Callum offers a very useful thumbnail of the first week’s soapboxing.
symposium
Symposium 1.0
Kerri-Anne found the first symposium confusing and disheartening (on the other hand Kenton had the opposite experience, neither is right or wrong of course, and it becomes valuable to realise the diversity of views and experiences, and to learn quickly that it doesn’t follow that your experience, whether positive, negative, neutral, is everyone else’s). It was all over the place, wasn’t it? IN relation to videoblogging, different problem, I’m the first or second person in the world (apparently) to have started a video blog, and what is done these days is not what I think of as video blogging. But that’s for another time. Stephanie links post industrial media with stuff from cinema studies (well done), and in spite of Kerri-Anne’s anxiety, the aim of what we’re teaching is to make you change agents in media, so you can manage, initiate, direct what is happening, rather than having a technical skill set that, like Ford, Holden, high end factory workers, has a rapidly approaching use by date.
Max, meanwhile, can see the relation between know how versus know what and VCE, high school, and a lot of what is mistakenly described as learning. Giorgia, meanwhile, picks up some similar points, noting that the ‘how’ of information is important. Michael left confused (fair enough), which personally is good – I think if you’re confused then it is a small step to wonder, and wonder is the key engine for real learning. My job, lets be clear, is not to tell, but to wonder, to model it, invite it, do it, and provide fuel for you to do it too.
Parts, Beginnings
Laura on know how, know what, and media tools. Ashleigh on the relations between parts being more important than the parts themselves (with pictures).
Mia has a great post on relations between parts, hypertextual making, and understanding this via film editing. Meanwhile Kenton enjoyed the symposium (early days yet), Amy has a great summary (thanks) of her take aways and then there’s Monique’s playful, articulate experiment with voice and ideas. George is worried about getting into the flow, my advice, don’t read the 25 best bloggers but read other student’s around you (and as you might learn, academic writing is a much more varied beast than you’ve been led to believe).
Pages, Books
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?
Lumpy
A rather hit and miss start to network media 2014 with me trying to repurpose a conference presentation into service. Some parts stuck. Some parts missed, terribly. Key points:
- industrial versus post industrial media (perhaps make a list of what we think the industrial is, and then what would the counter terms for post industral become?)
- the decline or scarcity as what defines the media (in relation to making, distribution, access)
- that scarcity was a consequence of cost of equipment (video and audio equipment was extremely expensive – it still is at the high end)
- that scarcity was a consequence of industrial/heritage media having very narrow channels (one newspaper published once per day, a TV channel only being able to broadcast one thing at a time)
- scarcity also applied to university, so we went to university to get access to media making tools (because they were expensive so only in universities…), libraries, films, and experts
- but this scarcity is now also gone
- so what is the role of a media degree?
- it lies in the difference between ‘know what’ and ‘know how’, which is also the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge
- so learning now needs to be less about knowing what and more about knowing how
- and so the problem is how to do this, when most of our experience of education concentrates on knowing what (we’re more interested in what your essay says, than in how you went about writing it)