Category: Other thoughts

Thinking about learning

Learning by doing: making, reflecting, making again. We can only learn how to write essays by writing essays.

  1. Learning is individual
  2. Learning is contextual
  3. Learning is relational
  4. Learning is developmental

Reflection helps to:

  • Understanding what we already know
  • Identify what we need to know in order to advance understanding of the subject
  • Make sense of new information and feedback in the context of our own experience
  • Guide our choices for further learning
  • Reveal and make explicit tacit knowledge

Taking stock: what do I know  –> Reflection: what do I need to know –> Feedback and Evaluation: how much and how well do I now understand –> Planning: how can I take my learning further –> Repeat

The learning process is incremental.

 

 

The ways in which we are connected – various thoughts from the week

  • Relations – media as a relational thing, eg the components within the frame/
  • Tacit Knowledge – knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalising it. Egs: facial recognition, the notion of language itself, riding a bike
    – We know more than we can tell
    – Tacit knowledge as ‘artful doing’
  • Process
  • Problem-based learning = learn research skills, critical thinking, content, contextualising
  • Cycle and Reflection = return to problem and think about it in what ways it is now different and from this make new decisions.
    – make, test, critique, make changes
  • Roland Barthes:
    – disenchantment with both established forms of writing and more experimental, avant garde forms which he felt alienate the reader
    – art should be critical and should interogate the world, rather than seek to explain it
    – search for individualistic meaning in art
    – attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture
    – limitations of signs and symbols, and Western culture’s dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards.
  • Constraint as liberation – frames 10, 40 and 70 minutes into a film
  • Multi-linearity
  • Entanglement
  • Sketches: suggest and explore, intentionally ambiguous
  • Specificities matter much more than generalisations
  • Juxtaposition
  • Multiplicity: being in two places/two things at once
  • Readerly Texts: classic texts presented in a familiar, linear, traditional manner. Meaning is fixed and predetermined. The reader merely receives information.
  • Writerly Texts: reader takes an active role in the construction of meaning. There is a proliferation of meanings and a disregard of narrative structure.

 

Patch up those sails, we’re back on the water!

Alternatively titled “Huge Blog Post To Catch Up On Everything Because Of Computer Problems / Why Do We Have A Long Weekend So Early In Semester So I Think It Is Still Holidays And Do No Work”

Lecture One:

  • Systems + better flow: The following system flow chart is for a border/coastal surveillance system, but demonstrates the benefits of a network system and how different sections contribute to good ‘flow’ of ideas and action. I want to work on adding more systems to my day-to-day life because I think they contribute to good practice and habits – maybe even just a morning routine?
  • Autism spectrum: Adrian mentioned this in regards to his own life experiences and what he has learnt about himself, particularly regarding messing with structure (and this link to networks). I’ve read a few articles surrounding the idea that everyone is on the Autism spectrum, including this article from New York Magazine, and it’s an interesting idea. Clearly not everyone who is a bit quiet, or has obsessive interests, or is socially awkward, or is an abrasive jerk, suddenly “has Autism” but these individual’s may be present on some far end of the scale. (Apologies for my incorrect use of commas, I just finished The Catcher in the Rye) I’m still unsure how I feel about this – could it also just be those traits and character flaws and curves and edges that make us human?
  • Assumptions: about what we think others know. This reminded me of two quotes:

    To assume makes an ass out of you and me

    and

    Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.

  • Essays: as modes of thought to follow an idea, as we discussed last semester. The fact that this concept still resonates and seems so novel and foreign to me is a testament to how strongly this previous strict practice about what an essay does has been taught and ingrained in us throughout our schooling.
  • Korsakow
  • Film as disposable and trivial: Adrian mentioned that what you are going to say and what you are going to do with it are more important than creating something confusing with “bells and whistles”. He made the point that great writers can make great writing using a biro and the back on envelope; they don’t need the best pen or their MacBook. Similarly we don’t need the best filming equipment to brainstorm ideas and try out techniques – our smartphone cameras are more than adequate. What we write with doesn’t affect the quality of what we write. I like this idea, and I think it’s important to realise this in order to let go of any preconceived notions when approaching film. It’s often been off limits in my mind simply because I’m not good at achieving depth of focus and pretty compositions. But it doesn’t have to be perfect – I touched on this in a few posts last year and this is definitely something I want to work on this semester: it doesn’t have to be perfect. Just try.
  • Personal documentary: what is/isn’t this? Specific apps sure, but what about any storytelling we do?

Notes I wrote on the first page of Catalyst (speaking of biros and envelopes)

  • Themes and ideas to consider and explore:
  1. playfulness, temporality and memory
  2. interactive documentary
  3. noticing
  4. reflection, practice, process
  5. explicit and tacit knowledge

An exercise in Noticing: ZOZOVISION#1 – My room in 60 seconds

Drowning?

I don’t know about anyone else but I’m feeling incredibly overwhelmed at this point in semester. So as a kind of cathartic exercise I’ve collated a bunch of stress relief tips to assist during this week of doom.

  1. Do some deep breathing or mediation
  2. Talk to someone you trust
  3. Write about what is making you feel stressed or overwhelmed
  4. Do some exercise
  5. Eat a balanced diet
  6. Try to avoid smoking, alcohol and caffeine
  7. Make time for things you enjoy
  8. Accept the things you can’t change
  9. Take a nice bath with some candles, oooh
  10. Savour a warm cup of tea
  11. Play with a puppy
  12. Laugh
  13. Get enough sleep
  14. Prepare for tomorrow
  15. Identify at least one good thing that happened today
  16. Crank up dat Tangled soundtrack
  17. Bake
  18. Practice positive self-talk
  19. Productivity not procrastination
  20. Definitely do NOT go on Oprah’s website when googling stress relief, that site is so slow I nearly punched a wall 🙂

Algorithm and metadata miscellany

If you tweet about your life, a new algorithm can identify your most significant events and assemble them into an accurate life history, say the computer scientists who built it.

 

Is there an algorithm for love?
Amy Webb reverse-engineered online dating.

So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text – a newspaper story – that has no chance of being repurposed.

“Metadata = surveillance. If you hired a private detective to put someone under surveillance, they’d see who they spoke to, where they went, what they bought. That’s metadata. When the president says ‘it’s just metadata’, he’s saying “it’s surveillance”
Privacy and surveillance: Jacob Applebaum, Caspar Bowden and more

There is a story to be told here

Part of the interactive documentary Explore Shoreditch, this section uses interactivity to allow users to explore an audio interview and tilled video/photo gallery.

This section is fun to use and allows an interactive experience. It aims to explore a possible form that documentary could take on touch-devices.

Interactive documentary experts Mandy Rose, Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi unpack the mysteries of interactive documentaries: what are they, what is exciting about them and how do they relate to the documentary tradition?

Through analysis of a range of interactive projects, all of which place new logics of authorship and storytelling at their core, the session provides participants with a set of conceptual tools to assist in the development of their own work.

Data Driven Stories: Aaron Koblin for the Future of StoryTelling 2012

Come to your Census (interactive media)

Working with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Spinifex have taken data visualization to a unique, eye catching new level through an amazing interactive projection on historic Cadman’s Cottage to promote the release of ABS’ 2011 Census data.

“I hope it’s not sporadically!”

Researchers have discovered that the seemingly erratic behavior of the “Rostov Ripper,” a prolific serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days. The researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law.

When the number of days between Chikatilo’s murders is plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the relationship forms a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot. It’s the same result scientists get when they plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred — and the same goes for a variety of natural phenomena. The power law outcome suggests that there was an underlying natural process driving the serial killer’s behavior.

Read More: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46045497/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/math-formula-may-explain-why-serial-killers-kill/