2014 Creative Critical Essay

Adrian Miles

Value: (40%)

due: Friday October 24

This task can be completed in pairs or individually. If a complete draft of the writing (minimum 1200 words) is submitted to your teacher by Friday September 26 you will receive a bonus of 5 marks. Work that is done in pairs is expected to be more sophisticated (writing, ideas, use of media, references) than work that is done individually.

Submission

Due to unforeseen technical problems with how some email is trapped by a ‘pre’ google filter (postini) we are not using email submission (too many disappear into the postini trap). So to submit please print on to paper, include the URL on the page, and hand in with a cover sheet in the usual way to building 9, level 4, submission bin.

email your individual teacher with the URL of the blog page that contains your essay.

TOPIC PROBLEM

Network literacy is not merely knowing about this, it is doing it. It is in this doing that we can understand that literacy is an applied knowing, or if you prefer a knowing through doing.… It is being comfortable with change and flow as the day to day conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, and recognising that all of this may change, and appear differently in six months. What underlies such change, however, are the principles of distributed content production and sharing, folksonomies, trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build with these varieties of content and knowledge….. Network literacy means recognising that there are no longer canonical sources and having the skills to find what it is you think you want, of being able to judge it, and then of being able to incorporate this, in turn, into your knowledge flows. Finally, networked literacies are marked by your participation as a peer in these flows and networks — you contribute to them and in turn can share what others provide.

Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30.

Take any of the ideas/concepts/arguments in this statement to investigate and think about the possible implications of this for you as a future professional media maker. For example, what might you need to know about? How might this affect how you make media? Consume it? How it get used? Distributed? Could the media in itself (what sort of thing we currently mean when we say ‘media’) change? In other words take something from this to think about what it might mean for you as someone who will influence our future media.

DESCRIPTION

This essay is to be published as a page or pages on your blog or as a standalone web page/s published via themediastudents.net website.

It is to include:

  • text
  • image (photos or drawings)
  • video and/or audio

The essay is to be around 1,500 words in length. It does not have to conform to traditional academic requirements and so can be

  • personal
  • use “I”
  • finish with questions rather than answers
  • be exploratory in its thinking and argument/s

However, it is still an essay which means the work must:

  • make an argument
  • explore or think about and with an idea or ideas
  • use evidence
  • appropriately cite that evidence

An essay is not an opinion piece, it is informed by research and thinking. This makes an essay critical, which doesn’t mean it criticises something negatively but that it interrogates ideas and assumptions to see what they are, what they are made of, and where they might take you. An essay is then a place in which you think through something, rather than reporting on what you already know or understand. This task is inviting you to treat your writing and making as more like a laboratory, where you state something, then think about what it means, its consequences or implications. In other words follow the idea where it leads you…

(If it at all helps imagine an idea as being some sort of thing and through writing and making you are prodding, poking, testing, querying what sort of thing it is. Bit like being a scientist, but with words.)

The essay can consist of more than a single page. The image/s and video/s and/or audio that you use are expected to contribute to the ideas being explored. They might reflect an idea, reinforce or endorse it, or provide a prompt or point of departure for your own thinking.

2014 blog assessment

Adrian Miles

Value: (30%)

Due: End of week six, Friday, August 29

DESCRIPTION

The blog that has been established on mediafactory.org.au is yours. It is/can be/has to be used for other subjects through out your media degree. For media students we intend to keep your blog for life (so you can keep using it after you graduate).

In Network Media your individual blog is the key place for you to discuss, note, record, document, discuss, argue about, reflect upon, interrogate, critique (can I stop yet?) what you do. Making, reading, classes, things you notice out and about.

In this subject the intent is to make contributing to your blog as simple as possible using whatever digital resources you have available, so that it can become part of your everyday network practice.

For this assignment you will print five blog posts, attach your blog audit table, and write a short essay to demonstrate how you have used your blog, to date, in networked media. These five posts should provide evidence of how you have

  • engaged with the readings to date
  • engaged with ideas raised in lectures and classes
  • put into practice specific technical skills that have been introduced
  • written or otherwise documented other things that are not just the set tasks from network media

The essay should discuss how you have used your blog to date this semester. What has been good about it? Bad? What has surprised you? Do you think it has helped you? How? Why? How would you like to use it for the rest of the semester? Why?

Academic writing is an argument that makes evidence based claims. We’re less concerned with the form (essay, song, poem), than with the integrity and quality of these three things.

Good writing is clear and explicit in how it answers these questions. The emphasis is on your critical thinking evidenced in your writing through the ideas you explore and how you use evidence. This is not an essay about being a blog fan (or not). If you don’t enjoy it, why? If you do, why? Good work uses more than opinion to make claims it relies on evidence.

SUBMISSION

Print the blog posts. Attach them to your essay. Attach your completed blog audit form. Submit (yes, on paper) with the usual cover sheet with your teacher’s name clearly on the cover sheet. The program name is your degree, the course is called Network Media, the course code is COMM2219, the lecturer name is Adrian Miles, the tutor/marker’s name is the name of your class teacher.

2014 Participation Assessment

Adrian Miles

Value: (30%)

Due: You complete a participation ‘diary’ every week in class.
An overall result is awarded in your last class (the week beginning October 13).

DESCRIPTION

A participation diary is completed weekly in class. Participation is not the same as attendance. Participation consists of the activities you do in addition to attendance that contributes to your learning. The majority of these activities happens outside of class time, so is not visible to your teacher, but are essential to being able to engage with everything that network media involves.

You will receive progressive feedback about your participation mark in weeks 4, 8, and 12.

The weekly diary is a simple way to make explicit what you’ve done, outside of class, each week. There will audits to validate these diaries.

Submission: The participation diary will be completed at the beginning of every class and submitted. The diary will be compiled by your teacher and evaluated three times through the semester.

2014, Here We Are

Adrian Miles

Welcome to the 2014 iteration of network media. You’ll find a list of staff and email addresses under the About menu. If you’ve come along here to find out about what’s happening, stay tuned, there will be plenty soon. You will have received an email with details of how to log in to your mediafactory blog. If none of it makes sense don’t panic, just hold on to that email ready for the first classes next week. Any pre class questions, shoot me an email (adrian.miles at rmit.edu.au).

Tactics & Strategies

Elliot Heatwole

There’s nothing quite like going above and beyond the scope of what’s required.  With that in mind, I’m recommending that you read chapter 3.2 of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, entitled ‘Strategies and tactics’.  Perhaps not now with your current workload but definitely something you should come back to and look over in future.

The Monopoly Analogy

Elliot Heatwole

I just wanted to post the analogy I used in class to describe the difference between random and scale-free networks.  Imagine, if you will, that you need to roll a 12 in a game of Monopoly to get to the ‘Go’ square.  If you were using a twelve-sided die, you would have a 1/12 probability of success but because most games use two six-sided die then your probability drops to 1/36 simply because there are more possible outcomes:

For a twelve-sided die:

1|1

2|2

3|3

4|4

5|5

6|6

7|7

8|8

9|9

10|10

11|11

12|12

For two six-sided dice:

2|1-1

3|2-1, 1-2

4|1-3, 3-1, 2-2

5|1-4, 4-1, 2-3, 3-2

6|1-5, 5-1, 2-4, 4-2, 3-3

7|1-6, 6-1, 2-5, 5-2, 3-4, 4-3

8|2-6, 6-2, 3-5, 5-3, 4-4

9|3-6, 6-3, 4-5, 5-4

10|4-6, 6-4, 5-5

11|5-6, 6-5

12|6-6

With the introduction of more elements the bell curve becomes more pronounced.  This also represents an interesting feature of random networks.  In a random network, a key requirement is that – because they are random – each node is equally probable to connect to any other node.  As such, outliers will exist (such as rolling a twelve), though this cannot account for the extraordinary popularity of certain sites.  Hubs like Facebook and Google should have an equiprobable chance of appearing as sites with only one or two links.  Take the rolls as the number of links to a specific site – if the Internet functioned as a random network you would expect it to represent a bell curve rather than the logarithmic curve described by Barabási.

A scale-free network relies on growth and preferential attachment.  We can also use basic probabilities to account for these networks, though we must change the way these probabilities function.

If you roll a double in Monopoly, you get to roll again.  Your odds of rolling a double are one in six.  It is possible to keep rolling doubles continuously but the probability reduces dramatically every time. (Well, not really.  It’s the same each individual time but in terms of the calculated probability of all rolls it reduces exponentially the more you get.)  The statistics overlaid on the graph below indicates how many of all possible outcomes exist within each section (ie, 5/6 turns will only receive one roll, 5/36 will have two, etc.)

GRAPH

To demonstrate how this can account for scale-free networks, let’s take a different game of Monopoly.  In this game, every time someone lands on your property, you get a chance to roll again, acquiring more property and hence more chances to keep rolling.  How many rolls (or links) are you likely to acquire over the course of the game?  What if the game had potentially infinite players and potentially infinite squares?

On the Internet, each link to a website increases the exposure of that website and consequently the probability that other users will see and link to it.  Of course it does not function as a static, one-in-six probability.  There are modifiers based on the perceived value of the content that affect the probabilities of growth.  However, you can see how, based on simple probabilities, hubs can emerge naturally simply due to exposure.  To illustrate this, I’ve overlaid the graph from above over the power law distribution graph from the Barabási reading:

GRAPHlayered

All Readings for the Course

Elliot Heatwole

Here are ALL of the readings for the course.  Keep in mind that the “x readings” denotes the class by which the readings should be completed.  For example, the week 1.2 readings should be completed by week 1.2, etc.

1.2 Readings

Key Readings:

Smith, M. K. (2001) ‘Chris Argyris: theories of action, double-loop learning and organizational learning’, the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm. Last update: May 29, 2012. (PDF copy)

Miles, Adrian. “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” Australian Screen Ed 41 (2006): 66–9. Print. (http://vogmae.net.au/vlog/research/network-literacies/blogs-in-media-education/) (PDF copy)

Bonus Reading:

Mason, John. Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. (PDF copy)

2.1 Readings

Key Readings:

Bosch, Torie. “Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling Explains the Intriguing New Concept of Design Fiction.” Slate. Web. 29 July 2013. (PDF)

Ward,, Matthew. “Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice.” Medium. Web. 29 July 2013. (PDF)

Bonus Readings:

Grand, Simon, and Martin Wiedmer. “Design Fiction: A Method Toolbox for Design Research in a Complex World.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference. 2010. (PDF)

KNUTZ, EVA, THOMAS MARKUSSEN, and POUL RIND CHRISTENSEN. “The Role of Fiction in Experiments Within Design, Art & Architecture.” n. pag. Print. (PDF)

Week 2.2

Key Readings:

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945. The Atlantic. Web. 19 July 2013. (LINK)

Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print. (Apologies for the strange scan, the scanner freaked out a bit – PDF)

Bonus Reading:

Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. New York: Perseus Books, 2002. Print. (PDF)

Week 3.1

Key Readings:

Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. (extracts, PDF)

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. Print. (extract, PDF)

Bonus Readings:

Graham, Paul. “The Age of the Essay.” Paul Graham. Sept. 2004. Web. 11 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

Week 3.2

Key Readings:

Extracts from Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. (PDF)

Extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. (PDF)

Bonus Readings:

Extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. (PDF)

Extract from Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Open WorldCat. Web. 15 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

Week 4.1

Key Readings:

Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. London: Vintage, 2003. Print. (Extract, PDF)

Anderson, Chris. “The Long Tail.” Wired. Oct. 2004. Web. 23 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

Week 4.2

Key Readings:

Barabási, Albert-László. “The 80/20 Rule”. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York, NY: A plume book, 2003. Print. (PDF)

Barabási, Albert-László. “Rich Get Richer”. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York, NY: A plume book, 2003. Print. (PDF)

Bonus Readings:

Barabási, Albert-László. Extracts Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York, NY: A plume book, 2003. Print. (PDF)

Week 5.1

Key Readings:

Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. Culture and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. This is the introduction from this book. Short, very general but lays out some important general ideas and terms. (PDF)

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. The MIT Press, 2006. Print. (PDF).

Bonus Readings:

Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. Culture and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. “Theoretical Frameworks” (PDF)

Week 5.2

Key Readings:

Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form”. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Vesna, Victoria, ed. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. 39-60. (PDF)

Bonus Readings:

Seaman, Bill. “Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics”. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Vesna, Victoria, ed. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. 121-140. (PDF)

Week 6.1

Key Reading:

Schultz, Pit. Latour, Bruno: On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications 1/2. 11 Jan. 1998. E-mail. (PDF)

Week 6.2

Key Readings:

Dietz, Steve. “Ten Dreams of Technology.” Leonardo 35.5 (2002): 509–522. MIT Press Journals. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. (PDF)

Readings for Monday (Week 3.1)

Elliot Heatwole

Here are the readings for Monday providing you with a strong grounding in hypertext from renown theorist George Landow as well as following on from our discussions this week with Jay Bolter’s Writing Space and Paul Graham’s The Age of the Essay.  I’ll be uploading Wednesday’s readings tomorrow along with all of the remaining readings for the course so you can get a head start on those if you feel so inclined.

Key Readings:

Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. (extracts, PDF)

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. Print. (extract, PDF)

Bonus Reading:

Graham, Paul. “The Age of the Essay.” Paul Graham. Sept. 2004. Web. 11 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

The week that was

Elliot Heatwole

Off to a flying start this week with a focus on practical skills in the workshop and more on the theoretical side in our first symposium.  The symposium was a little bit explanatory rather than analytical though hopefully as we progress through semester the nature of the readings will mean that we can start discussing the expanded discourse in more depth.

Important Notes

All of the participation diaries are now available under the ‘Assessment‘ tab.  If you need to access a copy in advance or due to absence, you can find them there.

We start work on the wiki tomorrow, so please check that out if you have a chance to see some of the previous entries from last semester.  It’s available at www.mediafactory.org.au/niki.  I’ve also added your blogs to a new blog roll that you can find over there –> and then down a bit.  Check out each other’s blogs and see what your peers are up to.

Doing

We’ve got a few “how-to” posts already, so keep these coming.  Helping out your peers with technical skills will be vital to getting the most out of this course as they’ll surely reciprocate in kind and we haven’t a whole lot of time with the length of this semester.  Bryan talks about how to create a link list that can be added to, say, a sidebar, while Daniel makes sure everyone knows how to include a link in their posts.  We’ve also got some multimedia aficionados keen to get A/V content into their blogs, such as Tim walking you through how to upload content (do this if you own the content) and Dana on how to embed content (do this if you do not own the content).

Thinking

Esther provides an excellent explanation of double-loop learning, while Kim L. thinks about how it applies to her own experiences.  A few posts are cropping up about design fiction that are starting to posit the role of design fiction in the development of new technologies, such as Dana pointing towards things like Google Glass.  Meanwhile, Mardy reflects on Blogs in Media Education and the rationale of their use in this course.

Spreading Out

It’s also good to see people starting to branch out into related ideas on their blogs.  Vanessa thinks about the integration of blogs and SEO, while Mishell ponders networked dependency in the workplace.  Kim O. looks at the significance of one’s virtual presence and the importance of maintaining a positive reputation, and of course Daniel wins hearts and minds with a video of a puppy.