Out of the three videos I viewed as part of this week’s online/virtual unlecture, Michael Wesch’s “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able” was the most poignant for me.

His points on how students of today use technology, approach their education and how this works within the institution of higher education are paramount to the ideas we cover in Networked Media, and how I want to be thinking about my education in general.

Being able to find, sort, analyse, criticise and create new information is something I think all students either think they will/have/can learn at university. However, I think many of us are misguided in how we go about this. I don’t think it’s just about learning how to research particular issues or topics of interest, and how we work through a process of finding some sort of ‘solution’ within them. But rather, our learning and higher education experiences should be about making meaning – by way of addressing real issues, utilising the human resources we have at university (other students, tutors, lecturers etc) and harnessing our informational resources.

I think he really gets it right in pinning together those three things. As Adrian said outright from the start of this Networked Media course, we have all the informational resources we need, we are able to connect with like-minded people across the globe, and we can seek out real issues. But within a higher education environment we’re able to practice how we utilise old and new media, harness old and new ways of sourcing information and collaborate.

Because it is a matter of practice. Creating meaning and being able to solve problems is a practice that takes training and some guidance.

As Sir Ken Robinson highlights in his Ted Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”, education should be embracing the unique ways that students evidently absorb information and learn.

In the case of networking and utilising technologies, most of the information young people and students consume and share is via electronic, interactive networking platforms. So why do we still adhere to one-directional, outdated ways of learning such as essay writing or reading printed academic writings? It’s clear that these aren’t favourable or necessarily effective for students in the 21st century.

 

George Landow’s article “Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization” gives some interesting insights on how we read and analyse hypertext.

For me, a big part of practicing online networking and blogging is understanding the ways in which your work can benefit from the network itself. Your writing and ideas can be instantaneously linked with others. Landow’s description of the first kind of hypertext prose pinpointed how I had used networking and blogging sites in the past: placing links without hypertext into an HTML template that includes navigation links.

By utilising the features of hypertext more extensively (e.g. linking to other sites and content), we not only include draw on the benefits of this information, but instantaneously insert ourselves and our work into a larger context.

This is at once an exciting and terrifying thing for a student – many of us guard our work from peers and ‘the big wide world’ in fear of it not looking up to scratch. So I agree with Landow that it makes for excellent academic practice to introduce and utilise hypertext as a way of pushing students and writers in general towards connecting with like-minded creators/thinkers.

Furthermore, I like the idea of hypertext as reflecting non-linear reading practice. The way in which modern audiences consume/read texts in hardly ever linear, and certainly carries some ‘hyper’ characteristics. I hardly know a single person of my own ago who will sit and watch TV without checking their phone throughout the program, or work at a computer without multiple screen and windows open to constantly switch between.

Jay David Bolter also hits the nail on the head in the first sentence of his article “Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing”: “writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience”. Hypertext quintessentially directs readers between different forms of information in order to shape a particular experience. It draws upon multiple sources and directs the reader towards a particular experience and understanding.

Hypertext reflects and influences modern reading/viewing practices, so it makes sense that it should be integrated into our learning and writing process.

Design fiction, hypertext… it’s all about purpose and practicality and this pretty much sums it up for me so far.

 

This week’s lecture mostly reinforced and clarified some of my thoughts from the previous week.

Firstly, there were some key ideas about things we face as we blog that I really took to. There was the idea about sketch–writing that I really like which relates back to some of the concepts about writing without audience from WMT. However, when publishing content on a blog, opposed to a private, hard-copy journal, there are some serious considerations in terms of copyright and media regulation that we, as media practitioners, must be subjected to and wary of. As much as we may like to experiment/speculate/try to write without audience, constraints such as these always exist. This is the reality of networked media and online publishing.

Secondly, Adrian’s brief recommendation to blog informally and often was a simple but very key piece of advice. I think it’s common as students to feel protective about our work in fear of it being published without first being perfected, or for things to be read without feeling completely sure of how our ‘writing’ may be consumed. But the fact of the matter is that we all need to get used to letting go of our writing, be it a major work or small and simple expression of an idea, and let it be consumed. I think this is an integral part of growing from being a student (when your work often remains between yourself and your teacher) to a media practitioner (when you’ve got a deadline by which you need to produce and distribute your work).

Thirdly, I have some feedback on the form of the unlecture. I feel it could’ve worked better had it been an open forum – just a simple hands-up, ask a question to the panel of tutors/coordinators etc. I think this would’ve inspired more interesting questions to develop about ‘networked media’ rather than the dry, administrative questions I think we all just quickly scribbled down. When this happens (as it has at times over the last two weeks), it tends to feel like a lecture on teaching methods, rather than a learning environment in which these somewhat ‘new’ or ‘unorthodox’ learning philosophies are learnt through experience. I think we’d all do well to just jump into a discussion about the issues or topics within the networked media industry, and learn by doing. Having said that, I respect that it all takes some getting used to, so a bit of conversation about how things are going to work this semester isn’t so bad…

‘Reflection in action’

This term grabbed me in the first part of M.K. Smith’s Chris Argyris: theories of action, double-looped learning and organizational learning. Peter Senge explains how Argyris introduced him to the process of, I guess, continuous awareness of the motivations behind your own behaviour, particularly when it comes to addressing problematically repetitive behaviour.

By contrast, this reminded me of the first reading in the Writing Media Texts course: Sari Smith’s Journals and Notebooks. When I read this article six months ago, it opened my mind up to the idea of writing with no audience. Through a process of sketch writing, the writer is at liberty experiment by streaming ideas, in a sort of big to unleash their creative subconscious and practice skills freely.

I feel I’ve always been very wary of who is ‘reading’: Do you like my blog? Do I sound like a moron? Is this photo stupid? Was that story line a total cliche?

I had never really kept a journal or notebook like that where I was just streaming ideas and testing the boundaries of my skills and creative practice. But I think this is an integral part of learning about media ‘writing’ – e.g. photography, video, sound – most of which is relatively new to me.

Alternatively, the idea of ‘reflection in action’ requires constant awareness and questioning of practice. While it doesn’t necessarily refer to creative outputs for an audience, there is some crossover in terms of self-awareness and the impact of your actions and habits.

Having quite consciously worked through both approaches in my media practice, I don’t think that ‘reflection in action’ is ultimately the most effective approach. Sometimes it helps to simply allow yourself to behave and interact in ways that are organic and free-flowing.

But there also comes a time when it’s important to reflect on things and ensure awareness of how you operate – be that socially, professionally, creatively etc.

Like most things, everything in moderation.

 

So far, I don’t mind the idea of an ‘Unlecture’.

I certainly like the idea of being experimental with the learning process, despite being a little thrown off from the traditional ways of learning I think we’re all pretty accustomed to.

As far as speculative learning goes, I was a bit thrown off by what Adrian meant, but I’m warming up to the idea and, steadily, the process.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, I’m very much accustomed to the academic system by which you are assigned a grade and BAM! You pass or fail and here’s by how much. In terms of academic study, I think I could use fewer guidelines. I think I’m a little too reliant on them to tell me what to do.

So I think it will certainly do me some good to just try and find my own way through the learning process, figure out in some way what I want to get out of the course (stay tuned…) and how I might be able to determine how well I’ve achieved that outside of the usual numeric grade measures.

Of course, this all lends to Adrian’s boat metaphor. And whilst I’m not the biggest fan of long-winded metaphors, I’m looking forward to the speculative learning process: instigating ideas, being pushed to think creatively and so on.

It may feel a little unusual, but I’m sure we’ll find our way and do a little better than these guys:

The most satisfying thing about being a student is having those perfect moments when theories, experiences and personal thoughts just seamlessly coincide to make sense of life in general.

I had a little moment like this today while reading Chris Argyris’ article Theories of action, double loop and organizational learning and considering the theories of espoused theory vs. theory-in-action.

I feel that throughout our experiences of education, work, and just trying to get by each day, many people tend to be Model I thinkers. But we’d do well to adopt a bit more of a Model II attitude. In fact, I think it’s increasingly necessary that we do.

To explain what I mean by this, let’s consider my attitudes towards being a student and the endless struggle to strike a balance between study, work, social life and health.

Hand me a survey and my “espoused theory” self would tell you I’ve completed the recommended 40 hours of uni/study, worked a reasonable 6 hour shift on the weekend, spent an enjoyable 8 hours hanging with my mates and a completed a healthy 3.5 hours of cardio this week. Winner!

Theory-in-action: I’ve spent 15 hours on uni/study, 31.5 hours working and interning, 15 hours hanging with my friends and the only cardio I do is sprinting to the train station each morning after sleeping through my alarm yet again.

Considering the dissonance between the espoused theory and theory-in-action of this situation generally just leads to massive waves of guilt. I find myself thinking crap, I should probably cut down my shifts and hit the books and not go out tonight and go for a goddamn run once in a while!

But it’s a good way to start considering things like practice and goals, and how accurate we’ve been in defining them.

Putting on my “Argyris” thinking cap, I can narrow down…

my practice/actions – working too many jobs, staying up too late, neglecting my health and denying the fact I’m back at school again

… which have consequences – feeling overworked, unhealthy, tired and behind in my homework

… that seemingly fail to achieve my intended outcome – of being a super-dedicated student who maintains a healthy lifestyle balance between work, friends and study! Ha.

So what now?

Well, there’s this idea of double-loop and single-loop learning. 

Staying with this case in point, at this point in my week I figure I have two options:

1)      rearrange my time in order to support my goals of being described the aforementioned “super-dedicated student” (single-loop), or

2) reassess how I really want to be spending my time and why (double-loop)

I feel that far too often people fall into the trap of being goal-focused, or at least I do. It goes back to how we are raised, educated, and most commonly expected to operate in a workplace. We have goals and we have expectations from ourselves and others to achieve them.

While single-loop learning requires us to rework the methods we use to achieve the goal, double-loop learning implores us to question the goal itself.

Maybe our method was right, and the unexpected outcome is what our goal should’ve been all along. Maybe the desired outcome was a misguided vision and thus the methods we used to achieve it were a waste of time.

Maybe I don’t really want to be a “super-dedicated student” after all and actually want to just become a 150kg workaholic with a closet drinking problem? No… I take that back. I do want to work hard.

But I need to refine what this means and why I want to do it. Then I can figure out how.

It’s a sort of lighthearted “case in point”, but it lends to bigger ideas.

As students, we tend to get caught up in measuring the experience of academic learning according to the governing values of Model I, but need to balance this with the values of Model II.

In fact, the concepts of Model I and II are integral to not just considering how we operate as students and why we study, but are integral to refining a practice that ensures our work remains relevant in the future.

In a professional working environment, there are fewer definitive measures and ‘right answers’ – two things we are overwhelmed with while we study.

But if you want to do good work that is relevant, valuable and fulfilling in the future, you have to get used to asking questions about what it is you’re working towards and why. Speculating about these things is the only way to stay ahead of the curb.

Ultimately, as media students/practitioners/“professionals-to-be,” relevance and how we achieve that are two of the most important things to consider, and Argyris’ concepts are a good framework for kickstarting that process.