Month: July 2014

Blogging, WTF?

Adrian Miles

Rebecca on blogs, the modern world, and the blogs and education reading. Louis on finally getting started with blogging (and if you want to be a journalist and you didn’t have a blog personally I wouldn’t employ you). Evan on blogging, publicness, the invite and possible value of this. Laura has nice summary of some of the key take aways from the reading, and yes, because it’s public a blog requires a certain sort of writing that you don’t ordinarily do (which is good). Seonaid on post industrial media ecologies, blogging, and the whole nine yards.

WordPress on your Phone

Adrian Miles

There’s a WordPress app that you can get for iOS and Android. Makes it simple to post directly to your blog. But things like Byword (my preferred writing app for iOS) also can post to your blog, and then things like IFTTT (check the tutorials here, under the blog weaving heading) make it even easier.

This proves that I can post from my phone

x

As I sit at the tram stop, I am remembering today’s lecture.

Is it true that stories no longer have a beginning, middle and end?

If so then I have just been transported into another  galaxy. I see the Internet to be the home of many droplets of information. Some of these are self contained (with beginnings, middles and ends) others are open ended.

This got me thinking …

Pages, Books

Adrian Miles

In that flurry today missed another naive obviousness. Pages and page numbers. It means things are arranged serially, one after another. In fact most of our technical media – until the computer – has as a default serial ordering. This encourages long forms of narrative that have come to privilege a particular sort of cause and effect, again because the material form of our media encourages and allows this. If we didn’t have pages bound together but small cards that could be shuffled (for example) what sorts of stories, and how we then understand the world, would we have and be using?

Reading 03

Adrian Miles

Another vanity moment for Adrian Miles:

  1. Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30. (pdf)
  2. “Chris Argyris: Theories of Action, Double-Loop Learning and Organizational Learning.” http://infed.org/mobi/chris-argyris-theories-of-action-double-loop-learning-and-organizational-learning/. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 July 2013. (pdf)
  3. Graham, Paul. “The Age of the Essay.” Paul Graham. http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html N.p., Sept. 2004. Web. 11 Aug. 2013.(pdf)

A Take Away Idea

Adrian Miles

Let’s introduce the concept of the ‘take away idea’. Each of the readings, even where they seem to cover a lot of ideas, theories, arguments, and so on, are written around a basic idea, concept, or problem (that is three ways of describing the same sort of thing). They are writing directly to something that the author feels the need to think about and think through.

(Think of the readings not as explanations of something, but as people using writing to think about an idea. This is a much more productive way of approaching essays and chapters and other material than thinking their role as writing is to explain something to, or for, you. Their role, in the first instance, is to let the author think out something. Approach them in the same way, and they become invitations to think along with them, rather than road maps detailing what is already known.)

So, the ‘take away idea’. Each of the readings can be thought to revolve around and respond to some kernel that matters. The take away idea is, to begin with, not you figuring out what this might be (but by all means go for it), but is your take away idea. What is the one key thing that matters to you from what you read, or hear? Why?