As an aside, recently Martin Weller, George Siemens, and Alan Levine were talking about what media-centric journal might look like, and it occurs to me it would like like a good blog about compelling media š I can’t think of a better example.
Last week Nick Antonini remixed the Tupac hologram, which appeared at Coachella 2012, with the classic Princess Leia hologram from Star Wars.
And soon after there was the video remix of Tupac and Star Wars by Sethward productions that takes it one step further.
All of this is not new, and I’m sure there were a lot of other people remixing Tupac and Star Wars just as Nick was doing it, but it is the idea that we are doing it. That we are embedded in the web, experimenting within its forms, and imagining more fluidly than ever before how culture is in constant dialogue with itself, it we are the conduits of meaning between it all. This is part of what I was trying to get at in my presentation at CUNY City Tech last week, and I think I am going to give a more precise and succinct version of that talk at TEDxNYED this weekend, we’ll see how that goes š
Yesterday I had the honor of both attending and speaking at the launch of CUNY City Tech’s Ā community publishing platform Open Lab. Built on a WordPress/BuddyPress combo, Open Lab follows in the rich tradition of Ā similar sites at CUNY like Blogs @ Baruch and the Academic Commons. And well before its launch, Open Lab has already gotten major buy-in from around the campus community.
Why? Well in part because there have been resources put towards the project thanks to a Title V grant secured by Matt Gold and Maura Smale, which reinforces how important resources are not simply to get things, but rather to get good people to do great things. And that’s where the real gold at CUNY is right now, they have an unbelievable group of people at a number of campuses pushing the open education movement from all angles. An Open Lab just brings that many more great folk to the ground swell of open education initiatives Ā happening at CUNY, people such as Maura Smale, Charlie Edwards, Jody Rosen, Jenna Spevack, Elizabeth Alsop, Boone Gorges, Scott Henkle & Bree Zuckerman—to name just a few. Successful open education platforms are not born at colleges, they are built by people —Open Lab gets this, and they are using their resources intelligently as a result. The funding is being funneled to people to reach out to faculty and students and work directly to shift the culture and shape the future towards open. Open lab is the platform through and on which this cultural shift will all play out, and what’s awesome about that is it will be readily available for all of us to witness. I was honored to be with them on opening day, and I look forward to more and more CUNY folks to collaborate with as we start thinking beyond our institutions.
On another note, I tried out a new presentation geared towards the Open Lab project, but also as a way to try and focus on some of the elements I think make a community like this work. I focused on the importance of integrating pop culture, media, and remix into an online community framework. The idea for me is that a community in the 21st century needs to understand the idea of the viral and embrace it to some degree—basically acknowledging that the visual vernacular of our moment is essential to understanding what makes for compelling cultural interaction on the web. I’m not sure I succeeded, but rather than talking about ds106 I featured work from folks like Nick Antonini, Emily Deane, Emily Del Ross, Andrew Allingham, Ben Rimes, and Jack Mulrey. The idea was to show how ideas are at their best when they are riffed on and played off of , and that the idea of open is always framed around the potentiality of “going viral”—and while that is not necessarily the goal it does add an element of awesome to the whole thing.
This presentation wasn’t perfect by any means, but I love the idea of focusing more on work people have done rather than what ds106 is, especially given I am not always entirely sure what it is depending on the day. After a brief overview of the community, I think the time is better spent demonstrating what people do with it, and how it might speak to the vernacular interrogation of pop culture that fascinates me most about the whole thing. The presentation got a bit crazy when I was talking about Andrew Allingham’s Boatload vs. Buttload vs. Shitload going viral, and I was as loose as I have been in a while which could be good, but sometimes makes the whole thing a bit more unpredictable. A special thanks to the good folks at City Tech for seeming to enjoy it all the same. Ā There was video taken of the event, and I hope to be able to embed it here soon, but in the mean time here are my slides.
Update: Here is the video, and other than it being nuts there is one small mistake, I said 5 million pageviews daily on UMW Blogs, which is absolutely not true, I meant yearly. My bad š Thanks to the good folks at OpenLab for publishing it.
Walking around NYC this afternoon I saw the IFC Cinemetal t-shirts (scroll down that page—what a terrible website the IFC center has) at their theater off West 4th Street and I really, really wanted the Carpenter t-shirt. These t-shirts are heavy metal t-shirts/album covers mashed up with film diirectors. For example, The Carpenters album Lovelines is mashed up with John Carpenter’s They Live.
And there are many more that have been around since 2008, where have I been?
And that’s just a few of them…but the enw Carpenter is the one I have eyes for š What”s more, this is right in line with a ds106 mashup assignment “Remix an Album Cover,” and what I like about this series is the focus on two specific groups that make ti easier: independent, hardcore film directors and Heavy metal bands. There may be something to such focused pairings to produce an inspired series.
Out of the blue last week a librarian at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library called Anto and I asking if we’d let our son Miles speak to the Fredericksburg City Council about the benefits of their continued support of the library. (As an aside, one of the greatest treasures of Fredericksburg is the local library system, and as unschooled feral learners our children are there all the time, and it rules.) We were honored on Miles’s behalf and we agreed. So last night Miles got up in front of the the city council to talk about the benefits he gets from their continued support of the best library system around. It was an awesome moment as a parent—forgive my indulgence, but this is my blog damn it! What’s more, there is a nice surprise 45 seconds in.
Last night I went on roughly an hour and fifteen minute rant during this #ds106 session about archiving and the digital. It was all over the place, covering everything from Wikipedia to Tupac to the Numa Numa Guy to Star Wars. I end with my firm belief that archiving is an immensely creative act, and it is where much of the impetus of all that is good on the web comes from.
Image credit: InspirationDC's "First Lemonade Stand "
Yesterday marked the end of the ds106 Kickstarter, and at the end of two weeks we raised $12,643 and funded the project at 301% the original request of $4200—all of which remains mind boggling to me. In terms of funding this is still very much the lemonade stand of raising resources when it comes to educational projects, a small localized community quenching its thirst. At the same time it provides a glimpse of something very, very powerful in terms of a funding model for more experimental projects in the future. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how awesome the folks in the UMW admin have been for understanding ds106 is not the Computer Science class I teach at UMW, although that’s part of it, but a much larger, open experience that they help fund by keeping it running regularly and paying people to teach it—at the tune of six times over this past year!
On the other hand, all us in the ds106 community benefit by having the freedom to push the classes we teach at UMW, Kansas State University, SUNY Cortland, York College, Temple U Japan, and Jacksonville State University beyond traditional notions of course space, campus-specific community, and provincial notions of enrollment. We are still very much at the beginning of this experiment, but I hope this Kickstarter might begin to illustrate that “traditional” educational institutions and the open, online communities are not exclusive or diametrically opposed. Rather they can and do constantly work together in some powerful and dynamic ways that we’ve only yet begun to understand.
But more than anything, what really moved me about the whole experience was to see what is possible when a number of small acts of kindness and generosity make a big difference. This is encouraging to me, this is that “hopeful twist” to the apocalyptic rhetoric around all things education, change and the internet. What could be more buoying than the idea that people want to help each other create cool things and forge deep, personal ties through and on the web? That’s enough for me some days. Thank you for drinking the lemonade š
Now, a few of us here have some cards to write, shirts to print, animated GIFs to make and assignments to name. What’s more, we haven’t ordered the t-shirts yet, so if you’re really dying for one let us know in the comments here and we will make arrangements to make sure you get what you want, I mean we’re not computers, Sebastian, we’re physical!
We had a great weekend: a little brick patio removal and dirt shifting in preparation of Faculty Academy (thanks Tim and Alan!) followed by the UMW Multicultural Fair with the family. And the all the while the Spring weather here in Virginia continue to prove sublime. But the highlight for me was watching my seven year old son Miles dance at the UMW Multicultural fair. It wasn’t a planned affair by any means, he simply got up during an intermission between two shows and started dancing non-stop for about 10 or 15 minutes in front of a crowd that very quickly warmed up to him. It was magical to witness how he lost himself in the movement while at the same time remained acutely aware he was putting on a show. I only had a camera, no video unfortunately, so I made a little animated GIF to remember it by. For a moment it reminded me of that popular internet Ā video with the kid who started dancing by himself which quickly led to a dance party. Hell, Miles always makes me want to dance.
Has ds106 joined the ranks of Princess Di, Brangelina, and Miley Cyrus? I doubt it, but it really warmed my heart when I saw Ben Rimes’ tweet this morning that a number of ds106 Silent Movie assignments had been featured in the online Daily Mail. I mean let’s face Ā it, ds106 is pop culture through and through and making it into the pages of the tabloids is kind of the apotheosis of everything we’ve worked towards. It reminds me of Don Delillo’s description inĀ White NoiseĀ of the tabloid as aĀ ‘‘mechanism of offering a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events.”Ā I really like to think about ds106 as a hopeful twist on an apocalyptic culture.
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