Month: March 2016

Creating this video based on a Haiku was an interesting exercise for me in discovering how the process of editing can apply a different meaning to the content that is used, a meaning that may not have been intended by the creator or what may be perceived if viewed in isolation.

A shot of feet walking down a city street can, at first glance, represent a busy populous moving about with no known purpose, even better if you have the atmospheric sound of a busy street with foot steps, tram dings, wind. All leads to what we view as a busy street.

But, if sound is removed and replaced with music of a particular tempo, placed in a sequence alongside other shots, and has text placed over it (all of which have a linking theme) a new context can be applied, one that focuses on a digitised population that is simply numbers. Yes, you see a busy street but you can infer more than that from the shot than you could before.

The video I created is deliberately lo-fi, particularly in the editing. Whilst a degree of technical quality was valued and (I hope) represented, I was more interested in the ability to manipulate media to tell a story rather than relying on any one media piece to tell a story.

As a result of this exercise, I have found a new value in editing that I hadn’t recognised before. I’ve been the ‘editor’ for a bunch of small projects and really only viewed the role as being one that put bits and pieces together into a shareable file that was enjoyable to watch. For future works, both in video and audio, I will be looking through the lens of ‘narrative editing’, where the process by which content is edited has a direct impact on narrative.

The video ‘Faceless’ features music by Klaus Topfinger, ‘Fire’.
It can be found at  https://soundcloud.com/todeskurve/klaus-topfinger-fire
The music used is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The distinguishing factors of a static personal journal and a blog, as Adrain Miles points out in Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning, is the public environment which blogs thrive on and which journals, by nature, avoid. This foundation, the existence of an audience, is almost trumped in my view by the second more revolutionary factor of blogs.

Blogs invite real time discussion, they prompt the audience to engage in sharing ideas, contesting others and in aiding the process of forming embryonic ideas not yet fully developed. In this invitation to converse, the blog instantly cedes the power granted to it’s print based cousin as being a point of authority which is not to be questioned by it’s passive audience. It isn’t as though a broadsheet constantly asserts it is right all the time, it doesn’t need to, but it doesn’t offer space for comment nearly as enthusiastically as a blog does.

In ceding this power blogs, or more specifically the individual posts within them, don’t act as stationary ideas which just happen to be available to everyone. Instead they are discussion markers, which can exist on their own but reach their full potential when engaged with, added to and torn apart.

‘Unlock the knowledge’, it’s a phrase I’ve started using at work and one that I use every time I feel like living inside of a TED Talk. Personal slogan? Maybe, I have translated it to Latin, ‘Qui reserver notitia’, so I guess if I don’t start using this at the bottom of my email signature I could start up a small private school, slogan in hand, or I could buy a garage and fill it with books. Platitudes aside, this is exactly what blogs do, especially in an educational context. Miles describes a ‘community of practice’, where a collective intelligence can be utilised, where it isn’t about the posts but about the ideas.

This is where I came up with a question that, honestly, I don’t think I have an answer for.
What is more important in a blogging community, the post or the comment?
The simple response would be that without a post there is no comment, no communication takes place and the knowledge is left locked. The post is the most important thing, period.

But! What use is it to a community of practise where posts, which hold the potential to be interacted with, remain unaddressed? Static. Does the post have any value? Is it the potential for someone to add their two cents to a discussion that provides value? Why are so many rhetorical questions being asked and why do we keep refreshing the page to see if anyone is commenting?

Perhaps viewing these two elements in a vacuum, unaware of the other, is the wrong way to approach the question of which is more important. In fact doing this only seems to prove that the relationship between post and comment is symbiotic.

My gut feeling is that the comment is more important than the post, how else does a community exist, particularly an academic one, without there being a transfer of critique and extension. A post’s value is not derived from it’s construction, length, links to guys in garages or even the ideas and arguments of the author, it comes from the discussion that takes place.

From this, comes a need for the community to determine some norms to commenting. In the YouTube community, the comment section is a stream of text which doesn’t add to the conversation, instead defaulting to abuse and spam. Facebook comments have become a long stream of users being ‘tagged’ by their friends to draw attention to this kid who is alarmingly nonchalant about his peanut butter coating.  Yes comments are extremely powerful, but only if the community that utilises them develops a code around how and when to comment without being restrictive so as to have members of the community question whether to add to the conversation or not.

The decentralisation of both media and education provides a massive opportunity for ideas to be shared and developed, but only if the community which shares and consumes these ideas are able to ,both technically and practically, comment in such a way that encourages further debate and discussion. At least thats what I think, thoughts? Comments?

Qui reserver notitia

Studying something as ambitious as a University degree probably has a bit to do with the way you are able to consume, analyse, question, apply and even teach what you learn, which is a surprise given that the ‘in-between’ space from secondary schooling to sitting down in the lecture theatre is full of distractions that are vying for your attention.

Special laptop discounts, concession cards, travel companies, student unions, banks, phone service providers and juice bars are all battling it out to get the ‘student’ market. Sure, you may have been a student for [pause to get out calculator] twelve years, but now you’re of value… which is nice, suddenly the label of ‘student’ is a badge of honour that you didn’t quite get with your old school tie. But they’re all on the periphery of being a student, they’re distractions. This is a problem because in the same week that I became quite accustomed to my new personal stamp of ‘student’, I picked up another one. I’m hyper attentive. At least, that is what I diagnosed myself as being in the ten minutes of reading Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes by N. Katherine Hayles.

Ignoring the irony of spending such little time on determining my default attention mode, the end result of coming to this conclusion was actually quite calming. It is nice to have a label sometimes, it places you in a group when before you just thought your traits were a discrepancy from the norm and helps you better identify yourself. I suspect that this is why horoscopes are so successful, they thrive off of the power of the label.

Not only was having this label reassuring, but it made a lot of sense to me. Of course I am hyper attentive, I am the product of a world that became increasingly hostile right at the moment that my academic workload started to steadily increase.
Even watching Steve Jobs tease the audience at the launch the iPhone two years before I started secondary school now seems tedious to me, spending too much time labouring one point and not enough getting to the shiny thing, getting to the reward.

The evolutionary role that attention has played in human development that Hayles describes is what interests me the most, it is as though we have reverted back to our primal cognitive mode, one that is constantly reacting to the hostilities that surround our physical environments and our still developing digital ones. Everything from the notifications that demand our immediate attention and response to the surprisingly rewarding feeling of scrolling through our newsfeeds. We are in a new age of bombardment and our minds have done a great job of not only adapting to this environment but now thrive off the little dopamine kick we get when we get a ‘like’ we like switching tasks, it feels good.

From my own perspective, outside of a learning context, I don’t see this as a uniquely ‘millennial’ issue. Regardless of age, we all fall for the little red dot that appears next to the app icon on the home screen.

I agree with Hayles that in a learning context, the generation that is just now going through the tertiary education system is the first that may see the significant impacts of these distractions on learning, both positive and negative.

Positives of being hyper attentive include the ability to be aware of the wider environment when studying a particular topic, and being able to rely on multiple information streams and fuse knowledge from these multiple streams, if utilised properly it can encourage a diversity in learning. Of course the negatives of being hyper attentive are significant, not valuing a task or information because it doesn’t offer instant reward actually limits the amount of learning that can be done.

Taking a step back and spending time to focus on learning as a process was a really helpful way to start the course and I’ll be trying to monitor my ability to harness the strengths of both of these modes of attention over the next couple of months.

I say both of these modes because although I believe I have a natural tendency towards being hyper attentive, after all this is the primal default, I do find myself focusing on tasks of varying levels of intensity. Whilst I’m not at a stage where the thought of spending hours upon hours with a book by Dickens results in a Dopamine overload that requires medical attention, I can spend around forty-five minutes constructing a blogpost #meta and I reject the idea that there is a binary status where we can fit into only one box, I suggest you watch this speech by Melbourne media maker Jonathan Brown if your hyper attention is getting the better of you and you’re now more interested in the topic of binaries.

The core message of Hayles is that in the context of education, both educators and students need to acknowledge the flux between these modes and from this I see that there is no wrong or right mode, though there is a need to be flexible and aware of our environment and an ability to train ourselves to get the most out of each mode.