After Hours – “Surrender Dorothy” and “Oh wow!”

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Reverend

I watched Martin Scorsese’s After Hours(1985) this evening, and I really do love this film. And while many might consider it a minor Scorsese film, for me it is one of his best. Right up there with Taxi Driver (1976), Goodfellas (1990), and Raging Bull (1980). It’s a beautifully wrought existential comedy that is perfectly played by Griffin Dunne, whose move from acting to producing is something I regret when I think of his performance in this role. He’s absolutely convincing in his slow and subtle exasperation with a night from hell, and he in many ways underacts through a kind of simultaneously sleazy, uptight, and out-of-place working stiff who is simply having a very bad night. Just about every scene is memorable, but I’ll pick two in particular, the one above has Roseanna Arquette in what might be her finest role as the deeply unstable object of Dunne’s misguided affection. The short tale about her film obsessed husband reminds me of Scorsese himself, especially if you have seen or heard him talk about movies, he is absolutely euphoric.

But the other clip, which is even closer to my heart in many ways, features Dunne’s character, Paul Hackett, at the end of his rope as he is being pursued throughout Soho by a vigilante mob. He ends a futile call to the police with a very simple exclamation, “Oh wow!” But that is no regular old “Oh wow,” for the way he says it has stuck with me for decades. In fact, I haven’t stopped coming back to it and repeating it since I first saw this film in high school over twenty years ago. It has in many ways guided me through my adult life, and supported me through so many a rough time. It’s my simple, special movie quote shared only with one another. Well, at least until now. Enjoy!

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More harm than good

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Reverend

Mike Caulfield and I have been having some fun thinking about questions of reform and the state of public education.  I freely acknowledge I am out of my element, but I left a long comment on Mike’s post here, and I figured I would re-post it here for the record because it frames some things I haven’t said on the bava before, but are dear to me, like, for example, becoming a fascist High School teacher at an inner-city school in Brooklyn, which really frames my deep distrust of our educational system, period.

__________

I’m not sure if this is rarefied or not, but I’d don’t necessarily understand how public education right now, and it’s divestment, isn’t part of the problem. In many ways I agree with you that the system is being gutted, my issue is that comes as much from inside pressures as outside pressures. In effect, making the question of access and equity a mission that moves outside of the current channels of reform and good will to something a bit more drastic.

I’m not sure you are quoting me, but I actually do believe the “current education model does more harm than good.” I think the equation of education with security is entirely problematic. Let’s face it, if given a choice security would always win out over freedom—just look at the 9/11 track record—and what we have here is an idea of security and financial possibility wrapped up with a sense of access and equity. Fact is, the two are often at odds with one another, and the idea of freedom remains and democracy remains a carrot to some degree, how can we call ourselves a democratic society when we fail to freely and fairly educate the whole population. Well, because we aren’t, and the education system is an amazing spoke in the flat tire that is our institutions.

Now, I hate to turn to a TV show in a conversation like this, but I can’t help myself. Season 4 of The Wire frames for me just how insane the idea public education—which I absolutely believe in because I can’t see anything else so clearly yet, and luckily I live in a wealthy enough city that I can say this without having to wonder how I’m going to afford my kids education beyond my taxes—as not being more harmful than good for the majority of the students who come from inner-city schools that are simply institutional factories of bullshit tests and the worst kind of socilization. I worked as an English teacher in a Brooklyn High School, Clara Barton HS to be exact, for almost two years. It was a school with a predominantly Black, West-Indian, and Guyanese student population, and there is no question that a majority of them were amazing in so many ways, I don;t think I ever laughed so hard, but that had nothing to do with either me or the school. In fact, I think where we came together was just how similar an innercity school like that was to a prison. It bred mistrust, absolute disrespect for authority (which may be one of its strengths :) ), an inane and oppressive curriculum, mindless petty acts of control and subordination, and a general feeling that is all but antithetical to an sense of freedom and democracy. Our institutions at the level of immediate and intimate experience are often as far  as possible from any of the ideals we abstract out from them—liek the noble pursuit of public education.

Pragmatic calls for reform and better education seems to elide the fact that reform is premised within a system that has made it a priority of distinguishing these low-income students from high-income students through an insane idea of local, tax-based funding that perpetuates the very ideas of inequality along economic lines. And this is where I am done with reform and some institutional idea of universal access and convinced we have many of the tools already, and simply have to frame a movement outside that tax base, or at least beyond it. I don’t know how, and I can only dream—but I believe there will be a way and it is important to work within the systems we’re given to survive—although I had to leave Clara Barton because I increasingly was feeling more and more like a fascist and it was truly horrifying for me—and strive for as much equity as we can, but always knowing that their has to be a tidal wave of change along class, race, and gender lines. And it won’t be comfortable or secure—it will be frightening and most probably highly contentious.

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Graffiti is Art!

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Reverend

UMW Blogs is up and rolling again this semester—with a brand new look no less, that’s all Martha Burtis, and as she polishes off the BuddyPress integration we’ll have much more to say about that—and Professor Nina Mikhalevsky has raced out of the starting gate with guns a-blazing. She linked to a video titled Muto by a group of Argentinian graffiti artists as the kick-off to her Banned and Dangerous Art Freshman Seminar.

Is it art? Well, watch the following seven minutes of awesomeness and try and argue otherwise.  I dare you!

MUTO from K?safilmci on Vimeo.

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Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Reverend

looking_for_whitman_header
Last Tuesday marked the kick-off of the Digital Whitman course at UMW. This course is part of a larger NEH grant that is focused on an inter-campus approach to pedagogy that is designed around a rich and distributed infrastructure of social media. The project is titled Looking for Whitman, and it brings together five geographically distinct courses on Walt Whitman in an attempt to experiment with how series of distributed faculty and students can share, collaborate, and converse out in the open.

The premise of the course is Professor Matt Gold’s brainchild (you can read his overview of the course here), and when he asked me to be a part of the project early on I jumped at the prospect because I firmly believe it’s an important opportunity to illustrate how social media can re-imagine the possibilities for sharing amongst and between students of a similar topic from a wide range of institutions. It in many ways frames the importance of an open and porous ecosystem of sharing not just within a single institution, but across many. It builds upon and amplifies an experiment like UMW Blogs by bringing a number of different institutions into a larger, focused conversation around a particular theme or topic.

And while the courses all still run a face-to-face model at their respective universities, a large majority of the work will be happening online and between faculty and students from entirely different campuses. All of which presents a really fascinating opportunity for re-thinking distributed courses between universities, and opens up an exciting possibility for re-imaging the architecture of distributed learning. Something that just about any LMS on the planet couldn’t even begin to address, or even imagine, given how deeply rooted they are within the logic of a single institution, not to mention how entangled they are in the restrictive logic of stringent permissions and content ownership—yet another roadblock to truly essential innovation brought to you by the LMS!

So, as may be clear by now, I’m pretty fired up about the possibilities of this project because it marries the classroom experience to a more distributed network of learners from a variety of institutions that represent a wide-range of students from all walks-of-life and backgrounds. From the University of Mary Washington to Rutgers-Camden to CUNY’s City Tech to Serbia’s University of Novi Sad, the project represents a rather compelling spectrum of courses from a variety of universities that provide a unique network of students from a wide array of experiences. This is not a “country club for the wealthy,” but a re-imagining of a distributed, public education that is premised on an approach/architecture that is affordable and scales with the individual. It’s a grand, aggregated experiment that will hopefully demonstrate the possibilities of the new web for re-imagining the boundaries of our institutions, while at the same time empowering students and faculty through a focused and personalized learning network of peers, both local and afar.

Now, all that said, what makes it all the more exciting is that we’re building this ship as it sails. We have set up an overarching site premised to some degree on the work we have been doing at UMW with blogging and aggregation, a setup cheap enough that we can direct more of the grant money to hiring people and training faculty and students than worrying about designing and programming yet another framework. The tools are already out there, what we are doing is focusing on hacking an open source application like WPMu and BuddyPress to give us as much flexibility as possible. And, that’s right, we’re pushing the logic of the syndication bus that much further, trying to see just how publication and syndication can create a rather simple, yet powerful framework for sharing, collaborating and conversing. So, to that end, I’m going to talk quickly about two three syndication based experiments we’re working on right now with this project.

Frontispiece Project
frontispiece The frontispiece project is just under way, and it foregrounds the power of tag-filtered syndication for a distributed series of courses. At UMW Professors Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart—a project the other four courses will also be doing—are having the student design their own frontispiece as a means of reflecting upon the 1855 frontispiece from Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass.

They’ve posted the frontispiece in their individual blog (which feeds into a course, aggregated blog you can see here) and tagged it with frontispiece. All the posts from around the Looking for Whitman site are republished in the http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org über blog (created thanks to the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin) which means we can get a single feed of all the posts from around the environent tagged with frontispiece: http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org/tag/frontispiece/feed.

Now, I created a new blog for the frontispiece project at http://frontispiece.lookingforwhitman.org and activated a cool photo theme called AutoFocus. After that I simply dropped the sitewide feed for the frontispiece tag into FeedWordpress, and every post tagged frontispiece will now republish into this project blog creating a very cool visualization of all the students’ frontispieces from all five courses. Tale a look here. It was dead simple, and the effect is not to be underestimated, this is now a space we will see almost 100 frontispieces emerge reflecting the wide-range of students and faculty traveling through this course together.

A Twitter-based RSS Reader?
twitter_whitman There have been some rumblings since Twitter took off that it has the potential to replace RSS readers, I haven’t found this to be entirely true in my experience, but there can be no doubt I spend far more time in Twitter than my RSS Reader on a daily basis. And I am pushing hard that this course experiment with Twitter (although I am getting some push back from some analog UMW professors who will feel the wrath of the Reverend, and soon) and one of the things I discovered is that it would be rather easy to have a Twitter account that basically republishes all the students distributed posts at UMW into a single twitter feed. Given we are already aggregating all the UMW-based posts into a single blog, I simply activated Tweetable (my new twitter app for WordPress Mu thanks to Shawn Miller) which allows me to include the project hashtag (#ww20) as well as tweet right from the WordPress site.

So, in short, whenever a post is re-published on the course blog, a tweet is sent out through the @whitmanumw twitter account, so you can follow this account as a kind of course RSS reader, or simply search the hashtag #ww20 to see the latest posts as well as what people are saying about it on twitter, if anyone at UMW actually tweets, which the dearth of is highly annoying to me. I mean the course is titled Digital Whitman, not Analog Whitman, get with the program hippies!

Discourse
discourse_whitman This idea is one I have been playing with for a while, and I have never really seen it pan out, but I figure what the hell, I’m already losing the Twitter battle, might as well unload everything at the very beginning, and cry myself to sleep thereafter. I created a separate blog at http://discourse.lookingforwhitman.org that I themed with P2, which is basically a Twitter knock-off theme for WordPress. And while students can become authors on this site and use it as a quick and easy space for discussion (something better handled on Twitter in my opinion, you hear that Mara, are ya listening?), I actually think of it as a way to integrate the Twitter conversation into the ecosystem of the Looking fro Whitman site via the feed for the #ww20 hashtag on twitter. Finding the feed for a hashtag is made easy by http://search.twitter.com—you can see the feed for the hashtag #ww20 on the wrongfully reviled Twitter here.

Once I got the feed for the hashtag, I simply activated FeedWordPress on the Discourse blog, and dropped it in there, and automagically all the tweets with #ww20 republish within this blog, and become part of the Looking for Whitman ecosystem. They are now searchable and discoverable through recent posts, sitewide search, and simple RSS feeds dropped in the sidebars of course and/or individual blogs.

So, it is just the first week, but as you can tell, the experimentation will be fast and furious, we have plans for digress.it (or what was CommentPress) as well as Google MyMaps, YouTube, FLickr, and all those other not-so-new-fangled sites. So, stay-tuned to the bava for evermore cutting edge instructional technology, your one-stop-shop for brilliance writ large 🙂

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Song of the bava, a frontispiece

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Reverend

Image of Hunter S Groom

Walt Whitman Jim Groom, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or

apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

_________________________________________________________________

It’s amazing just how much Whitman’s “Song of Myself” frames some deeply problematic questions for me right now. While studying the iconic frontispiece to the 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass” and working through the poem I find within it everything that has been plaguing my ego for the last two years of so. This question of framing an identity, being both a finely tuned persona as well as a fleshy, eating, drinking and breeding man. A spectrum of identities that are fragmented and often weighty in their incongruity and dissonance. In fact, after reading Gary Richard’s post that provocatively frames Whitman as a poser in the frontispiece (in the perjorative, rather than literal, sense of that word) I began to think a bit more about the construction of an identity (or identities) in relationship to some sense of authenticity.

Gary frames his argument by means of an image of a distant relative from the 19th century, whose distended paunch and work soiled clothes provides us with an arguably more authentic “rough.” In fact, he gives us an image that can be understood as a more documentary vision of the 19th century citizen—is he somehow realer? Such a strain of thought suggests the complex tensions between an artist’s framing of their subject—interestingly shedding Whitman’s list of people and types in as much a documentary as a poetic framework. Which, to follow a line of thought, brings to mind texts like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or films like the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (1968) or Gray Gardens (1976), wherein the documentarian are both artists and interlopers, very much constructing their space within these films as both archivists and artists. Capturing a moment as well as amplifying its particular tensions, beauty, and purpose.

So then, how do we begin to deconstruct the relationship between Whitman the poet and his seemingly infinite identities and poses in “Song of Myself” as a literary documentarian of an entire nation of people, a figure that attempts to encompasses all races, genders, and classes? How might the construction of innumerable identities, be at once the erasure of self though imposing one’s own self on everyone?

In all people I see myself, none more and not one barley-

corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

Now while these questions may lead me down a rabbit hole I won’t soon emerge from, they also help focus some issues surrounding my own identity. For a large part of my identity, rather than being deeply embodied as we see Whitman figuring in his poetry, is predominantly disembodied and fragmented. Blogging almost daily over the last four years about a wide range of ideas places one within an ongoing stream of thought that is personal, public, and professional all at once. A space wherein one’s constant publishing and re-publishing around a series of ideas ultimately gives way to a particular trace and sense of one’s identity that is just as much constructed as authentic. Often times equal parts fiction and fact, a partial and inadequate representation of one’s work and life, that is both mindful and hungry for an audience, while at the same time pained and imprisoned by it.

At the heart of this identity—which for me is online and almost entirely disembodied—there’s a schizophrenic transition to alternative selves that seems to me at the core of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a sense of performance, construction, and laying bear. In fact, the frontispiece image I chose above is a portrait immediately following a short film Tom Woodward and I made that is premised on the struggling with the idea of an online self and the concomitant act of bearing and tracing one’s life through a series of fragmented streams across a variety of loosely connected sites. “I Just Shaved” is a rather physical and filmic attempt to deal with this question of fragmentation and disembodiment. The portrait is premised on an overt quote to The Royal Tenenbaums that is fused with a highly personal and documentary recording of both transformation and the willingness to bear it all in this new environment, which is often as painful as it is liberating.

Yet, that’s exactly the magic of Whitman “Song of Myself” in my mind, he manages to both fragment and disembody his identity throughout the poem in order to reconstitute a much richer composite of identities that, oddly enough, re-imagine a sense of authenticity through posing. A shadowy idea of truth through types. It’s alchemy, and I love it.

This hour I tell things in confidence.

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

Image credit: The great Bionicteaching’s “Rebirth of slick”

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The Wild Bunch ‘How does it feel to be so god damned right”

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Reverend

I’ll be quoting from Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece, and my all-time favorite Western, The Wild Bunch extensively in the scenic series. But right now this scene just seems so right. Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a “Judas goat,” confronts the railroad detective Harrigan (Albert Dekker) about his unrepentant abuse of power and concomitant righteousness. And for me it just nails everything about the struggles of being compromised by and working within a system premised on the eradication of all threats and alternatives. What’s more, how can you beat those musical transitions, Jerry Fielding’s score is brilliant.

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When did EDUPUNK become about entrepreneurship?

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Reverend

I never really thought the ideas surrounding EDUPUNK led to innovation in businesses and business models, in fact I thought it brought into deep question the irresponsibility and lethargy of corporations like BlackBoard and their ilk as well as the institutions that support this bad habit like sick crack addicts. Innovation has flatlined for almost a decade in the land of Learning Management Systems, and let me be clear here that in my heart of hearts EDUPUNK is not about entrepreneurship, that is simply how this article interpreted it.

If there will be a new way, it won’t depend on the next business model or unique profit-driven approachs to e-learning or textbooks, it will ultimately depend on people finally re-imagining their relationship to status, money and power. Therein lies the future, and it need remain predominantly idealistic rather than purely economic and market driven. EDUPUNK is a state of mind, it’s an attitude, and it’s a belief that the system in its current incarnation does more harm than good, and so much of the damage is born of the increasingly business logic of higher ed. And maybe EDUPUNK has to die to be born again in some more radical fashion that resists the all-encompassing logic of captial that refuses to rest until every alternative is subsumed into a potential market for commodification. bavatuesdays is EDUPUNK, and it’s back on that map ready to rumble in the edtech jungle. Bring it on!

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WPMu Development for Education

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Reverend

Image of wpmudevc ontibutorHats off to Andre Malan for getting the dev.wpmued aggregation site together in no time at all—did it take him a single night of kicking ass while Brian Lamb was fast asleep? The idea behind the site, which you can find here, is right line with all the goodness that came out of the Open Ed conference—do it cheap, do it out in the open, share it, and make the focus of our labor people and ideas.

Let’s face it, many of us are working and hacking within WPMu, and this provides a place to aggregate and share out centrally that development. More than that, it is up and available to any one out there who wants to include the work they are doing. And what’s more, I’m a contributor, so what the hell else could you want? (Although Boone Borges’s blog has been on total fire, which means I better get my game face on 🙂 )

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Spider-Man 1967, Episode 21

Posted on August 23, 2009 by Reverend

”The Origin of Spider-Man”: Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and soon finds that he has gained the arachnid’s amazing abilities. He learns that “with great power there must also always be great responsibility” after his Uncle Ben, husband of Aunt May, is murdered by a thief who he allowed to get away during a heist.

From Marvel.com.

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Spider-Man 1967, Episode 20

Posted on August 23, 2009 by Reverend

”Sting of the Scorpion”: The Scorpion escapes prison to get back at Jonah Jameson and Spider-Man. The Scorpion breaks into Dr. Stillwell’s lab and drinks a toxic potion that mutates him into a twenty-foot-tall giant. He captures Jameson and starts rampaging into the city. Now, Spider-Man must find a way to return the Scorpion to his normal size in order to save Jameson. ”Trick or Treachery”: The Fly Twins break into a vault and frame Spider-Man for the crime in the process. The villains implant a “fly tracer” on Spider-Man in order to monitor his whereabouts and continue to frame him while committing crimes in the city. After discovering that he has been tricked, Spider-Man sets out to clear his name and corners the Fly Twins at a fur storage warehouse for a final battle.

From Marvel.com

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