintroduce the ethics/ aesthetics relationship.
Van Manen "The practice of teaching can be regarded as a living recommedation for showing what teaching is (or should be)". (19) - reflexivity.