doing

For praxis in the subject, things to do, things that need to be done

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.

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.

Readings for Wednesday (Week 2.2)

Elliot Heatwole

This week there are two key readings by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, both of which in some way speculate on technological futures by extrapolating the affordances of current technologies.  ‘Literary Machines’ is structured in such a way as to emulate hypertext navigation through information, so it will be beneficial to think about how you are absorbing its contents as you read it.

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. (PDF)

Recommended Reading

The recommended reading comes from David Weinberger and contains some relevant take-away ideas that are applicable to today’s technological landscape.  Try thinking about what kind of principles are universally applicable to interactions with types of technology and how these can apply to your own potential futures.

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

 

Reflective Graphs

Adrian Miles

A sharp change in the line generally means a qualitative change in understanding. Not knowing more, knowing different.

Unsymposium 0.9

Adrian Miles

Where a potted history of the subject is offered, we touch on unresolved questions, and try to answer, or at least ruminate upon, the experience that may, or may not, have happened over these common twelve weeks.

  • Do the algorithms of a database change the nature of what is defined as narrative?
  • How are databases changing notions ‘traditional’ narrative?
  • How can narratives emerge from databases?
  • Why do some media objects explicitly follow database logic while others do not?
  • Can the paradigm and the syntagm be more the same than opposites in new media?

The slides:

Unsymposium 0.8

Adrian Miles

Carry over questions:

  • (from a couple of weeks ago): Why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web?
  • We’re used to the idea of the internet being characterised as a democratic, open, non-hierarchical technology and space: is Galloway arguing something that fundamentally challenges this?
  • Galloway notes that the future is already here but not uniformly distributed (paraphrasing William Gibson). How does this apply to a network like the internet?

This week’s new questions:

  • Do the algorithms of a database change the nature of what is defined as narrative?
  • How are databases changing notions ‘traditional’ narrative?
  • How can narratives emerge from databases?
  • Why do some media objects explicitly follow database logic while others do not?
  • Can the paradigm and the syntagm be more the same than opposites in new media?

11 Reading (for Week 12)

Adrian Miles

A speculative piece that comes from the point of view of art to close out the semester:

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

Why art? Because artists know how to think about the materiality of the digital, that it isn’t just virtual and abstract, that it has concrete qualities that matter. Why does this matter to you? Because to ‘get’ the network it is not enough to play on it, or use it, but you need to understand it in a deeper sense.

Weird examples to help explain. Do you know of any racing car driver who doesn’t have a deep understanding of cars, engines, tyres, and of course driving – they don’t just drive. Do you know of any dancer that doesn’t have a deep understanding of different sprung floors, points, slippers, shoes, ankles, knees, their own bodies and muscles? Do you know any film maker who doesn’t have a deep understanding of composition, miss-en-scene, light, space, time, and performance? It is part of trying to move past thinking that doing something on the interwebs means we understand the interwebs. In the same way that just because you know how to drive a car doesn’t mean you ‘understand’ cars.

10 Reading (for Week 11)

Adrian Miles

Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been mentioned in passing a few times this semester so let’s get our hands dirty here. This is Bruno Latour outlining via a very influential new media/internet studies email list, what ANT is. It is dense, difficult, full on high French post humanities theory. So, if you can’t get through it, it is imperative, essential, heck even demanded of you, to read the first section which runs over the first three pages and ends with the line “In this sense ANT is a reductionist and relativist theory, but as I shall demonstrate this is the first necessary step towards an irreductionist and relationist ontology.”

required reading

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

Unsymposium 0.7

Adrian Miles

Last week Brian left us with the intriguing “the 80/20 stuff isn’t what I think really matters in the chapter”, so we will begin this week with this prompt about what does then matter from the chapter.

And then:

  • We often forget that technological inventions are made within a society that has particular values. How does this context get embedded into the technology and shape the way it is used?
  • Does technique drive technology or does technology develop technique?
  • Are there limits to what we define as technology?
  • We’re used to the idea of the internet being characterised as a democratic, open, non-hierarchical technology and space: is Galloway arguing something that fundamentally challenges this?
  • Galloway notes that the future is already here but not uniformly distributed (paraphrasing William Gibson). How does this apply to a network like the internet?

Great questions, Buckley’s of getting through them in the 50 minutes.

Unsymposium 0.6

Adrian Miles

We will segue into this week’s questions via last week’s uncompleted answers:

  • Does a network have a centre? Or do we all create centres for our own networks?
  • Anderson states that infinite access to entertainment media is accommodating more niche tastes, encouraging exploration away from a hit-driven culture that thrives on “brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop songs”. Why are these still the most popular, mainstream and successful in our entertainment culture?

This week’s questions:

  • Why does the 80/20 rule seem to appear universally in the physical world?
  • What kinds of systems does the 80/20 rule apply to?
  • Why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web?