Randomness & Connections

2012-01-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of area codes in the greater Los Angeles metro area.

...and deep inside of that area code is 213.

It's uncanny how much power these three digits have to define us.

Lila's Latching & Online Learning Posting

2011-06-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

While working with the Provost's committee for "Learning Outcomes Assessment" over the past two years or so, I've been exposed to ideas of Rubrics and specific outcomes assessment. A few years ago, I'd have dismissed the entire enterprise as "Bean Counting" and as nearly the opposite of "Progressive, Inquiry-Based Education". But now I'm not so sure...
I've been waxing philosophical too much already in this course...but with your permission I'm going to indulge hyper-abstraction for just a little longer....because soon, we'll get down to some technical details...and possibly, even some fun!
(and as I stated in my post on the other thread, I'm going to copy-and-paste some of my ideas here because they're actually more related to this week's module. Also, I'm "modeling best practices"...in that ideas, once written, can be recycled and re-used in multiple contexts while learning)
We're at a point in history where we've had an Internet for about 43 years, and a World Wide Web for about 22 years. We've been porting higher education into both for a while now. Some things have been great, some were lost, others were simply mediocre.

...and in that same way that education went from memorizing Epic Poems to reading Socratic Dialogues about 2500 years ago...we've already made much of the leap into an Information Age....the work for us to do now is to create a long-term functional framework that can stand the test of time...for us and our students.
Last year, I took a crack at reading Robert Pisrig's 'follow up' philosophical novel to "Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", called "Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals".
Along with many ideas the author explored, is the idea of "Latching" -- that is when a new advance makes itself permanent by establishing a physical or social framework for itself. Here's the best quote I could find to make this idea make some sense:
"Sometimes a Dynamic increment goes forward but can find no latching mechanism and so fails and slips back to a previous latched position. Whole species and cultures get lost this way. Sometimes a static pattern becomes so powerful it prohibits any Dynamic moves forward. In both cases the evolutionary process is halted for a while. But when it's not halted the result has been an increase in power to control hostile forces or an increase in versatility or both. The increase in versatility is directed toward Dynamic Quality. The increase in power to control hostile forces is directed toward static quality. Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed."
(Robert Pirsig, 1991)
An even more complex treatise is available here.
I believe that what we are trying to do in this particular class ...and at UDC in general (and all of higher ed) is to mix the static and Dynamic in order to evolve ways of learning, teaching and knowing to a higher level of complexity.
But what this will require is finding those practices & ideas (software) and even physical things (hardware) that will LATCH online learning and education into the existing systems of digital information networks.
Perhaps this is where Quality Matters and other best practices come into our explorations. So for as picayune and tedious as these standards may be, I believe that as long as we keep Dynamic Quality in mind, what we will create by following lists like this...

1) Couse Overview & Introduction
2) Learning Objectives
3) Assessment & Measurement
4) Resources & Materials
5) Learner Engagement
6) Course Technology
7) Learner Support
8) Accessibility
...we will be LATCHING all of the cool, progressive, dynamic ideas we've created online into a new tradition of teaching and learning. Coincidentally, I'd encourage all of you to chat with my colleague Prof. Smith about the "technology of theatre" and something called the "Scena". There was a technological breakthrough in about the 6th century B.C.E. when the Greeks could build amphitheaters and raised stages that allowed for a single narrative to be performed for hundreds (maybe even thousands) of people. This technology for passing narrative around was LATCHED into what we now call "Theatre"...and it's served us well for several thousand years. (In fact, we didn't change it until the late 19th or early 20th century when we started to edit film to tell parallel narratives...but that's [quite literally] a different story)

So, I look forward to tweaking and finessing our course content, and our online experiences into these assessment rubrics...not because they're fun (these rubrics probably aren't)...but because these standards will allow us to LATCH our enduring knowledge together with evolving technology to create a new way of teaching and learning.
What will we create? What will we find? These and more questions we can grapple with over the next two or three weeks.

A fun song!

2010-04-22T17:09:00.001-07:00

My new math-geek bedtime song for kids: "Two plus two is four. Four plus four is eight. Eight plus eight is sixteen. Sixteen plus sixteen is thirty-two. Thirty-two plus thirty-two is sixty-four. Sixty-four plus sixty-four is one hundred and twenty-eight. One hundred and twenty-eight plus one hundred and twenty-eight is two hundred and fifty-six. Two hundred and fifty-six plus two hundred and fifty-six is five hundred and twelve. Five hundred and twelve plus five hundred and twelve is one thousand and twenty-four" (great for teaching kids about RAM upgrades!)

TIVA presentation

2010-02-12T09:50:00.001-08:00

Here is the video of the presentation I made at the TIVA Social Media event.

Professor William Hanff Jr. from TIVA-DC on Vimeo.

Fellow of Strings

2009-12-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

With a name like 'Stringfellow Barr', how can your dialogues not be interesting?

If you have the time, listen to these recordings (we'd call them 'podcasts' now') from the mid-to-late 1960s from St. John's College.

caught by the camera

2009-10-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

A Ukrainian car advertisement. I'm not sure if the two men were aware that they were going to be in the ad.

Pages 101 to 104

2009-09-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

A student of mine recently introduced me to the musical stylings of Calvin Harris. Given my penchant for ridiculous retro-futurism, I was particularly taken with the song and video for "Acceptable in the 80s" This lead me to thinking of the myriad of interactive technologies that did not use personal computers or the nascent internet.

Sitting in my office, on top of the filing cabinet is a semi-functional 2XL - a cleverly designed 8-track tape player. Using the ability to jump between tracks, a clever writer-producer-voice actor designed multiple interactive narratives and quiz segments. Really pushing a simple technology to do sophisticated (if campy) things.

Although I only had a passing acquaintance with it, the vast majority of my friends (then and now) were hard-core gamers. On the few occasions I'd joined a gamer-pod during a several-hour-long game of original D&D, I was struck first by the illustrations. But only later did I realize how complex the systems for this analog equivalent of an MMORPG really was. (in time it's become even more complex, but eclipsed by its online counterparts)

A few months ago, I was walking by the loading dock at the university where I work, when I noticed several beautiful wooden card catalog bureaus being thrown out. I managed to salvage the four nicest of them. I can't help but think that there's a bit of hubris in ditching the analog catalog simply because there is a more effective digital one. In this respect, I admire my RPG otaku friends who keep playing paper-based games.

Then somewhere in the back of my brain I remembered another example of an analog interactive technology, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. These were the young adult fiction that I remembered from the 80s. Most of them were cliché even to a budding 12 year old. But buried within these mass-market paperbacks was occasional brilliance.

In fact, I think the one above taught me an important lesson at least about novels, if not about life in general. ...and how boredom might have been my first introduction to "postmodernism"

The contrivance to all of these books was simple: a 2nd-person narrative that prompted the reader to turn to a page to continue along the storyline that was based upon your choice. In theory, a great novelty for YA fiction. A reader with a short attention span is engaged in a physical task, and rewarded for decision making. Each reading of the book could be different, also longer or shorter depending on the intent of the reader.

But that's not the post-modern experience I had with these books.

On some long trip or another, probably either on a flight back from visiting my grandparents or a drive back from visiting my cousins -- both interminable by the standards of a 6th or 7th grader. I decided to simply read the books cover-to-cover. The result was far more interesting that the simple storylines the authors had intended. It was an experience of multiple overlapping realities. In the book pictured above this reached a brilliant meta-conclusion.

The story is of an adolescent ("you") abducted by aliens for inclusion in their zoo. During various predictable plot twists, the characters begin searching for a Utopia with its expected peace and happiness. However, following the instructions of the book, a reader would never come across that narrative thread.

These are "pages 101 through 104" - and I'd stumbled across them when, being bored, I'd read the book straight through violating its premise. The intervening years had clouded that memory (too much partying in the late '90s). But it's an important lesson to recall. Breaking across the multiple narratives may be the best way to find those hidden utopias - that are un-seeable from the expected narratives that society gives to us.

What are some other means of jumping across narratives? Back the the aforementioned late 90s, I'd heard of a film-studies student who had used the school's video editing suites to re-cut "Pulp Fiction" into its chronological order. What utopias did he find? (or was he himself a film-school urban legend? ...a narrative utopia?)

At least we can continue to challenge and hack the stories we tell ourselves. Exegesis may be only the beginning....but I'm beginning to see why esoteric frequently means hidden.

Like pages 101 through 104.

Decoys

2009-08-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

I was reading about how much of the city of Bristol was saved by erecting a 2/3rds scale decoy farther down the river. A bit more research on Military Decoys brought me to this brilliant site.

Roads that Cross the Beltway

2009-08-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

I had begun to list the roads that I knew that crossed the Washington, DC Beltway without an interchange. I thought there were maybe ten to twelve. There are 39. I spent the fifteen minutes that the computer was rendering a video, looking at Google Maps and counting them.

These are great ways to avoid rush-hour traffic and get out of town without fighting to get past the Beltway. So, for the edification of the public, here they are from the "12 O'Clock position"(coincidentally the Montgomery/PG county line) running clockwise:

1) Riggs Rd.

2) Cherry Hill Rd.

3) Rhode Island Ave.

4) Cherrywood Ln.

5) Greenbelt Rd.

6) Good Luck Rd.

7) MLK Hghwy.

8) Ardwick Ardmore Rd.

9) Glenarden Pkwy.

10) Arena Dr.

11) Darcy Rd.

12) Suitland Pkwy.

13) Suitland Rd/Forestville Rd. (partial exit)

14) Auth Rd.

15) Temple Hills Rd.

16) Livingston Rd.

17) Oxon Hill Farm Rd. (Dead End)

18) GW Pkwy. (partial exit)

19) Fleet Dr./McGuin Rd.

20) Backlick Rd.

21) Heming Ave.

22) Lee Hghwy.

23) Idlywood Rd.

24) Oak St.

25) Lewinsville Rd.

26) Old Dominion Dr.

27) Live Oak Dr. (Dead End)

28) MacArthur Blvd.

29) Persimmon Tree Rd.

30) Bradly Blvd.

31) Greentree Rd. (Dead End)

32) Frenwood Rd.

33) Cedar Ln.

34) Kensington Pkwy.

35) Jones Mill Rd/Beach Dr.

36) Linden Ln.

37) Seminary Rd.

38) Sligo Creek Pkwy.

39) Burnett Ave.

2009-06-14T07:01:00.001-07:00

Full text of "The Absorbent Mind" is available on Google Books.

It's all relative.

2009-06-14T04:24:00.000-07:00

A helpful calculator for DC in the summer.

The Absorbent Mind in it's early teens

2009-06-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

I had a long discussion with a friend of mine on a dark, humid night here in DC. He was worried, like many of us are, that he's not as inspired and creative now as he was 15 years ago when we first met. He's got a good job; a journalist for a major national magazine. He's got a pretty decent social life; he'd been flirted with by no less than three young professionals that evening. He's over-worked; but like most of us, he's happiest when busy.
Neither he nor I have made the films, documentaries or art-projects we'd planned all of those years ago. The details of life took priority. So looking back at the creative people we'd been years ago, it's easy to feel that we let something slip.

My suggestion was three part:
1) find a topic to obsess on - something that you can be crazy enough to bleed for; something where your enthusiasm will infect other people.
2) go back and watch the films and TV that "creeped you out" in your early teens. As adults we've lost the 'magical realism' that we saw the world through as kids. But in our early teens we're at this specific time when pop culture connects with us, where we can blend the emotional sensitivity of childhood with the rational articulation of early adulthood. (This idea is lifted from Maria Montessori's 'Absorbent Mind' -- the idea that certain times in our development, we're receptive to new ideas and styles of learning, and perhaps sadly, there are times when we resist them)

Following this logic, your mid-30s are not a time when your brain is hard-wired for new modes of knowing and learning (I knew some colleagues in grad school who tried to counter this with 'entheogenics') But my early to mid teens teemed with new ideas and ways of looking at things. While visiting another friend in his tiny, cramped, rent-controlled apartment, he'd assumed that because I teach TV/Film, I would know virtually every television program ever made. He was still fascinated by a show he'd seen in his early teens on Nickelodeon. He was at exactly the right age to connect with this show. It took some digging, but I found it. It was a rebroadcast of several non-US tween Sci-Fi from New Zealand, Wales, Britian and Canada, repackages for US cable called 'The Third Eye'. Thaks to the magic of the internet, we were able to watch some episodes. I had not seen the show during my 'absorbent mind' phase, and as such it struck me as contrived, campy, clever, and mundane. For my friend it was a type of functional nostaglia: he spent the rest of the evening writing (as opposed to surfing the Internet)

Back to my discussion and three points.

Find the books, TV, music and otherwise disposeable pop culture that unsetteled you in your early teens and re-watch them at least three times, taking notes and critically disecting your emotional responses. Because if you can caputre those responses and articulate them as an adult, you'll have an 'audivisual emotional literacy' that you can then use to write and produce powerful media.

My number three is a little less well-formed. In a nutshell, make a PowerPoint presentation. Make a slide-show mock-up: start to assemble to pictures, audio and video while writing a short script on the idea you're obsessing on. No doubt you will find parallels between your functional nostalgia show/album and your chosen topic -- but avoid directly combining the two.

Will my friend make is documentary? I have no idea. But at least he's going to spend some time researching and creating something tangible. These little presentations could wind up the equivalent of Facebook postings - short bursts of creativity shared for the love of the topic.

E-Solutions 4 E-verybody

2009-01-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

Not Quite Live-Blogging:

Here are the random and unedited notes that I made during the Google/New America Foundations "Wiki Whitehouse e-Government" conference and seminar:

http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/wiki_white_house

I busted out the tiny Asus Ee PC and semi-live blogged the event. In fact, since I hung out in the back of the room with the cool kids, I didn't have that good of a view. So I streamed the live feed to my computer (sound off) for a better POV. So now, without further preface, my random musings:

Thinking again about the nature of democracy - what is the nature of self-determination within collective action when technology allows for very fluid connections between individuals and groups.

Transparency vs. Communication

What will be the push back from corporate entities and entrenched political parties? Use of PR and adversing?

What is the difference between resident and citizen?

What can be "crowd-sourced"? What is the relationship between democracy and "the crowd"? What is the value of mass connectedness?

What are the nature of open-source and tech standards?
Craig is shopping for a Label. It makes him good at oxymorons. (note - we are not paradoxical, we are optimistic!) "My fellow nerds..."

Are we at the rise of "Geek Cultural Revolution". Free the nerds! A new kind of civic engagement: become 'smart' about one topic and get involved online.
Don't feed the trolls.-- building discussion boards for vote ups/downs -- will run back into the persistant problems of democracy. For example those people looking to either scam a system.

- Net Neutrality is close to agreement, but professional PR trolls get billable hours to slow down genuine discussions.
- Digital Divide is being diminished through cheap mobile phones, but the education and thought needed for participation needs to be expanded.

What will the opennes to comments on YouTube and WaPo articles do to discourse? Will we start running sources and using social netowrking -- will we demand the same of government info dumps (like budgets and spending bills) Is corporate and government deleting of comments a restriction of 1st amendment rights? Especially in a world where there is no shortage of space (unlike ink & paper)

Technocratic Meritocracy! Public Diplomacy.

What is the role of comment posts as the new 4th estate for the post-literate age? How literate will the post-literate information era be? (education for new masses?) Or bury dissent in a sea of unorganized information?

Is the next decade and a half the rough equivalent of the time period 1776 to 1789? (what is the new form or government that is going to evolve?) What is the relevance of the nation state - controlling resources? What new resources can challenge these old structure?

Look again at "Yes Prime Minister". What is "open government"? How do you know when you have it?

Innovation: a small video-mixer software where a operator can switch between wi-fi cameras in a room.

Are we at the height of a "Praxic Age"? What does it turn into? What are the social ideas which endure?
What do we need to do to change the culture? (Bitchun Society?) Education better than Attrition to change from a broadcast to a p2p mentality & culture.

----
and somewhere I still have my notes from the House of Sweden event I went to over Spring Break. But that's another posting...

Science

2008-11-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

I'm not worried about Luddism. In fact, in order to be a functional Luddite, you'd have to already be pretty sophisticated in your approach to science.

What worries me more is that too often we make ourselves willfully ignorant of the science and technology that have such an immense impact on our lives and culture. This is sometimes called a 'magical re-masking' of technology back into the wondrous. Which is a great thing to do for children and for literary suspension of disbelief. But when raised to a lifestyle, it becomes a dangerous philistinism.

Carving out new alchemists, high priests and hierophants of technology lets too many people off the hook for understanding the complex and nuanced world around them. Some people are calling for a reversal of this almost as a form of civil rights movement.

What can we do to make all citizens of a 'digital democracy' into 'media alchemists'? Can we design a system of education to bring all people to the understanding of what had been esoteric gnosticism a few generations ago? What responsibilities do we need to hold ourselves to in order to remain aware of the creation of ideas in a distracting world of cultural spectacle?

Granted, there are no easy answers to these questions. But by asking them, at least we can have a thoughtful dialogue on how we want people to think for themselves in the near future.

gender & politix:

2008-11-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

thinking about gender and politix:

http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Mt7FMoFrs

http://www.bitchmagazine.org/

What does it mean to "queer" something when you're philosophical tradition is reasonably conservative?

Pardon the pun, but it can make for some pretty strange bedfellows:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/may/15/thefarright.gayrights
http://eveningpapers.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/20080424_asegler.pdf

http://books.google.com/books?id=TbaL1VYhaNMC&pg=PA270&lpg=PA270&dq=Queering+conservatism&source=web&ots=RgHvPSZqMG&sig=muBZMIQQVnkIX6pdyFDLtQVnV1o&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPP1,M1

On Telegraphs & TelePrpmpTers

2008-09-17T06:33:00.000-07:00

On two technologies: Telegraphs & TelPrompTers

One of the public relations stunts that P.T. Barnum executed which was not a hoax was being the first private citizen to send a transatlantic telegram. In a move that would make the yet-uborn Marshall McLuhan proud, Barnum openly admitted that the content of this first telegraph was not important. The medium itself was the message. Barnum was reinventing himself and his personal brand within the early electronic/communication revolution. (coincidentally, Barnum had a 5th cousin who later got rich building telegraphs)

There is a fascinating new book about the collision of science, industrial technology and show business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Madness in the Making

I am trying to either build or buy two TelePrompTer hoods for the student production studio at UDC. In an attempt to better train students for news and documentary productions, I believe that they will need to know both how to operate and read from prompters. Reading from prompter is both an art and a craft that many people simply can not master. It's an astonishing example of the metaphor that everyone who watches television assumes they could make it as well. TelePrompTers are a fantastic example of Heidegger's idea that the complexity and the assumptions of the technologies we use are self-concealing. (everyone can drive an [automatic transmission] car, but few could repair one, and fewer still could build one) A well-produced news piece, even one only made for podcasting or streaming,
will feature on-camera talent reading so naturally from the prompter, so that the technical aspect of the production is completely hidden from the viewer, and the 'personality' of the presenter or 'content' of the story covers the technical production.

But beyond this self-concealing aspect of prompters in television production, they also highlight the weird tension between written and spoken words. Anyone who has delivered a speech from TelePrompTer is first very aware of the uncanniness and awkwardness of the experience. After several takes, the performance (and it is a performance & vocal contrivance) becomes more natural. After a 16 week semester, students should be comfortable both reading and operating prompter. But this does not change the inscrutable connection/tension between reading words and speaking or hearing them. For the most simple example, turn on the English subtitles to a film you already know very well. Having the written text available to you changes your experience of listening to the performance of the film. This is only exacerbated when the words are scrolled, as they are in closed captioning, and brought to levels of near -confusion when you are the performer on camera who must read/perform the scrolling text. Yikes.

Reading is not performing. There are two skills necessary in using a prompter, one is the simple timing of the production, the other is the concealment of difficulty which the on-screen performance must include. The 'personality' or the 'content' becomes the distraction from the technical aspect of the media. Or, returning to the opening paragraph. The medium itself is the message, but it must conceal this fact from it's users and audience.

So, that is what I am looking to teach. No easy task.

an essay on the iconography of chubbiness

2008-08-11T04:02:00.000-07:00

If you're in the mood for an essay on the iconography of chubbiness and it's relation to enlightenment and idolatry (and a hypothetical Thai-fusion restaurant near DuPont Circle), click here.

More Random than Usual

2008-07-24T18:26:00.001-07:00

and SNUBBS.

Introduction by way of ...

2008-07-13T04:19:00.000-07:00

Knowing that everyone should spend more time writing, and less time watching television, reading tabloid newspapers, nattering into their cellular phones, etc., I want to be held to the same challenge. Thus starts this particular project in journaling. Sadly, the weblog seems to be loosing its original raison d'etre of long form writing. As English internationalizes becomes increasingly twiter-ised, it seems that few bloggers who are not paid and edited, write for deeper understanding and context.

Con-Text.

Among the many strange things I am paid to do, one is teaching a Media Literacy and History class. I frequently find myself explaining to my students exactly what context is. Many of my students are young and brilliantly headstrong. I don't expect the average 20-year-old working college student to spend much time contemplating the context of their words, actions and life overall. Attending college is supposed to change that. And that change is a long, slow process.

But so many "educated" "professionals" also ignore the context of their words, action and lives. Why? I myself will admit to being intentionally myopic at times. I understand that some selective attention, retention and selective exposure is necessary to stay sane in a chaotic world that can often appear random. But by shutting ourselves off from large chunks of our own sensory perception we can easily miss the connections within what initially appeared as random.

I occasionally make music mixes for family and friends. Decades ago this was the subtle art of the "mix tape". Years ago this was the techno-cratic bleeding edge of the "mix CD". Now, like so many other media, music mixes are hybridizing into equal parts physical and virtual. Be that as it may, my music mixes usually garner the initial response of, "Wow, that's random...but lots of fun." For those family and friends who have the patience to sit through several listenings over months, or even years, they return with many questions and theories of connections -- connections which I myself would only be liminally aware of.

By way of...
....Example.

One of the most difficult aspects and/or angles of writing is the balance of structure with spontaneity. At its simplest, this weblog is a practice for me to write m0re, write better, and write clever(er?). But at the same time, to be open to the connections which appear within what initially appeared as random if I spend enough time being open and looking for the right mental structures which are flexible-yet-fixed enough to describe these connections to other people. People like you, who also have the patience and desire to find connections in the seemingly random.

Come along...it'll be fun -- not necessarily easy or relaxing -- but well worth the trip.