hegemony rules

(via BoingBoing)

In today’s NYT ArtsBeat blog, Patty LuPone writes a letter defending her choice to chastise audience members who were using cell phones and flash photography during her performances. She writes:

Do we allow our rights to be violated (photography, filming and audio taping of performances is illegal) or tolerate rudeness by members of the audience who feel they have the right to sit in a dark theater, texting or checking their e-mail while the light from their screens distract both performers and the audience alike? Or, should I stand up for my rights as a performer as well as the audiences I perform for?

Reader comments generally supported Ms. LuPone’s position.  I especially liked this one:

Welcome to the club. College profs have been putting up with this BS for the better part of a decade.

Students often wonder why I have such stringent policies regarding technology use within the classroom.  I usually mention how it is distracting to lead class discussion and lecture when there are individuals surreptitiously writing text messages or e-mail on their phone.  In labs, I have students turn off their computer monitors – if I didn’t, most of them would spend the class period doing a combination of surfing the Web, IMing friends, and obsessively checking Facebook.  It’s not that no learning is taking place when students are doing this kind of multi-tasking, it’s that they’re paying continous partial attention to multiple tasks (what Linda Stone refers to as “semi-synch”).  This makes deep, reflective learning difficult.

Taking a cue from David Silver’s Digital Media Production class, I’m going to be separating out technology-focused days from theory-focused days in my Introduction to Communication and Technology class in the fall.  Fortunately, I’ll be teaching in a lab that has a large table with computers ringing the outside of the room – I think this structure will facilitate class discussion more readily and allow for a natural division between times we’re talking about technology and when we’re actually doing hands-on work.  Hopefully, this will also encourage students to become a bit more conscious about their use of technology in the classroom.

My presentation on the discursive construction of the “user” within information architecture has been posted on Slideshare (and below).  Please contact me (amassanari AT luc DOT edu) if you’d like the outline/crib sheet for this talk.

This is new.  Today, I got a comment on a screenshot posted to my Flickr account.  It seems to be, from what I can tell, very targeted spam.  Well, targeted more to me as a person (it mentions a dissertation resource site) rather than having anything to do at all with the actual image.

very targeted comment spam on flickr

Has anyone else had this happen?

Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State, authored a compelling piece about education and what has happened recently in the classroom.  On the first day of his large lecture class, he realized the entire notion of engagement has changed.  As students played their iPods, surfed Facebook, and IM’d, Wesch aptly notes,”the students were undoubtedly engaged, just not with me.”  He continues:

My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.

The solution, he argues, is to stop seeing technology as a distracting force that impinges upon the walls of the classroom, but to expand the walls of the classroom to include these technologies.

We don’t have to tear the walls down. We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world, and begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions.

When we do that we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.

The complete article is posted on Britannica.com.

I agree with Wesch’s perspective re: expanding the walls of the classroom to encourage engagement with the world (including all of the “distracting” new media surrounding us).  I especially like that he suggests that as teachers we must help students develop critical thinking skills in/around new media, and when they might learn the most by turning off their laptops and iPods. In my Communication and Technology course, I’ve asked students to take a 48 hour fast from non-essential new media consumption and reflect on the impact these technologies have on their sense of identity, community, and/or embodiment.  Most, I think, have hated the experience (and, that’s kind of the point, really), but I’m very curious to read their reflections.

What’s been interesting this semester is how many times I’ve assumed (wrongly, of course) that my students understood what appropriate use of new technology in the classroom entailed.  After watching several students repeatedly texting in class, asking them to stop, and then watching as they continue to text using their books to “hide” their cell phones as they continue to text (as if I won’t notice), I’ve become convinced that it’s incumbent upon educators to start talking (again) about the notion of a classroom community – and how iPods, laptops, cell phones, etc. can both add to and distract from the learning environment.

I noticed something interesting this morning when reading BoingBoing from my RSS aggregator. In a report about the jetBlue fiasco last week, Cory Doctorow writes,

After a week of terrible JetBlue delays, the CEO put together a youtube in which he apologizes to JetBlue fliers and promises to institute major changes to prevent a recurrence.

What’s interesting about this posting is not that the CEO used YouTube to distribute his apology (well, that’s sort of interesting, but not what I’m talking about here), it’s that Doctorow has now coined a neologism: “youtube,” as in, “post/distribute a video via YouTube.” It’s fascinating to witness the language changes that the internet brings with it – “googling” is now used as a reference to any type of online search – and now it looks like “youtube” will represent any sort of online video content. The commercial nature of the web is now becoming naturalized into the language we use to talk about it. This has happened before with terms like “Xerox” and “aspirin,” but I wonder if terms like “googling” or “youtub(ing)” will have the same staying power. Oh, and it’s a bit unnerving to realize that with Google’s acquisition of YouTube, they’re actually “owners” of both neologisms.

No power = no heat, no light, no computer, no fridge, no Wii, and one unhappy camper.

Horrible infographic from Seattle City Light showing the areas without power in red

I find it particularly interesting that the most racially and economically diverse neighborhoods of Seattle just so happen to be the ones that don’t have power yet. Of course, I’m sure this is just a coincidence…

OMG. LOL. WTF?

Anyone who wants to argue that the video game industry isn’t seriously sexist (and just about any other -ist you can think about) ought to spend a little time watching this fake ad for the Wii, which appeared on the G4 network. Oh, and the game industry says it’s all about grrl gamers…right. And, don’t get me started about the Ubisoft-backed Frag Dolls. Ugh.

There is, however, a great article in this month’s The Atlantic about attempts to create immersive environments in which characters actually respond to your words. Facade, a freeware “interactive drama” from Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, is a pretty engaging first attempt. They’re hoping to push the genre of these environments.

“There’s no drama genre, there’s no comedy genre,” Andrew Stern told me recently. “What exists right now are action movies, basically.” He might have added: silent action movies. The video-game industry’s annual trade show in Los Angeles, called the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short, is one of the loudest places I have ever been. Also one of the most silent.
…
It was only after I left the hall that I realized there was something odd about all the noise. The thunderous sound effects were masking the absence of conversation. In real life, much of what’s interesting involves talking to people. The characters in games could deliver scripted lines like “I’m ready to kick some ass!” or drop prerecorded comments on the action, but conversing with me or each other was completely beyond them. It occurred to me that if video games seem inhuman, that is because they lack humans. Their esoteric syntax is an artifact of a stunted environment in which blasting someone’s head off is easy but talking to him is impossible.

A month later, I asked Andrew Stern what he thinks of E3. “I shake my head a little,” he replied. “All this effort and money being poured into all this derivative and uninspired work. I’m bored and slightly disgusted.”

- Jonathan Rauch

I’ve tried out Facade and found it…well, interesting. It is more of an environment, rather than a game per-se, but I’m glad folks out there are actually trying to push the boundaries of video games far past the stereotypical point-and-shoot action genre.