The jackals at DTLT Today have been relenetless in reminding me that I have not been carrying my weight for the team’s TV show over the past few weeks. But come 4:15 PM this afternoon in UMW’s instructional technology nerve center that is DTLT, I was all alone and I delivered the goods, per usual. Today’s episode was my first solo venture and I had the distinct pleasure of having our first UMW student as a guest (that wasn’t a DTLT student aide, mind you) .
Valerie LaPointe was inspired to write an article about UMW Blogs after reading this post about UMW’s publishing platform in Times Higher Education. The fact that UMW Blogs is considered a model of excellence and trust when it comes to sharing and highlighting the work happening around a university community takes a number students by surprise. So many of them are so used to it being part and parcel of their UMW career that it’s surprising to hear few other schools provide their community with the same resources, not to mention trust. And it must be noted that Valerie is no stranger to UMW Blogs; she’ll be graduating at the end of this semester and has been using UMW Blogs for a variety of courses since her Freshman year. What’s more, her study abroad blog “In The Wonderful World of Oz” offers one of the most compelling chronicles of a student’s authentic learning experiences abroad I have yet to see on UMW Blogs, or anywhere else.
All this to say, when Valerie asked me if I would do a quick interview about the Times Higher Education article, I figured I would take the opportunity to turn the tables and have her on DTLT Today talking about her experience with UMW Blogs—and I have to say she is probably the most articulate and thoughtful commentator on this platform I have come across since Brad Efford. So, I offer you one student’s perspective of UMW Blogs, and what it might mean for a community of students to assume social media, networking, and working out in the open as part and parcel of what a college education is all about. Conversations like this make me proud of where I work and what I do.
Just a few days ago artist Jeff Baij praised myriad UMW students in Rosemary Jesionowski’s Digital Approaches to Fine Arts class that have been committed over the last several years to “shitting all over [his] art on their university blogs.”
The artist in question speaks more on the genesis of this relationship on his permalinkless blog (starving artist etc etc etc):
i have no idea how i ended up in the curriculum (and let me say here that i am SO HAPPY and insanely grateful that i did) but 90% of these kids HATE MY SHIT. truly. some of the more unreserved lashings from previous years are on my –> bio <– page.
i’m saying, the reaction is on some whole other level and i can only imagine that it must have been a total shit storm year after year because now these kids arent reviewing me anymore.
no way bro:NOW THEY’RE MAKING MY WORK.
That’s right ladies and gentleman, UMW students are now attacking this artist by actually demonstrating just how easy it is to fake his work. Even an undergrad in a digital arts class can do it—the ultimate insult.
Sarah Cunnane, writer for the Times Higher Education blog, recently featured UMW Blogs as one of the rare scholarly publishing platforms for a university community that actually cultivates, encourages, and allows for open publishing by anyone in the UMW community. We are proud of this public display of trust, and rather than resulting in a black eye for the institution it has become a mechanism for highlighting the amazing work of faculty and students alike, as well as bringing attention to the great work we do at UMW on a regular basis.
The discussion around trust and academic blogging platforms was ignited by a post by Mark Smithers on “Blogging and tust in Universities”. He highlighted UMW as a rare example of trust in Higher Education:
Now the question is why aren’t universities doing the same thing? To be fair, there are some very good examples of university blogging environments where numerous members of the university run a blog. One of the best known is the University of Mary Washington blogs site but even this runs from its own domain and not from the UMW main site. These sites, though, are the exception rather than the rule.
Fact is, this is just the beginning of UMW’s experiment with openly sharing the work we do with the world. over the coming academic year our main website, http://umw.edu, which is now running on WordPress will feature more department bogs/sites (see here, here, and here for examples), individual sites/blogs, and cross-fertilize content from specific departments and class sites into the umw.edu space. This open, fishbowl approach to teaching and learning on a university’s website brings a new idea of open engagement to a university’s web presence. UMW’s website is not just a brochure anymore—it is an open educational experience and a resource all at once!
The Open Education 2011 conference has come and gone, and I would like to think my keynote got a few people thinking. I don’t believe everyone will like it, and I’m not even sure it is all that cogent—but there is a bit of theater, a few jokes, and a general argument that open education should be approached as an experience not a resource. That last bit came to me the night before the talk thanks to a discussion between Gardner Campbell and Alan Levine on #ds106radio. What’s more, the #occupyopened idea was Chris Lott’s brainchild, the tent was thanks to Marc Hugentobler‘s awesomeness, many of the performative details were filled in by Brian Lamb, and the visual aesthetic thanks to Michael Branson Smith. As usual, if it was at all a success it has everything to do with all the people who were so generous with their ideas, time, and feedback.
The idea of the presentation, in short, was to re-situate the power of open education back to connections, people, and relationships rather than resources. I used ds106 as the model for this argument while using Gardner’s privileging of open educational experiences over open educational resources (OER) as a general refrain. It was fun to do, and while I was nervous about the tent and had some technical difficulty up front (thanks David for bailing me out) it seemed far better received than I expected—which is a relief to me. Anyway, if you have any interest, you can be the judge of that thanks to the fact there is already an archived video available on YouTube.
And I am also including my slides here—which have links to many of the sites discussed—as an added “experience.” 🙂
Finally, special thanks to Giulia Forsythe for animated the talk with her awesome art, I am honored and humbled.
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
Katie Jones was part of the illustrious first class of ds106. A mighty internaut was she, and it has come to my attention on twitter that her ds106 kung-fu has not gone dormant.
I couldn’t help but let her know how awesome I thought that was on twitter, and she couldn’t help but blog it. So who am I to stop the reciprocal love, so this blog is an homage to Katie Jones for exhibiting a few things brilliantly:
1) Skills you learn in ds106 are useful well beyond the life of the class
2) Blogging regularly is awesome
3) Twitter is amazing for keeping in touch with former students as a resource, a source of encouragement, and a general sense of community beyond 15 weeks
And I am doing very little justice to Katie’s blog which is an ongoing discussion with much bigger life questions: like faith, love and loss—now that’s blogging!
I’m getting these messages from YouTube more and more these days—I got four in the last last two days. YouTube seems to be embracing it’s role as copyright constable, and their technology seems to be getting better and better—or else they are just catching up on backlogs. Either way, I wonder at what point, if at all, this will start hurting YouTube as a resource. I am getting a bit more annoyed and the feeling that I am being spanked regularly by YouTube and one of the major networks. I want a project reclaim for our culture—why is it illegal to cut, share, and remix this stuff if we aren’t doing it for profit?
Dear jimgroom,
Your video, Creepshow: Ed Harris dancing disco, may have content that is owned or licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment.
No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.
Image credit: "Live Casting NYC" by Michael Branson Smith
That’s right, we came, we saw, and we kicked the big apple’s ass! An EST extravaganza that was epic in every regard, what’s better is that most of the chronicling has already happened. What I am gonna do here is point to the various dead sea scrolls and then fill in a few gaps, think of it as me carving a few commandments into the stone tablet that is the bava so they can all live on in the annals of awesome. Can you dig it?
And while I lovingly pick on Luke, to be entirely honest it was unbelievably gratifying to see him lay out his response to the presentation, particularly because Luke pulls no punches—and if that post reflects how he sees ds106radio at the moment it buoys me to no end. It is hard to get a perspective on something that has become so integral and intimate a part of my life, so Luke’s ability to extract the implications of the ds106radio experiment outside of that is awesome, necessary, and greatly appreciated—I still love you Waltzer! For the review of the session as well as a video recording of the session (thank you Tom Harbison!) in two parts go to Luke’s post, if you are looking for the ds106radio audio archive, you will find it below.
After that, we all headed out to dinner at Molly’s Pub for burgers, fish & chips, beers, and some great conversation. I spent most of the time catching up with Tom Harbison (where is your blog?) who works alongside Mikhail and Luke at Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute (BLSCI). He has been the lead on the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool or VOCAT (amongst many other things) —a tool BLSCI is in the process of re-visiting with a bava favorite Cast Iron Coding. VOCAT introduces some powerful ways for students and faculty to share, comment on, and assess web video—and the fact that video assignments and work are only going to get more and more common at the university puts BLSCI in the catbird’s seat here. What’s more, Tom and I got to talking about the work Andy Rush and Tim Owens are doing at UMW with the Kit, DTLT Today, and WOWZA—and Tom is quite interested in what’s possible. Oh crystal ball, I can see a space for a future seminar hosted by BLSCI 🙂
After Molly’s Grant GNA, Michael, and I headed to Brooklyn (my home for more than seven years 🙁 ) and parted ways with GNA at the Jay Street hub en route to Windsor Terrace. And before we called it a night of bad vodka we called the ds106radio 888 number from a subway station to check in with the steraming web. What’s crazier, it just so happens that it worked a treat. Try it, the number is 1-888-720-4178 and it only works in North America at the moment. What’s more, moments after we called ds106radio Scottlo and Cogdog got on the PBX and started chatting with Michael, Grant and I in the 15th Street/Prospect Park subway station. So sick!
Cut to the next morning when Grant scared me out of bed (I heard rumors of a ds106radio snore cast) by threatening to leave for the Contactcon Conference without me. I jumped up without a shower (actually not as much as much as a wash) and tracked up to thank MBS and his family for their awesome hospitality (save for the vodka) and headed back out into the city in search of more rush. We started with Terrace Bagels (one of Brooklyn’s finer bagel joints) then pushed out to a decommissioned Synagogue in the Lower East Side (you can see the details here) that was probably the coolest conference space I have yet to experience. Grant took some awesome images using Photosynth, check them out here and here.
The conference was interesting, and had a ton going for it. I may write more about it anon, but for now a few quick things. Having people do no more than 5 minute overviews about what they think, are doing, believe, etc. and linking that to the conference is a nice touch. Not all 5 minutes shots were great, and a few even stumbled with the format, but when it worked it was awesome. For example, Steven Johnson, author of Where Good ideas Come From, did a quick profile of Ada Lovelace that beautifully suggested how good ideas are often not born from Athena’s head, but made apparent through the cross fertilization of ideas, concepts, and metaphors from different disciplines—a kind of mashup of fields that leads to a new way of imagining both. What’s more, he pointed out how innovation often comes from rethinking old tools rather than trying to dream up new ones. This was particularly awesome because I think this is exactly what Grant Potter is doing technically with ds106radio. It was a great short talk that really nailed what we might want to think about as we go about imagining new ways of reframing social relations through technology—which was the ultimate purpose of Contactcon. And what I took from Johnson is that we have been doing this all along for the past decade or so when it comes to the socail web. What’s more important is what metaphors we can use to help us marry old technologies to new possibilities that will help us conceptually come to terms with awesome implications of such a cultural shift—we need the poetry of the various spheres to collide so that we can see.
After the talks the conference broke out into a kind of unconfernece comedy of errors wherein Douglas Rushkoff was trying to hone everyone’s session into something that would result in a product at the end of the day. The idea was to make something as a group, or at least have something concrete in mind you want to make before the end of the day. Quite frankly, a majority of the ideas were far too generic to be of any value to this end and the insistence on making them fit seemed unnecessarily painstaking and painful to watch. Despite that, however, the sessions where people sat down and discussed their ideas with one another, generic or not, seemed like a great success. Everyone was engaged, talking to one another, and the room was afire with energy. I sat in on the nodal computing section run by Isaac Wilder, the dude who built and deployed the FreedomTower (through the Free Network Foundation) that is providing free and open wireless to NYC’s #occupywallstreet movement, and who was, come to find out, arrested during the Brooklyn Bridge protest. He was a super smart, as was “The Doctor,” and I learned a ton about mesh networks and how they work. I’m still not ready to take the final exam, but I am really intrigued by the possibilities. His work on the Freedom Tower gained him one of the three $10,000 grants from the conference, the other two were received by the Freedom Box and a library in upstate New York who will build a MakerBot lab. The freedom Box is very much inline with the PirateBox in a number of ways and I will get to that shortly, but what I love about the terminology around the FreedomTower and the FreedomBox is how the re-apporpriate the Bush-era America idea of freedom as a sick virus Americans were suffering under into an open, populist movement of retaking control of our communications, and by extension our communities. There was also a ton of things about new currencies, micro-payments, etc., but none of that stuff really resonates with me at the moment. I know they make sense and there is important work there, but I can’t help but think our vision of currency and payments has not yet escaped the limits of capital.
At about 2:30 Grant and I bolted from the Contactcon conference to meet up with David Darts to talk about his awesome PirateBox project. David was amazingly cool, articulate, and in many ways a true visionary about what this technology might mean to the human condition. We spent almost an hour talking to him (and the session was all the great Grant Potter’s dong) and he really blew me away with his notions of the PirateBox as a pedagogical experiment, artistic provocation, and viral phenomenon that took off around the world. I had been exposed the PirateBox before the meeting thanks to Grant Potter, Zack Dowell, and Alan levine, and in many ways the idea of it, the conceptual framwork of creating your own local network for sharing provided me the conceptual headspace to understand the FreedomBox as well as the FreedomTower. The ideas of mesh networking are really the next wave of re-thinking our relationship to freedom on the web, and I love the whole thing. If you have 50 minutes to spare I highly recommend you dig in for this amazing discussion with David Dart, who needs to be the keynote at Faculty Academy this year. His stuff on digital identity is amazing, take note Martha.
After that Grant and I got some beers at McSoreley’s Ale House, talked life, love, and loss, and then went back to the decommissioned synagogue for the closing DJ party—which was awesome, not to mention the free Brooklyn Brewery beers!
After that, we made a quick stop at the after party for a quick beer and then we headed to the concluding part of this amazing 36 hour trip: the NYC #ds106radio Jam Session. It was nothing short of amazing and thanks to Giulia Forsythe, in all her awesomenes, we have all the audio archived and you can find it here. Mikhail Gershovich orchestrated the whole jam session and deserves major love for that—what’s more he is a solid hand at the animted GIF 😉
What’s more, Michael Branson Smith captured some awesome images of the event and shared them on his Flickr:
And as always Dr. Garcia played the master of Ceremonies and rocker extraordinaire for the event. Keeping us broadcasting, reporting in, and making the whole thing expand infinitely through the radio. Dr. Garcia is truly a sister from another mother–she rocks and her brilliance on the radio is only matched by her generosity off of it!
We also had the great Boone “Control Your Jealousy” Gorges on Keyboard, Bass, vicals, and guitar—he was rad! And @polarismusic shredding the guitar along with Marcello on the drums. Louis Katz stepped in on the drums after Marcello, and brought the punk on—Daniel Phelps busted out the iPad and started infusing the trippy sound effects. It was an awesome evening, and we even picked up another Vancouver-ite from the after party, and he spent part of the jam session rocking out with us—why am I forgetting his name?
I had fun with the Ramone’s “The KKK Took My baby Away” and Grant’s last tune (not sure of the name). So if you want a sample I will offer these up as a testament to the rocking. Enjoy because we sure did!
Finally, at midnight we all headed out, said our goodbyes to Mikhail and Grant, and went to the LIRR station to drink the rest of our beers, eat the horribly great Caruso’s pizza, and relive so many lonely nights I have spent in penn Station;s LIRR. After that we said our goodbyes and some of the best moments of my life receded as I jumped on my train back to Fredericksburg—from where I write these words.
The great Scott Lockman has brought his Cyberspace and Society course being taught at the Temple University, Japan into the ds106 house—and these cats are leaving no prisoners!!! I mean eating up the course like it was candy….well, it kinda is candy and that is what I like about it. What’s more, it’s my theory that candy and gravitas are not nearly as distinct as we might think, take MOME’s brilliant response to Tim Owen’s “We are All Artists” as an example of this:
So let’s get back to the subject of ds106, because what’s really interesting about this is that it’s about trying to put all these ideas into one neat little package. It’s taking the idea of media appropriation, of user-created content and trying to shoehorn that into a classroom setting. So how’s it going? Someone mentioned the following reaction to ds106: Surprise?anger?acceptance?”art”, and if you take a look at that what it tells you is that people are uncomfortable, but that discomfort is what could possibly lead you on to the next breakthrough. Why? Because you can; you can choose to slam the Star Wars Kid’s gyrating motions, or turn it into the next trend (it’s called the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons), or you might be the one putting something out there for the world to evaluate, like we all do on ds106. Or facebook. Or Twitter. Or…
Make some art, damnit! And MOME distills the ideas surrounding ds106 and why it might work so brilliantly. Thank you!
What’s more, I am loving the work by the folks in Tokyo. You can see all their posts here—it’s brilliant stuff and below are a few highlights for me.
If not, BEWARE!!
Coz I NEVER am a female despite of my body born in a female form!
(I actually am a neutral-gender dude, though…)
…WELL, I’m not gonna tell you descriptions of what the words mean, coz
THEY JUST MEAN IT.
NEVER believe the person’s physical gender in respect of perceptions for gender-image.
Just see how the person behaves like, and what the person dresses like.
The physical gender worth for NOTHING but medical scenes and making love with somebody.
You are so lazy cat
When I’m working really hard at school
You are sleeping at home
And thoe are just a few examples of some assignments that came across the ds106 site recently, there are manay, many more. Lock in and give these awesome internauts some feedback.
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
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