a “b” blog
Anand Rao put together this fun JibJab mashup as an added bonus for the lunch festivities. The main event was Faculty Academy’s first annual Deck Wars —which was a blast and has officially crowned its first annual champion: Jeff McClurken, video forthcoming .
Click on image above for the JibJab
Tags for this article: fa08 , faculty academy , jibjab , umwfa08
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Dr. Janet Murray’s unbelievably intelligent and thought-provoking talk, “Inventing the Medium: Learning and Symbolic Expression from Knucklebones and Senet to Second Life and Spore,” examined the historical role of games and game play upon the evolution of humanity, communication, and representation (read the abstract here and video will be forthcoming). Immensely interesting stuff that will take me a while to process and make sense of. During her discussion she talked about PeaceMaker, a game that provides varying mediated perspectives upon the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by allowing you to play both sides of the struggle (the game’s tagline is “Play the News. Solve the Puzzle”). This got me thinking about Tiltfactor, and organization that creates games for social change (an organization Jeff Drouin pointed me to with his comments here).
…we create games for change, educational games, artwork, and social software. We hope to make effective interventions in thinking about how games, and software in general, can evolve to take into account social activist principles. For example, how can one design for multiple learners and multiple play styles? Can games improve the self-efficacy of underrepresented groups? Can games teach equity? What is an excellent design solution which focuses on collaboration, yet also satisfies competitive urges?
You can find out more about the lab from the video below.
Tags for this article: fa08 , PeaceMaker , umwfa08 , video games
[?]This is awesome, found it via Dan Coleman’s Open Culture blog, and it is just amazing how insane people can be (if it isn’t a fake, but I tend to agree with Dan that this is the real deal). Sometimes I love humanity, and the minute and half video below is why. Despite the bill of goods the Age of Enlightenment sold us, reason has no place in the greatest of human genius! And what was that Adam Smith said about self interest?
Tags for this article: fun , insane , shark surfing , YouTube
[?]So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field (and many others, something Jon Udell calls professional blogging) as part of an ongoing, networked conversation about process and collaboration, rather than some isolated, fixed product.
An RSS-Driven Departmental Portfolio Review Project
All of which makes me think about the project Professor Sarah Allen and I have been working on for her Writing Process course. Each member of the class was asked to create their own blog and post various papers and revisions to the blog as a kind of digital notebook in which they would publish the work for peer review and feedback (all of which fed back into the course blog, a now “classic” course aggregated model for using blogs at UMW). The class was focused on process, and part of the approach was to understand writing as a dynamic, unfolding art form that must be labored over with numerous revisions, iterations and approaches.
During this year’s Tech Fellows program Sarah and I came up with an RSS-driven framework for delivering the “final” version of a English majors essays to a secure space so that faculty could conduct a blind review for assessment purposes. The samples would come from a select group of English courses (Sarah’s Writing Process course being the test case). Traditionally this was handled through a BlackBoard drop box, wherein the essays were uploaded without students names and then reviewed by faculty. To do this they would have to download the papers, print them out, comment on them, than convene with other members of the review committee to discuss the them.
The thought Sarah and I had was there’s has gotta be a better way to streamline this portfolio review process. So, what we did was rather simple, Sarah had all her students writing in their own blog throughout the course of the semester, and publish their revised essays as they finished them. Once a student considered an essay to be a final version, they tagged it with “final paper.” We got the sitewide RSS feed for every post tagged with “final version” and fed them into a blog called ELC Assessment.† The assessment blog is now populated with final, anonymous essays that the department review committee can comment upon from anywhere and have a distributed discussion about the writing, better yet it is all easily protected so that only English, Linguistics and Communication faculty can access it (we left the example open, because it’s a proof of concept).
UMW Lablogs
UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik provides yet another example of how an RSS-driven infrastructure can make things a whole lot easier, and provide students with a practical portfolio of their lab work. I posted about this project earlier this academic year and Steve and I will be presenting it at the EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference. This was a grand experiment, and I think it has some serious possibilities for thinking about managing a scientific portfolio of experimentations and labs.
In short, Steve Gallik developed an entire suite of online laboratory resources wherein students can record the results of their experiments, something he terms an Online Laboratory Suite. Well, if that’s not impressive enough, Andy Rush and Steve Gallik conceptualized a way to take the experiment results for each student and create a RSS feed for it. When each student signs up for an account on Steve’s Online laboratory Suite, they are immediately sent an RSS feed that they place within a spam-blog plugin like FeedWordPress on their own blog, choose the category to publish it to, and before you know it they have an aggregated, feed-driven lab notebook (or a LabLog) of their work that automatically updates as they complete their online labs.
What I like about this project is how clearly it suggest that whether or not you can program your own laboratory software like Steve Gallik, having a publishing platform that is framed around syndication effects everyone. If we do have online lab software being used by a department, isn’t it about time we expected to have an RSS feed for student work? Steve’s LabLogs represents a powerful model for thinking about how students can easily re-publish their own labs into a format they can control, re-publish, and re-purpose as they see fit.
The Macaulay Honors College E-Portfolios Using WPMu
Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Technology and Learning at The Macaulay Honors College (part of the CUNY system), has been pushing the envelope in terms of the small pieces loosely joined approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Joe, with the agile help of Jeff Drouin, has been using open source CMSs, wikis, and blogs to great effect during his first yearat Macaulay. After a few brief e-mail exchanges with Joe about using WPMu as an e-portfolio system, he invited me up to talk his crack cadre of graduate student Tech Fellows about the small pieces loosely joined approach to educational technology. And as always, I focused on the work UMW has been doing with WPMu in particular.
It was great fun for me, in particular because I started out in this field as a tech fellow at the CUNY Honors College almost four years ago. So going back talking about this stuff was pretty cool, and I could warn them to resist getting too deep into blogs and wikis lest they get hooked and never finish their dissertation, only to find they have become a fanatical, raving EdTech lunatic 
So I recently discovered that Joe has decided to pull the trigger on a WPMu driven portfolio project, and it is alrady up and running, you can read more about it on his blog here and see the actual site here. How cool! Joe is an impressive guy, and he is not afraid to experiment with these powerful, open source publishing platforms, which at CUNY means a lot. To quote Jon Udell talking about UMW two years ago, Joe has really put the Macauly Honors College in the catbird seat when it comes to instructional technologies. He is not afraid to experiment with a wide array of open web and open source tools, and he understands the importance of deploying them rapidly and always already as beta to see how they will fare. That is the pace you need to keep currently, and it is why most of the rest of CUNY is screeching to a devastating standstill when it comes to instructional technologies (Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute’s Blogs@Baruch being the other brilliant exception, thanks to Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer).
Moreover, Macaulay has a manageable incoming class of 300 students every year, all of which are distributed amongst seven different senior colleges of CUNY (I think it’s seven?). A small college loosely joined that may prove an extremely powerful example of how these tools might bring a de-centralized learning community into some kind of online focus. Needless to say, I love Joe’s style and I’ll be watching the Macauly Eportfolio project closely over the next year.
OK, that’s enough about e-portfolios, now it’s time to get ready for Faculty Academy, miles to go before I sleep.
Tags for this article: blackboard , blog , blogs , colleges , community , e-portfolios , eportfolio , feeds , macaulay honors college , open source , publishing platform , rss , small pieces loosely joined , syndication , teaching and learning , wiki , WP , wpmu , wpmued
[?]Stephen Downes already linked to it, so this may be irrelevant, nonetheless if you missed Mike Caulfield’s post about Monica Hesse’s article in the Washington Post, be sure to check it out, it is awesome. Without question one of the best deconstructions I have yet to read of how the traditional nodes (or is it modes?) of authority attack all kinds of web-based information as amateur and unreliable which often leads to a conflating of their established positions of authority with truth. His analysis and research centers around a quote in Monica Hesse’s article from Abraham Lincoln, “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg,” that establishes the conceit of her critique of the current state of online research and amateur culture. His precise “unraveling” of this argument is awesome.
Authority isn’t truth, and this reading offers a phenomenal example of how all too often those self-appointed defenders of “truth” are the one’s we should be worried about. Behind their righteous vision of reality there lies motives for power and control. Boy is it nice to have Mike back on the blog feeding gems like this to his fellow amateurs.
Tags for this article: amateur , authority , downes , monica hesse , truth , washington post
[?]So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised. However, the comments on part 1 are already making me wonder whether this post shouldn’t be written by D’Arcy, Chris, Phaedral, or Cole (or perhaps all of them)?
That acknowledged, I want to particularly note Chris and Phaedral’s comments about the importance of each individual controlling the sequential nature of their portfolio, giving them full control over this nuanced space for extensive creativity, expression, and order. I couldn’t agree with either of them more, and hopefully some of what I suggest below will point in that direction, but by no means put to rest the challenges and demands of such important caveats, and one can only hope for meaningful serendipity.
Ok, no more backsliding, avanti! The examples below will be centered around the work we have been doing at UMW with WordPress Multi-User (much of what I discus below can surely be done with Drupal and Movable Type —and probably several other applications I don’t know about), but this is my blog and I ain’t going to talk about those hippie applications anymore, ya hear?
Good.
An Example of a blogfolio?
Robert Lynne, a graduating Art major at UMW, will be my example for this post. I hope he can forgive me constantly harassing him, but his blogfolio (to quote D’Arcy) is a model of at least one way you can imagine the portfolio logic working. Rob has used his blog for several classes, an Art History course, an Art Studio course, a Sculpture course, as well as a Poetry Workshop course. He has had his blog for the 2007/2008 academic year, and the space demonstrates some of the questions of creative control, sequence, and serendipity that I mentioned earlier in regards to Chris and Phaedral’s concerns.
In his blogfolio he chronicled his trip to NYC, helped shape a manifesto, blogged for classes, sang songs, and even had time to heckle yours truly. All of this was an on-going stream of ideas and thoughts that framed a process, being an art major he also had a lot of completed work to present to his audience, and this is where the use of pages on his blog became the space for what many might understand as a more traditional portfolio. He has a page dedicated to his paintings, sculptures, final thesis presentation, as well as a more focused about page. In these pages he controls the sequence, presentation, and obviously decides what goes in and what is left out. The space captures a fascinating part of both his creative process and experience throughout the year, but italso quickly became a space for him to represent the products of that process. He controls his space, he can delete my comments, delete his blog, or export the contents and take them somewhere else. In fact, there is no reason why he couldn’t have done all of this on Blogger or WordPress.com. That said, I think the major reason he started it (but it probably was not the logic that ultimately drove it) was the fact that he was asked to blog for at least three different courses this academic year. Not all of which were in his discipline. I think the major reason his work branched out beyond the classes was that there was an audience, the UMW culture encouraged it, and he found it useful (at least to some degree) to frame his work and experience.
The Name of the Game is Spam-like Aggregation
The reason why blogs can be understood as more powerful, dynamic, and complex portfolio system is because of their Houdini like RSS ability. It really all revolves around the syndication infrastructure which makes all the difference, it affords flexibility, dispels the myth of a monolithic system, and allow for the more complex levels of filtering of content I will outline below. But for a portfolio system to work (and I think I feel the term portfolio falling apart right about now but bear with me) it has to be more than that. It has to be a space where people post there ideas for class, react to topics more informally, add resources about various issues they are thinking through (course related or not), and frame the academic work that they are amassing through their career as learners more generally. This is not a technological issue at all, this is a cultural one, and we have begun to see the beginnings of this at UMW (Roblog being an excellent example), but it is by no means ubiquitous, and there is much, much work to be done in terms of fostering the community to think about these elements together in a more orchestrated fashion.
One of the things about blogs more generally that have made this cultural leap a bit easier is that they are excellent at pulling together all the various online spaces a person may occupy and they are inherently open. Both of which allow for updates from Twitter or Facebook; embedding videos from YouTube or images from Flickr; providing extensibility for a wide range of multimedia and traditional site design. All of which forms a platform that is inviting for its protean ability to incorporate various media and one’s distributed presence into one, simple space. This is key, and it is beautifully illustrated by an imagie engineered by Tom Woodward, which once I am able to annoy him enough to post it will be below as a big, beautiful illustration of this profound point, but geared to all you visual learners.
[ Imagine an image of an Octopus here with many loosely joined Web 2.0 tools ]
So, while Roblog is an excellent example, how does this make sense across a larger campus, and can you create both a culture and harness a simple enough technology process so that Roblog (and hundreds of other students) can easily blog for three or even six different courses during the year, while at the same keep it all on spaces they control yet share it as need be with the appropriate class. That is where the questions of filtering, aggregation, and a little bit of spam-blogging emerge.
Let me outline how this might at our current stage of development.
Thanks To Andre Malan’s widgets BDP RSS Add Feed and Add Sidebar User, it is getting simpler all the time, but we still have to make a couple of more jumps. I’ll outline them all below.
Leap of faith, I’m a professor and I ask my 25 student to get blogs (whether on UMW Blogs or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter) and once the do to come back to my course blog and add their RSS feeds. This is made easy with Andre’s Add Feed widget, for I can easily limit who adds a feed by the blogging community. So, once the student set up their space they can drop the feed in in the text field on the sidebar. Easy enough. But wha if they are using their blog for three diferent classes, a film hobby, and to document their Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession? Well, then they could do one of two things, create a category for my class on their blog, lets call it bmoviemania, and if they are using WordPress (not sure how other blogging platforms handle category feeds) they can just add the RSS feed for that category like so:
http://myblog.com/category/bmoviemania/feed
Thereafter, everything they category as bmoviemania will be fed out to the course blog, keeping their Buffy posts and biology labs out of the b movie class blog (thanks goodness!). They could also do the same thing with a tag on wordpress, it would look like this:
http://myblog.com/tag/bmoviemania/feed
Now, we have a pretty straightforward method of taking these student blogs post for a specific course category or tag, and feeding them into an aggregated course blog. Now how does the aggregated course blog work? Well, it is much easier than it was a semester ago, but there is a little more automation that we need. (Warning: It gets a bit technical for the next few lines! But this information is not essential to the overall logic, so don’t let it throw you off, it is me calling or help ) The feed, once entered by the student, is immediately fed into the BDPRSS aggregator, this would need to be activated and the widget in the sidebar as soon as the professor creates this blog (any ideas Andre?).
Moreover, all the feeds that are fed into the BDP RSS aggregator would then have to be treated as an overall OPML which in turn is placed in the FeedWordPress plugin which actually taking all the posts from the respective student blogs and post them on this course blog (with the permalink pointing back to the students blog). Another automation needs to occur here, FeedWordPress needs to be automatically populated with the OPML feed from BDP RSS: http://bmoviecourse.com?bdprssfeed=1 The suffix will always be the same for this code, but the log domain, depending on the course will change.
So, save for two small bits of automation, we have a self-service aggregated course blog for aggregation, that allows all of the students responses, interaction, and posts to remain within their own space, while still capturing the logic of the course. A beautiful example of this is Gardner Campbell’s Rock/Soul Progressive course from Spring 2008. One additional benefit would be an automatically generated blogroll from the list of students who entered their feed, possibly drawn from the URLs in BDP RSS.
Sorry for the programmistan talk, I hope feedistan isn’t reading, but the larger point is that individuals now have their own space that they can grab the feed for, and even drill down and determine a feed for any given class with tags or categories, and then add it to a course aggregated blog.
But why all the talk about course blogs and aggregated such and such when this is about portfilios? Well, because I believe that this process is part and parcel of the archive/raw material that will ultimately populate this portolio. And as we saw with Roblog, the process is often just as relevant and important as the “product.” This is also where the importance of community and the push for students to have their own space and create within their own Personal Learning Environment (their I said it), but alow it to be fed and captured within an aggregated course blog navigates liminal space between the increasingly irrelevant LMSs, and the free-for-all hippie PLEs 
Also, think about what just happened with the course blog for a second. What was outlined there is now the basis of a publishing framework for an individual’s portfolio that pulls from his/her blog archive of posts and class materials in a way that, like the course blog, they have the option to further tag or categorize the work in their personal archives that deal with all sorts of subjects, topics, experiences, and projects from their experience, and allow them to feed it into a site that reflects them in some way outside of the more conventional ideas of a blog (this would be available for UMW Bloggers and those who self-hosted—not free, hosted solutions like wp.com, Blogger, etc.). Now some might be saying but why? The blog is them? And Roblog is an excellent example of this, so I don’t necessarily disagree, yet the overarching archie blog may not be where they want to frame their work as a photographer, present lab work, field work, films, music, poetry, or business case study. The idea here is that anyone can choose how the fed out the relevant categories, that let’s say are tagged with portfolio, and these spaces become more elegant and malleable presentation spaces for for particalar elements of their work wherein they control the sequence, aestheitc, and in many ways the experience of the visitor.
In many ways the is the aggregation/syndication infrastructure brought down to the human scale. yet, if you have students adding feeds to course blogs, why couldn’t they do the same to directories, aggregated discipline channels, a Blogging platform hompage, or what have you. The fact that the syndication architecture is brought down to the atomic level of the individual, makes for the power of the site to scale more globally. More than that, the community will have a good sense of what it is they are doing and why!
I’ll end here because it’s three am, and a man’s gotta sleep, but sometime tomorrow look for part 3 of This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio
Featuring: Biology Lab portfolios at UMW & an experiment with an English course using portfolios for anonymous assessment? Who knew?
Tags for this article: andre malan , bdp rss , blogging , blogs , community , e-portfolios , eportfolio , faculty academy , feedistan , manifesto , personal learning environment , ple , presentation , publishing , roblog , students , web 2.0 , widgets , wordpress multi-user , wpmu , wpmued
[?]It’s been over a year now since my full-fledged burn, baby, burn conversation with Gardner Campbell about WordPress Multi-User, ELS Blogs, the Digital Five Ring Binder, and the underpinnings of re-imagining an online distributed space for teaching and learning that both encompasses and moves beyond e-portfolios, capturing a whole range of activities both for class and beyond.
This is a conversation that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, see Cole Camplese’s post about using the blog as an e-portfolio back in May, 2006 (and several subsequent iterations on that idea). Or Mike Caulfield’s posts here and here on the topic of e-portfolios. Or Helen Barrett’s ongoing discussion of all things e-portfolio. Or Gardner’s vision of the feedbook back in the day. Or Stephen Downes on the subject of the space of RSS, aggregation, and distributed student and course content way, way back in the day. The conversation has been one that has unfurled over time for a long while and I enter it very late and only capture a snippet of its history. It’s by no means new, in fact it has held a pretty steady space in the imagination of educational technology for well over a decade, if not longer. In fact, many have moved away from the idea of an e-portfolio altogether, re-framing it as a Personal Learning Environment that can take into account the dynamic, distributed personalized spaces wherein we network, interact, create, commune and by extension learn.
All this said, I want to return to one simple and very unrevelatory idea, how might we imagine a campus cyber-infrastructure for managing a cheap, flexible, and dynamic e-portfolio system? And with that, I’m off…
Barbara Ganley’s 21st century proverb, “Twitter to connect, the blog to reflect,” will lay the groundwork of how we might think about the blog as e-portfolio and much more (I’ll ask many of you to forgive the limitations of my terminology as we get started). This blog/e-portfolio creature might be better understood as a digital frame for experiences or a personal archive of one’s thinking over time (an idea laid out nicely here by Martin Weller as he articulates our collective wondering whether the blogosphere is moribund). I like the idea of understanding a student blog/portfolio as an archive of their throught over the course of their time as a member of an academic community. A space that they can share, interact in, take with them, and build upon as they move onwards and upwards with their lives.
But a portfolio isn’t an archive, right? Well, yes, you’re right smart guy, but we need to spend a bit more time here to move to the idea of featuring and presenting one’s best work as a portfolio so often connotes. An archive becomes the raw material of thought that can be categorized, tagged, fed out, and re-worked in whole series of different and exciting ways. I have said it before, and I’ll say it a gain. With a blogging platform like WordPress and Drupal† you can feed off of categories or tags, which makes the work students file under a particular tag or category easily syndicated to an aggregated course blog –I talk at length about this here, here, here, and here and see Andre Malan’s frighteningly lucid post on the subject of different kinds of course blogs). And by extension, students can use categories and tags to filter specific work for a course blog, a group blog, or even a separate portfolio blog that they feed in only the things they want to feature (keep in mind that students, faculty and staff can have as many blogs as they want, wither on the campus system or elsewhere–more on this soon).
Cole Camplese had brought up the point of using the PSU network drive, or storage space, as a private repository for files that students wanted to keep separate from the blog. I think this is a great feature, and given that PSU has the infrastructure to integrate it with their blogging system it is a bonus. Fore those who don’t have it, I’m not sure you would require a locally supported infrastructure for the job. Might this be better provided by services like divShare, Google Docs, Blip.tv, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. The more I think about it, the shear simplicity of integrating selected Google Docs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, divShare files, etc. into a blog often makes these services easier to work with then a centralized campus storage/file sharing network. The small pieces loosely joined approach guarantees that everyone takes ownership of their work, takes responsibility for the services they choose, and defines their own digital management plan which isn’t premised on the outdated notion of a central network/storage backbone provided by colleges and universities. Universities can make recommendations, and IT departments and/or libraries might make recommendations, but the choice rests with the individual. Jon Udell outlines the logic of a syndication oriented infrastructure which makes far more sense for universities and colleges than the current practices of continually trying to maintain and host everything locally. As Brian Lamb put it (and I shamefully keep quoting this, sorry Brian!):
Schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?
In my mind, the key to such syndication driven architecture has everything to do with tweaking a few tools (like Andre Malan’s Add BDP RSS and Add User widgets) and perhaps a hack or two to make this work so that the the campus community is sharing their work with one another in a way that is visible and open, while at the same time as simple as a tool like Facebook (which qualifies under Ganley’s notion of connect), but unlike Facebook this system would be open and students, faculty, and staff would control their data (see Justin Ball’s post here).
This is the key, we cannot build a monolithic system that will represent the new breed of “Learning Management Systems” on campus, rather we need to provide possibilities for a community to come into conversation with itself and the rest of the world by making it easy for everyone to share their feeds, filter their work to appropriate spaces, and become part of larger community that is not dictated by an overarching logic of management, control, and isolation–those are the tools of nefarious capital D’Arcy Norman and Bill Fitzgerald have come up with an excellent prototype of such a system for Drupal both here and here, respectively.
So, with that, I’ll end the overview, albeit a brief and idiosyncratic context, and move into some specific examples and how blogs (and in my case WPMu specifically) might be used for e-portfolios. I just wanted to stop here and pace myself a bit because my posts are becoming ever-longer, and Jerry reminded me I should break this stuff up so that someone will actually read it.
Part deux out at 3 am tomorrow morning
† I imagine applications like Movable Type and Blogger can do something like this with tag/category feeds, I’m just not familiar enough with them, so I haven’t been able to find such features on blogs that are using these applications.
Tags for this article: aggregation , drupal , eduglu , eportfolios , personal learning environment , ple , rdd , small pieces loosely joined , syndication , wpmu , wpmued
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I went down to the University of Richmond today to see Tom Woodward’s Blog Bestiary presentation at UR’s Learning 2008 event. Tom’s presentation was a lot of fun, and his ability to take the medieval bestiary metaphors and images and graft them onto the flexibility and possibilities for re-imagining blogs was masterful. Hopefully he’ll put the presentation on his blog shortly, for the images (see them on Flickr here), the sophisticated conceits, and the outrageous playfulness are well worth your time. Some quick quotables are (and I paraphrase): “Hand coding a site or using Dreamweaver is like an old woman fighting a dog.” A statement accompanied by the image above— classic!
The other classic quote was how blogging has been likened by many to a Bonnacon, or a medieval horse/bull that can propel its flaming excrement for acres. And, of course, there was the indelible image…
The faculty Tom presented with, Darrell Walden (Accounting) and Patricia Stohr-Hunt (Education), are doing some amazing stuff with podcasts. Dr. Stor-Hunt’s Open Wide, Look Inside class blog features a series of podcasts from students framing how they use a series of books in the classroom, namely outlining themes, relevance, and possible approaches in the classroom. Dr. Walden’s approach was to have his Accounting class create enhanced podcasts, and build an awards system out of it, wherein the class was asked to review and rate the others in the class, and vote on the best presentation of an accounting theme (you can see them here).
The following group of presentations dealt with some of the documentary filmmaking going on at Richmond, and there is some pretty impressive stuff, but it was interrupted about halfway through by a very strange and frightening series of events. It started with the director of the Help Desk at UR coming into the computer lab where the presentation was being held asking us to turn off the lights, remain quiet, and lock the door. That was it, he disappeared. After a little bit of murmured confusion, and some fumbling with cell phones, e-mail logins, and the like, it was quickly determined that there was a suspicious individual at-large on campus and he is believed to armed and possibly dangerous. It was at that moment that someone remarked, “not again,” and I found myself at first being confused and then full on frightened as I looked at the locked door and remembered the insane reports from VA Tech just over a year ago. It was an insane moment that thankfully passed quickly. And while I was certain this was not “it,” I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind –and in that split second I found myself daydreaming about Tess and Miles.
What followed was pretty surreal. We all sat in the computer lab nervously talking, some suggesting those of us closer to the door move to the front of the room, and others calling out any information they might have received via e-mail. It was a bit tense, but I think everyone was more confused than scared, and there was a certain amount of levity in the discussions that were at times less than the ordered quiet (there was shushing). I had no internet access on my laptop, and asked Tom to log me into a UR computer so that I could get a sense what was going on. I went immediately to Twitter, as did several other folks from UR who were holed up in a different computer lab. It was bizarre gauging what was going on through their tweets, almost a sixth sense. Soon enough, I started tweeting what was going on in the room (as did others) , and I found the act to be really soothing. People at UR were sharing information and giving advice to one another, while the larger network from around the world was sending regards, prayers, questions, and their well wishes. I had a very powerful sense that those “others” were there with us from beyond that lab, or even the UR campus. I can’t fully explain why that felt so good, someone even offered a Safety dance from abroad, nothing like a laugh during a moment of untold strangeness
After about a half hour (I think we were in lockdown for over two hours, but I am really not sure about this, time kinda stood still and flew by all at once) there was a certain amount of talking that at times seemed to get a bit loud. And I got my first experience with how truly crazy a tense, potentially life threatening situation can radically impact a dynamic amongst fifteen or twenty people stuck in a room together. I kept thinking of Stephen King’s novella The Mist the whole time, just wondering what the hell is out there, and how it will get us. One of the group said tensely that we were ordered to be quiet, and if the situation is as serious as it seems shouldn’t we be quiet. I appreciated this statement, it manifested the anxiety many of us felt, yet at the same time I felt suffocated by it. The idea that we might be in danger was exactly what I didn’t want to think about. The room quieted down, and the tension rose higher, during this time Andy Morton (a UR librarian and tech guru) had been escorted from the other lab across the hall to go to the library to get an image of the suspicious gunman from the libraries security camera. I knew this all because of Andy posted the details to Twitter along with the image.
Those of us on Twitter brought this to the attention of the room, which made for some marveling at Twitter, as well as a sense of security that we are well-armed with information about the situation. In fact, not too long after this many in the room signed-up for Twitter and were monitoring the situation there. Things did get better from here, Tom had us playing scrabulous (I won!) and the UR police came in a while after to scan the room for anyone matching the description. This put many at ease, and not that much later we got the all clear. Crazy for sure. I don’t have a moral to draw from this whole thing, but I did notice something that has me thinking a bit. Of all the technologies we had at our disposal, very few were more effective than Twitter. I got access to the latest news reports outside the campus from fellow twits, I got an image of the alleged perpetrator, I got support, and vital information. My cellphone had no signal, and my e-mail was useless to me because I am not part of the UR community, hence I wouldn’t be notified there. For those thinking about a means to manage a crisis, I would put Twitter, or an application like it, at the top of the list. It proved invaluable today for all sorts of reasons, and it made all the other means of connecting with others and collecting information dreadfully inadequate. The recent case of a journalism student using twitter in Cairo to let others know he had been arrested by Egyptian authorities, which then alerted others to his whereabouts allowing for his speedy release, is another excellent example of how effective it might prove in a crisis -for people can care about one another together in this space, despite how far away they might be.
Today was strange, and I often think about how technology is used in movies to great effect. For example, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are two excellent examples of George Romero integrating radio and television into the actual dramatic action of the narrative. Scorsese failed miserably at this in The Departed with text messaging. The presence of Twitter in today’s narrative was real, compelling, and a welcome, re-assuring space during an uncomfortable moment. Anyway, we live in strange times, and the Zombies seem to be coming out in greater numbers as the economy tanks, the presidential race goes sour, and the War in Iraq marches mindlessly and endlessly on. Twitter won’t stop any of these realities, and it isn’t a panacea for the abundance of guns, violence, and terror in our communities (even those that are traditionally “immune” to these outbursts), but it gave me a bit of solace today.
Tags for this article: gunmen , image , lockdown , twitter , university of richmond
[?]This can be filed under obscure hacks. For those of you out there who are using the MistyLook theme for MediaWiki and haven’t been able to get the editing toolbar to show up in the later versions of MediaWiki, then this hack is for you.
I found this fix thanks to Hal’s comment on Jason Pearce’s blog.
Find the following code in the MistyLook.php file
That’s it, it should work. How easy!
“…At her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”
I’ve spent much of the early morning hours reading through Brad Efford’s awesome Judges 5:27 blog—the Reverend’s last man on ELS Blogs! It is, without question, worth putting on your blogrollif you are into discovering an amazing range of thoughtful reflection on all kinds of film, music, and mashup craziness. I’m learning a ton from him, for example his post about truth and The Evolution Control Committee video “Rocked by Rape” is out of control (and brand new for me). He also makes passing reference to Plunderphonics in this post while introducing his logic for his formative 10 albums (a great series I’m following hungrily- I’m loving Squirrel Nut Zippers). I hadn’t heard the term Plunderphonics before, but it certainly is extremely relevant to music’s current, entrenched battle against copyright. I was already familiar with this concept/artform/movement? to some degree given Negativeland’s “work”—but Plunderphonics as a term framing this movement was one I hadn’t been aware of until now, thanks Brad!
What struck me like a lightening bolt this morning was how much Brad’s blog might illustrate, to some degree, the power of the ELS/UMW Blogs experiment for the UMW community more generally. I first came into contact with Brad’s blog when he was taking Gardner Campbell’s Film/Text/Culture class during the Spring, 2007 semester. We have since had several other occasions to talk movies, music, mashups, and everything else interesting, and he is only a rising junior, so I have at least two more years of on-site goodness. After spending several hours reading Brad’s posts that range back over a year, I was reminded of just how integral to the learning community the work DTLT has been doing at UMW truly is. One small example of this was the conversations Gardner and I had in both June 2006 and January 2007 about harnessing the power of multi-user, distributed blogging which resulted in a series of experiments with his Film/Text/Culture classes, which I think was beautifully captured during the Spring 2007 experiment with ElS Blogs.
“Back in the day” of ELS Blogs when we were running WPMu on a Bluehost account and had under 100 blogs (most of which were Gardner’s students) I invested a lot of time reading the posts quite closely, but I still couldn’t read everything. I read enough, however, to get a good sense of how cool that class was. Gardner took the idea of distributed, individual blogging for a class to the next level during that semester. Exemplified by when he asked the students to post their final papers on the blogs, which would include at least three trackbacks to posts by other students in the class over the course of the semester that had informed their thinking about a particular, film, theory, idea, reading, etc. He presented on this approach at Faculty Academy last year, likening it to re-imagining how we use the library to cite the work of others that inform our scholarship. I thought it was a great conceit to frame his always amazing work, but I haven’t thought too much more about it until I began reading Brad’s blog in its entirety this morning.
Gardner’s course featured some great films by Errol Morris, and one of the posts by Brad I stumbled across this morning beautifully illustrates the power of this distributed community of class bloggers to create links, references, and an engaged community of thinkers. In this post Brad voices an interesting and intelligent take on Fast, Cheap and Out of Control that has me re-thinking that film a bit. Below is an excerpt from Brad’s critique of Morris’ film:
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control felt like a neverending trailer for a film that never actually presented itself….The problem is, this trailer is 80 minutes long….I was a big fan of Morris’ idea of filming his subjects in natural environments (their homes, a park bench, on a boat), so watching this movie seemed like a huge step backward for the filmmaker…This is what made Morris’ earlier films so much more brilliant: the idea of letting the people speak for themselves, without distractions or cheap camera tricks…there were too many of those, too, those cheap little skewed camera angles & slow-mo edits.
I felt cheated, having to watch an Errol Morris film that didn’t feel fully there. It felt too edited….whereas Vernon, Florida’s intrinsic beauty as a film was all in its seemingly shoddy editing….it felt to me like Errol Morris tried too hard to make them interesting for the sake of fleshing out some larger themes. Show me something that isn’t trying to impress me & I’m far more likely to be impressed. The style was too big for the movie, the characters too small for the style, & the whole thing way too Hollywood.
After reading this I think part of me agrees with Brad when I compare it to Gates of Heaven or Vernon, Florida but that will soon change after spending a good chunk of this morning reading and trying to figure out Brad’s paper on the film –wow, what a cool/trippy essay that reads like a biblical exegesis with Dante’s Divine Comedy standing in for the Bible!—As a further aside: how many people can go back and read a students essay and get excited about it?—Brad now has an archive of his thought that I can interact with, argue about, and learn from -I love that!) for while Thin Blue Line starts to play with the re-enacted, slo-motion “visions” of what might have really happened, it is the conversations and the way in which those characters talk candidly about the events surrounding the murder that remain truly compelling.
But Brad’s differing perspective on the place of Fast Cheap and Out of Control in Morris’ filmography didn’t go unnoticed by Tyler Babbie in his final paper when he recognizes Brad’s reading and his problems with the film, yet still provides his own reading of this film as a kind of visual poem about obsession. To quote Tyler’s final paper:
This post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Brad’s blog, and trying to speak to the issues he raises in Fast Cheap. Brad felt like it was a big trailer for a movie, which never happened. This movie worked for me, obviously. It cannot be approached as a normal film. To watch it, you need to get into a sort of trance where you relish every word the characters say, every image on the screen. It’s not a novel, it is a long poem
….I do not watch many movies, and I’ve learned how little I know about them in this course. Maybe the flashiness of Fast Cheap appeals to me because I’m not silver-screen jaded. I don’t like most films I see, and I can’t say what makes a good film for me. Vernon Florida was fantastic. Fast Cheap seems more epic. Morris took a big risk in this film, making it so colorful and editing with such intent. To me, it is a complete success. I can see why it wouldn’t be so great for Brad and other people, how the charm of Vernon could trump the power of Fast Cheap. But as poetry student trompling around in another medium, it pushed all the buttons I like to have pushed. I guess it’s like the Faulkner/Hemingway debate. I’m Faulkner all the way, I like rich language and color and strange angles in novels and in films. As Brad says, the people in the film “are chosen purposely & precisely for their absurd nature.” I don’t know about the absurd nature so much, because I think they are great (not good) examples of humanity at its most obsessive.
Regardless of where you fall on this debate about Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, I think the fact that had me full of respect, wonder, and excitement during the wee hours this morning was the fact that Gardner had encouraged these students to engage and challenge the works they were watching as I’m sure he always does in any given class he is guiding, but he has also come up with a powerful way to both trace and archive these discussions, disagreements, and meditations beautifully. And it doesn’t hurt to have folks like Brad, Tyler, and the rest of the UMW faithful to make the reading, thinking and engaging that much more rewarding.
Tags for this article: community , coptright , elsblogs , film , gardner campbell , instructional technology , Judges 5:27 , mashups , movies , music , negativeland , plunderphonics
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