It seems that tagging information is useful for more than just organising things (either individually or socially); tags can be art, too! In that vein I’ve just discovered Wordle which can take any series of words – or pull your tags straight from del.icio.us – and let you play with various visualisations. I dragged in my del.icio.us tags, and I have to say I quite like the little word-art picture that resulted:
If you squint, it almost looks like a badly drawn map of Australia! :) What do your tags look like?
On Tuesday, the students from my Digital Media class, as well a few invited guests and colleagues, enjoyed a screening of the Best 8 Student News Projects from the unit. This project, the first major assignment for the unit, takes place after 4 weeks of workshops which introduce digital video cameras, sound recording and (very) basic lighting, non-linear editing and copyright in media production. It’s a bit of a whirlwind, but the culmination of these workshop is a project in which students, working in groups of 4 or 5, get exactly one week to produce a 3 minute news story on the basis of pre-assigned topics (all of which are based on relevant local issues).
Once the projects are completed, part of the feedback process is not just comments from myself or Christina (who is tutoring half of the classes, I’m tutoring the other half) - although we do give a fair bit of written feedback - but we also have a reflective seminar where the projects completed by the groups in these seminars (there are 4 groups in each seminar) are viewed and the other members of the seminar offer written and verbal feedback. I find this is always a very rewarding process, as students often engage more directly with peer feedback. To top it off, at the end of each seminar (there are 8 ) each seminar votes and the best project, along with the top from the other seminars, become those which make up the Best of Student News screening. While I am a little hesitant to place too much weight on the ‘best’ projects - learning is, after all, not a competition - students nevertheless respond well to this voting process. I suspect the idea of them deciding the best projects rather than the course staff is very appealing! Then, in the Best of Student News screening, the students get to vote once more and select their choice for the Best Student News Project of the year.
I have to say, I think the level at which students produced their projects this year has been outstanding. Even though most of them have learnt their media production skills over 4 one and a half hour workshops, many of these projects can stand up against the work of professionals who’ve had 3 year of training. The Best Project for the year, as selected by their peers, shows that humour - when used properly - really is one of the universally appealing elements of media. So, without any further ado, this year’s Best Student Project takes a comical look at the role of community radio in the era of media conglomeration.
At the screening, there is also a Staff Award given the the project which got the highest overall mark. This award went to the group behind a technically outstanding project which explored whether Australia’s young Olympians are adequately prepared to be thrust into the media spotlight at the Beijing Olympics.
There are two other projects from the screening I wanted share: one takes a look at the proposed redevelopment of the Perth inner city foreshore, and the other asks to what extent Earth Hour is a genuine attempt at ecological change.
One other noteworthy aspect of these projects, and of many others students created for the course, is that after our discussions on copyright, each of the projects above has selected to place their finished work under a Creative Commons license. Among other things, this suggests that far from the end of the conversation, some of these student projects may, indeed, have an interesting life being screened and remixed in different settings.
The students in this unit are now working hard on their second project, which is explores more specifically the affordances of digital video on the web, and I have to say, having just heard their Pitches for these projects, I’m really exciting to see the next projects as they’re completed!
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot this semester has been the way my teaching does - or doesn’t - encourage my students to develop that elusive, highly ambiguous but universally sought-after quality of creativity. I’ve been running two units - Digital Media, which is a relatively large second year unit (about 140 students) with a fairly hefty hands-on component; and a far smaller honours unit called Creative Selves which is specifically about exploring the way creativity is thought about, situated and can ultimately be harnessed in the world of work (or, at least, the world outside of formal education).
Even though creativity is often associated with the romantic ideal of the lone creative genius, one of the contradictions I’ve been quite aware of, and something that has come up in both units, is that both individual and group creativity is often meaningfully enhanced and provoked when students are thinking about the audience that might ultimately view/experience/interact with their creative work. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise since over the last 4 years I’ve often encouraged (and occasionally mandated) that students blog their work for just that reason. In so many cases, when the potential audience for a work - written, audio, video or whatever else - stops being just the marker or examiner and starts being a potentially global community, students tend to push themselves to work that little bit harder. Occasionally one or two students have suggested this is unnecessarily stressful, but 99% of the time when students are faced with the large potential audience that the internet provides, they step up to the challenge. There are other clear advantages of getting students to create in the public sphere, too, such as those outlined by Jason Mittell:
One of my pet peeves about teaching is that often you get wonderful student work that is, by design, written for an audience of one, and has no lingering presence beyond the semester. By asking students to blog, share, and otherwise publish their work, it both raises the bar for their own sense of engaging a community with their ideas, as well as offers an opportunity for faculty to publicize their excellent work.
Mittell has written a seriesofposts showcasing some of the impressive work students have made as part of his Media Technology course this past semester. They range from podcasts which interrogate something specific about audio, to video-games based shorts (sort of machinima, but not in the Red Vs Blue sense - more videos which mix and match game footage in different ways to highlight a particular critical or creative point). One assignment I particularly liked was the use of video remixes, or mashups, which included one student effort which remixed current blockbuster trailers - and a ubiquitous iPhone ad - to create an overhyped trailer for technological convergence itself:
Another student collaboration I’ve come across recently is Shake Girl, The Graphic Novel. This graphic novel was a collaboration between 17 Stanford creative writing, art and design students who’ve produced a moving and provocative story which ultimately ends up being a heart-wrenching tale highlighting the terrible phenomenon of acid attacks on women in Cambodia. This is no two-dimensional moral rant, though: it’s a thoroughly engaging story, with sophisticated characterisation which envelops the reader in the story only to shock them with the protagonist’s fate. In their About section, one note rang particularly true for me, regarding the challenges but also the substantial rewards which come from successful creative collaborations between students:
The process of collaboration - we think all of our students will agree - was both one of the most frustrating and exciting experiences of our lives. A lot of the first in the first two weeks, much of the second in the last four. Those of us writing the script seemed to trip over one another in the early stages. We wrote, researched, rewrote, tossed drafts aside, argued, yelled sometimes, tossed our hands up in the air, and then started over. The illustrators waited patiently, until patience ran out, and we were finally left with this mission statement: 1. We want to get this project completed, and 2. We want to make everyone moderately happy.
And with that, we made the jump to light speed. How many late-night hours did we draw, redraw, rewrite, design, redesign, and mostly… really enjoy each others company, efforts, and camaraderie?
All I can say is that Shake Girl definitely highlights an impressively successful student collaboration! [Via BBoing]
This graphic novel also reminds me on one idea for a small-scale creative project I’ve always wanted to do especially with a large first-year class. Many of you will recall the fabulous Theory.org.uk Theorist Trading Cards, which were essentially bubblegum cards featuring well-known cultural theorists. In a large first-year class where new theorists, ideas and concepts are introduced for the first time, I suspect that if students generated their own cards as part of tutorial presentations, this would be a great way to creatively get them reading and thinking about the main features, and differences, between the writers and works they encounter. As an added bonus, these trading cards could be collated online and serve, to some extent, as useful prompts when students are revising for exams.
Along a similar line, this week my Digital Media students are presenting a pitch, outlining an idea for a short video which will critically explore some aspect of digital culture loosely based on arguments about either convergence or citizen journalism, so I hope I’ll be able to post a few of the results in a few weeks time.
Until then, I wanted to end this post by pointing to the very cool and very virally popular video Apple Mac Music Video by Dennis Liu. While not really student work (Lui has just finished formal education, but has been working professionally for a while; read an interview here) this is video is inspirational. It’s a brilliant reminder that under the hood of an Apple Mac (or even a decent PC) is more than enough power to make some truly inspiring and amazing creative work …
To explore, expand and expound upon the emerging Australasian Commons, the Creative Commons Australia team have organised a free one-day symposium which investigates a range of activities, programme and philosophies driving open access and the cultural commons across Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. I’ll be there, participating in a panel on the Creative Commons and Education, as well joining the team facilitating a workshop on ‘Building Knowledge: Open Education Resources (OER) and Research Materials’. Here are all the details:
… are proud to announce that registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons ‘Building an Australasian Commons’ Conference. The conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia (http://creativecommons.org.au), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (http://www.cci.edu.aau), and the State Library of Queensland (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au).
This event provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. The conference aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.
The current programme detailing the array of presentations, workshops and round table discussions can be found at http://creativecommons.org.au/australasiancommons. Attendance is free and open to all comers. However, places are limited, so if you’re interested in attending please register ASAP. Registration closes 9 June 2008. You can download the registration form at http://creativecommons.org.au/materials/ccauconf08/
australasian_commons_conference_registration.pdf and return it via email to Elliott@creativecommons.org.au.
The conference will be followed on the day at 6pm by the second CCau ccSalon, a showcase of Creative Commons music, art, film and text from Australia and the region. This will be a great opportunity to mingle and relax after the day’s events while experiencing CC works in action. We look forward to welcoming you at ‘Building an Australasian Commons’.
Keep in mind, it’s a completely free event, so if you’re interested and can be in sunny Brisbane on 24 June, I’ll see you there!
Open-access to scholarly research has been very topical the past few years. The internet as a means of communication and distribution seems to have led down to paths, increasingly divergent: either academic journals are going open-access, allowing anyone to read the contents; or, they’re becoming part of large corporate conglomerates which charge university libraries (and very few others since they can’t afford it) very large fees for access to all the journals in their catalogue. Graduate student and social networking guru danah boyd (yes, she spells her name without capital letters) has argued that academics need to form a united front and only publish in open-access journals. Here’s what boyd proposes:
Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals. Unlike younger scholars, you don’t need the status markers because you’re tenured or in industry. Use that privilege to help build new journals that are not strapped to broken business models. Help build the reputations of new endeavors so that they can be viable publishing venues for future scholars. Publish in open-access journals, build a personal webpage and add your article there. You will get much more visibility, especially from younger scholars who turn to Google before they go to the library. I understand that a lot of you prefer to flout the rules of these journals and publish your articles on your website anyhow, even when you’re not allowed. The problem is that you’re not helping change the system for future generations.
Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction. Encourage your members to publish in them. Run competitions for best open-access publications and have senior scholars write committee letters for younger scholars whose articles are stupendous but published in non-traditional venues.
Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow. Younger scholars can’t afford to publish in alternate venues until you begin recognizing the value of these publications. Help that process along and encourage your schools to do the same.
Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you’re in a new field. This may cost you advancement or tenure, but you know it’s the right thing to do. If you’re an interdisciplinary scholar or in a new field, there aren’t “respected” journals in your space and so you’re going to have to defend yourself anyhow. You might as well use this opportunity to make the valued journals the open-access ones.
More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure. I understand why you feel the need to follow the rules. This is fine, but make a point by stopping this practice the moment you don’t need it.
All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals. Help make them respected. Guest edit to increase the quality. Build their reputations through your involvement. Make these your priority so that the closed journals are the ones struggling to get quality reviewers.
Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue. Many of you do this, but not all. Open-access journals are free. Adding them to databases does costs money but it helps scholarship and will help you ween off of expensive journals in the long run.
Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains. You are respected institutions. The bandwidth cost of hosting a journal would be much less than allowing your undergrads access YouTube. Support your faculty in creating university-branded journals and work with them to run conferences and do other activities to help build the reputation of such nascent publications. If it goes well, your brand will gain status too.
Academic publishers: Wake up or get out. Silencing the voices of academics is unacceptable. You’re not helping scholarship or scholars. Find a new business model or leave the journal publishing world. You may be making money now, but your profits will not continue to grow using this current approach. Furthermore, I’d bank on academics shunning you within two generations. If you think more than a quarter ahead, you know that it’s the right thing to do for business as well as for the future of knowledge.
(Read more here.) Personally, I commend boyd for her position. I must admit, as an early career researcher, I’d be hard pressed to turn down an opportunity to publish in a well-respected journal, even a very locked-down one; academic careers are that hard to build and maintain that lost opportunities are costly. However, I’d be delighted when we get to the stage that the most respected journals are open-access. In the meantime, I really hope that boyd’s call is heard by our research leaders - I believe the push for open-access has to be top-led to be successful - and where I have any choice in the matter, open-access will be the way to go for me.
What do you think? Does open-access matter to you?
Insight #3: If ePortfolios and other forms of electronic presence are going to be (or are) a core part of the way graduates ‘sell’ themselves to employers, then identity management needs to be taught at all levels of education. Identity management includes those aspects of identity which we intend employers to see, and those we don’t want seen. If a basic search online for someone’s full name reveals drunken party pictures on Flickr or YouTube clips of bullying antics in their youth, then that is just as likely to be viewed by employers as the intended ePortfolios or other material. Identity management clearly is something of a challenge, especially as many educators aren’t fully aware of how much students can put online (or how to temper that), but the Internet never forgets and we need students to be able to understand that for all sorts of reasons, and future employability is clearly one of them.
Insight #4:The unconference model only works when all the participants have a strong sense of what they are intending to pull apart or critique in advance. If half of a conference is populated by people trying to get a basic understanding of something – in this case Web 2.0 – then the unconference model of primarily relying on informed participants leading all the conference sessions themselves, directed by their conversations and thinking, to the exclusion of traditional papers or presentations, is doomed to disappoint a lot of people attending that form of conference. (This, incidentally, is not a personal gripe, but a clearly articulated sense from a number of my fellow conference delegates).
I’m at the Learning Futures Symposium today and tomorrow. I’m not blogging summaries of sessions because, to be fair, that’s often quite dull. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to take the conference discussions to springboard some observations or thoughts that occurred during these interactions…
Insight #1: There is a reasonable amount of critical distance in terms of the ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ rhetoric, but the same critical perspective doesn’t stretch to critiquing the idea of ‘web 2.0’. Whereas ideas which supposedly encompass an entire generation are easy enough to pull apart, many educators seem wary of software and claims made about software as they acutely feel that this is one of the few areas in which students know more about this area than they do. I suspect that if the same educators were dipping their toes in a little more they’d realise something commonsensical which seems to have entirely escaped these kind of conversations: that while there are many types of web 2.0 software, there are generic skills to be found in using these tools and platforms. The reason that people can move from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook so easily, for example, is that at a basic level there is a lot of similarity between the way these platforms operate and the skills needed to use them. Sure, the rate of new names of software can be overwhelming, but if we remember that a large section of the skills learnt using one social software platform are viable for the next, super-duper, upcoming must-have web 2.0 tool are transferable, that makes taking the time to learn and teach them a whole lot more important and palatable. And social software platforms are just one example; skills in blogging, using wikis and many other forms of ‘web 2.0’ tools are similarly transferable and, at some level, generic. Perhaps we should be focusing more on what those skills are.
Insight #2: Often the people in the driving position for educational policy aren’t confident to make decisions about ICT – nor should they be!
The big news of the day is that The Australian Blogging Conference, a fabulous-looking free one-day event exploring everything about blogging in Australia (including education and Creative Commons!) now has a date: Friday, 28 September 2007 in sunny Brisbane! All of the details are here. I’d write more, but I’m now running around to see if I can get myself from Perth to Brisbane for the day of the conference!
Looking at the way PowerPoint slides can be used poorly is something most higher education developers need to make time for. Comedian Don McMillan makes all of our lives a little easier, because he demonstrates some of the worst uses of PowerPoint, with humour! Check it out:
I’m sure this clip will make it into future discussions of using media in teaching!
As part of UWA’s Teaching Month (which, to be honest, is “Teaching 17 Days” but that just sounded naff on flyers and banners), the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is running a group blog in which a number of academics, professional staff and at least one student are exploring the place of blogs and blogging in higher education. The blog is entitled Blogs: The New University Workspace? and so far topics that have been covered include:
At this point, the bloggers would be absolutely delighted if anyone from the university community or beyond who has an opinion or thought about any of these topics could drop by the blog, have a read and, if you’ve time, leave a comment. We’re hoping that this can be one of those opportunities were a community of interest really does emerge!
Also, if you’re interested in following through on any of these ideas face to face, and you’re in Perth, staff and students across campus and beyond are invited to attend a Discussion Forum on Monday May 14th, from 12-2pm (including lunch) in Social Sciences Seminar room G2.08. The Forum will initially be led by those blogging in the Arts blog, but will be open to all ideas and opinions!
I hope to see you in the blog and, hopefully, face to face next Monday as well!
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