Halfway thoughts of Networked Media
“…the sheer generality of the term network makes it slippery to pin down precisely…”
This pretty much sums up this subject. On the surface you may think you know what it is, but in reality no one has really explored it enough to understand it. I feel like in this subject, the students are among the test subjects for a research and development team creating a new subject. They play it by ear, which is good in some fashions but also catastrophic. It means that we are doing an experimental subject and we do not know whether it will be useful for not. Next year this subject may not even exist. We don’t know. What I’ve deduced so far, 7 weeks in is that we are learning about speculation and how to speculate. That sounds interesting and all but for me it feels like the loose tyings of concepts and ideas that didn’t fit into any other subject so they were bundled together and put in this one.
What I found most frustrating was the wiki tasks. I just didn’t understand what we were doing with them because the assigner sheet was so general. Speculative interview. I couldn’t grasp the concept of what was required from us and when I tried to ask how it was to be done, it was just a rehashed version of the task description. It was like I was being told to jump off a ledge and nobody would let me see what was below.
I’m still working on the wikis so I may actually find them enjoyable but at the moment I still haven’t warmed to this subject. It is very hit and miss for me.
suggest you read Alois’, Anna Dunn’s, Denham’s, Lauren Midler’s, Patrick Turnbull’s, and Samuel’s blog, to begin with. They should provide enough to help you join the dots. As a recent post said, we can talk and claim to be innovative and creative, but you also have to do it. And subject’s aren’t pets, so the question is not whether it wants you to warm to it or not, but what is it asking of you, and why.