The Core of ITP
This visualization of the digital media future (from Corning Glass) sparks a lot of discussion: pervasive TV, surface computing, digital signage, architectural video, even flexible OLED at 4:29. How does the lecture and the essay compete in this world?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38[/youtube]
Posted in After Class Discussion.
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– March 2, 2011
As mentioned in class (only moments ago) here is the url for the Graduate Center DropBox:
You should be able to simply log on with your CUNY ID etc, however space might need to be set up by the IT gurus here.
Posted in Uncategorized.
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– March 1, 2011
Posted in Weekly Readings.
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– March 1, 2011
Technology sucks the profit out of every business it touches. Michael DeGusta recently published an analysis of U.S. recorded music sales using data from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). He starts with a popular chart posted by mega-consultants Bain & Co. and fixes the numbers for inflation and population.
The corrected chart is titled The Real Death of the Music Industry:
Michael DeGusta's music revenue analysis by product.
Key findings:
It’s not just piracy, the Digital Revolution has broken the artist-composed album into easy-to-buy one-off singles, he says: “Turns out that, somewhat unsurprisingly, the recording industry makes almost all their money from full-length albums.”
See the full analysis at TheUnderstatement.com.
Posted in After Class Discussion.
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– March 1, 2011
I mentioned this panel in class last week and thought it may be of interest. Unfortunately it’s not a complete recording, but it does include the last 3 presentations and the discussion by all of the panelists. In particular, the panel by the founders of Open.Michigan was really well done.
Posted in After Class Discussion.
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– March 1, 2011
Student design for a poster for Haitian Relief
How do we judge students’ digitally-created content? Are we teaching Photoshop or photography, Final Cut or filmmaking? We always say that it’s the application that’s important, not the technology, but don’t we reflexively dismiss work that has an important message but comes carried in a sloppy format?
One of the arguments for using old technology is that it focuses on the work by restricting the technique. A haiku teaches you about syllabification, figuration and adding to 17. Driving a stick makes you listen to the motor and judge the relationship between hills and RPMs. Powerpoint can teach the rudiments of digital storytelling, motion typography, animation and imagery without a lot of expensive add-ons.
How do you separate content and technique? Some tech teachers focus on a subset of technical elements until students master the tech, and then they add a content assignment for that tech. Others link content with tech, for example, “Edit a news photo so it means the opposite of its original message.” Others combine student teams of different talent levels to collaborate on a final piece.
My own interest in K-12 students’ work comes in what it reveals about their teachers’ work. I look at portfolios and contest submissions to chart how technologies are being taught and how students understand them all in context. If every kid submits a Flash animation for a storytelling contest, or nobody ever edits a photo, I worry that something is missing. I rarely de-construct a file or shave off points for bad technical implementation, but I do ding poor messaging or murky argument.
Given our recent discussions about multimedia dissertations, what’s the outlook for higher education content?
Posted in Motivation.
rev="post-230" 4 comments
– February 27, 2011
Since last week’s discussion on maker culture, I have kept thinking about the contemporary band, Ok Go.
In class, we we talked about making things with technology, and I think, who owns materials once they are published online. As we discussed all of that, I kept thinking back to this band.
I am including a link to a NYT article that sums up the band’s recent strides in viral video dissemination, and fights with their record company. They are unique because they found mainstream success by taking a DIY approach to creating their music videos. See the following two examples [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1_CLW-NNwc [/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA[/youtube]
Yes, both videos are rather crudely made, but they are also very original because of their DIY quality. After the band fought with their record company, EMI, when they disabled the embedding feature on their videos, they dropped their major label, and started their own company .
So what is the tech/pedagogy take away here? Obviously, you should decide for yourself. But I think that it seems safe to say that people will take cultural production into their own hands, even when powerful companies try to stop them.
Posted in After Class Discussion.
rev="post-211" 2 comments
– February 27, 2011
Here are a very interesting set of blogs (all gathered from twitter) that address this question. Since we are talking about what students produce in a technology enhanced classroom this week, I thought these examples would help:
http://www.teachingcollegeenglish.com/2011/02/26/beginning-to-articulate-a-coherent-theory-of-why-i-integrate-tech/
http://www.teachingcollegeenglish.com/2011/02/25/what-web-2-0-looks-like-in-my-classroom/
http://np-composition.blogspot.com/search/label/technology
http://pedagogy.dwrl.utexas.edu/taxonomy/term/94
http://www.pedagogy.ir/
Enjoy!
Posted in Uncategorized.
rev="post-208" 2 comments
– February 27, 2011
I just wanted to attach a link to this article in the Chronicle about whether “video books” published with established presses will “count” in a tenure review. I found the points about the ephemeral qualities of this kind of scholarship to be particularly interesting.
Posted in After Class Discussion.
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– February 24, 2011
All, I hope class was joyous last night. After getting home lugging my ‘historically accurate Schubert edition’ from which my pianist played, I downloaded the precise score for free here. while trying to wake up I stumbled upon a NY Times article discussing the very same site where I was getting free sheet music from.
Per much discussion over Google Books, Amazon etc. the rights management of items came up often in last semester’s class. However, since I am currently working on my text/IPA project I would like to link in scores like those on IMSLP.org by translations for a more direct comparison to the set text.
I know this is not part of this week’s reading and that I am not the motivator, but I value your thoughts and opinions and think your feedback can help me in putting together my project update for this coming week’s class. Thus, I have a handful of questions for all of you…
1. Do you think that publishers will actually be able to shut down a site like imslp.org because they retain control over publishing rights to works created by composers who have been dead for over 200 years? (i.e. Mozart)
2. From an academic perspective, do you find educational value in having all materials (poem, translation, IPA, video and audio) in one place for students to analyze through a multi-media interaction? Or, do you find value in the search a student much go through to locate these materials? Pros and cons….
Example:
Music by Chad, words from a bathroom stall at Juilliard
This is the first page of a song setting of a poem I literally found on the wall of a bathroom stall while I was a student at Juilliard.
The original text looked like this:
just try and
imagine my surprise
last we glanced as my
lowered eyes
into yours arrived
and now you
know why.
I found the author after this was premiered (he was actually in the audience) and he let me know if was a phonetic acrostic poem (read downward through the first phonetic sound of each line) dedicated to a girl named Gillian who was also at the premiere performance. Awkward…
The IPA rendition looks like this:
dʒʌst traɪ ænd
ɪmædʒɪn maɪ sɚpraɪz
læst wi glænst æz maɪ
loʊɚd aɪz ɪntu
jɔɚz əraɪvd
ænd nɑʊ ju
no waɪ
Word doesn’t like this, so I had to go here to type that. If I did this in German I would have to specify the regional dialect to use this IPA and if it was in French there would be myriad parentheses around each symbol because the French are just like that. The English posted here is exceedingly simple.
I could include audio of this being sung, but I lost it, so perhaps I’ll just play and sing iPad style in class on Tuesday. Nevertheless, a comparative YouTube video of a good performance (diction-wise) of this could be embedded next to the score as could the audio as well.
3. With reference to the utilities compiled last week, can you suggest additional tools that would combine these multimedia elements into a pedagogically sound presentation?
Posted in After Class Discussion, Project Concepts.
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– February 23, 2011
