What I learned from UMW Blogs today….

I have been trying to catch up on my reading of UMW Blogs, but it is getting hard with a torrent of posts averaging about a hundred a day.  The campus-wide use and resulting community on UMW Blogs is really coming together in some exciting and fascinating ways, and I will talk more about them when I have time.  But for now I just wanted to share something I learned from this post I read today on Melinda’s Blog.

Did everyone else already know that Salvador Dalì worked with Disney in 1945 and 46 on an animation piece called “Destino”? I had no idea, and while it was theatrically released with select films in 2003, I never heard about it. According to the Wikipedia article it was more widely released as an opening short to Beverly Hills Chihuahua this year.

It gets better though, Melinda points to a Looney Tunes classic which highlights Dalì’s influence on other animators of the period well before his arrival on the animation scene, particularly in the Porky Pig episode “Porky in Wackyland,” also known as “Dough for the Do-Do” (1938)—a classic episode I had yet to see.

Did I ever tell you I love UMW Blogs?

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5 Responses to What I learned from UMW Blogs today….

  1. rax says:

    Tangentially related, have you seen Salvador Dali on “What’s My Line?” I bring this up whenever Dali and YouTube are mentioned because, well, it’s awesome… Almost as awesome as UMW Blogs.

  2. Cole says:

    This is such an incredible example of the power of open education! The fact that we can both check in on the postings of a whole institution is mind bending. This is just another highlight in the ongoing story of open blogging in education. I love that you take the time to expose it as well! Thanks, Rev!

  3. Reverend says:

    Rax,

    I have seen that Dalì video, and it is, indeed awesome. His persona is so brilliant, so unassuming and outright funny—it is a classic, but no where near as classic as UMW Blogs 🙂

    @Cole,

    It is amazing, and the massive flow of information is wild, almost like Salmon post jumping up stream to hatch their intellectual eggs—I feel like a hungry bear wading through the streams.

    On another note, your new avatar is very Kubrickian–I like it a lot…

    Where’s your gravatar @Rax?

  4. zach whalen says:

    That is pretty cool indeed. Animation is a medium well-suited for surrealism, and it was used for those and similar purposes very early on in it’s existence as a medium.

    I too love that this kind of thing is getting talked about through umwblogs.org, but can I also voice a complaint? From the blog you linked to, I have no way of determining who Melinda is (which is fine — it’s her choice) what class she’s writing this as part of, or even (if I found her blog via, say, google) what UMW even is.

    This is more a navigational issue than a pedagogical one, but in terms of pedagogy I think it raises the question of how and to what extent the creation of content through a blog is wedded to classroom discourse and how much it is pretending to be its own thing (but not really its own thing because it’s being evaluated somehow by an instructor).

    So, with that question raised, let me try and answer it: Maybe that’s not an authentic difference to begin with. Maybe arguing for the latter conceptual framework (blog-as-assignment complaint) imposes the personhood of the instructor into what would otherwise by the singular, authentic voice of a student writer. But then again, maybe that begs the question, since it assumes that the personhood of blogginess is already there in the absence (invisibility) of an authoritative, disciplinary context (which is always there anyway).

    Then again (again), maybe the line that bars the student in the phrase above extends in recursive vector through the authority of the teacher as subject supposed-to-know, which is in turn always already undermined (determined by) the influence of the Other. Maybe if the unconscious is structured as language, so is a blog framework?

    Then again (again, again), maybe I’ve been reading too much Lacan.

  5. Pingback: Accidental Openness « Cole Camplese: Learning and Innovation

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