Category Archives: the network

please don’t kill my books

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i really enjoyed today’s symposium/unlecture. i found that there were a lot of interesting points brought up from the answers to the various questions. so much so that this post may be split into two posts discussing different things. but we’ll see how we go (that’s real essay writing here folks, i never know where it’s gonna lead!).

so, onto today’s ever so important question… is the book dead?
I, for one, certainly hope not! you probably all think i’m crazy but i love books. and i hear you all saying “but lauren, it’s all so much easier on the ipad. who wants to lug around 6 text books?” and the answer is.. me!!! even despite the slipped disk in my back, i still would rather carry around 6 physical books than one lousy ipad. you can flip through a book. you can hold it there in front of you. and you can highlight it!!! (as we’ve already discussed, i cannot do readings online, i need to print them out to be able to take in the info while reading). maybe it’s different on the ipad but on the computer you’re reading upwards, like, vertical. it just doesn’t work!

now, i do see what adrian was saying, the difference between literature and books. and that even though books may be dead, but literature isn’t. and yeah, that’s alright

for the people in offices who don’t want to have to search through 50 filing cabinets to find one file. but what about all us bookophiles (is that a word? it is now) who just love to curl up with a book and read it. an i pad or e-reader or kindle just isn’t the same. you don’t get the love, it can’t really be passed down. and it doesn’t crease when you’ve read it too many times (like my harry potter 4, which had so many pages falling out from overuse that i need to buy a new one. but i love that!). and best of all, crazy bookmarks. i love using different things as bookmarks. here’s the one i’m using now, isn’t it great? can’t have one of those on a fancy e-book now can you?

i liked the idea that soon, when everything does become digital, books will become more valuable, collectors item like vinyls. i guess i’ll be rich then with all my books! not that i’d ever give them up. i was explaining to someone today just how attached i am to my books that when my mum took my copy of twilight overseas and left it there i was both furious and devastated. now, i hate twilight, i thought the book was terrible and i was never planning on reading it again. but it was still my book, i had read through those pages and it had sat on my shelf with my others books so the thought of it lost in a foreign country was just awful. (still haven’t worked out that i’m crazy?).

and no one can ever really get rid of books… right? like was discussed at the symposium, everyone thought theatre would die with the introduction of film, but plays and musicals are still going strong (and if none of you have heard of or seen “book of mormon” i urge you to check it out.) and vinyl is back in fashion again (if only i had a record player). i don’t remember who said this in the unlecture but it was a good point; “the same content but different carrier”. i guess the problem is i like the book as the carrier. i don’t want the book to be a temporary technology. but i guess it will have to adapt to survive in our ever changing modern world. if only we as humans didn’t always find it necessary to have things as technological as could possibly be. i miss being able to throw my brick phone nokia at a wall and pick it up like nothing has happened. i miss when toddlers had to learn shapes and to read from books and toys not electronic games and screens that just tell them everything. maybe i’m a little too nostalgic. but i will miss the book when it goes. hopefully that won’t be for a long long time.

 

goodbye lecture

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so we were finally getting the hang of the unlecture symposium only to have it stripped away from us. yes, hopefully the strike will lead us to a good outcome for students and teachers, but it was cold and raining and i spent around 2 hours trying to film the protest while shielding the camera from the rain under other peoples umbrellas. safe to say, i couldn’t feel my hands when i came back inside which made transferring the footage onto the computer a much harder task.

but, onto the the lecture that never happened. instead we got some pretty interesting youtube videos to look at. the problem was that watching these videos on youtube of course led my mind to wander so after watching one i’d be led onto something completely random and irrelevant (like the new honest trailer for star trek into darkness or what if star wars episode 1 was good or more info about the new pokemon mega evolutions – megakangaskhan anyone?!?!) so it really took me a lot longer than it should have to get through the videos. but i did. and they were pretty good. and here are some interesting points i took away from them.

the first video asked us if schools kill creativity. this comes from us learning and creating through making mistakes and being wrong however the current construction of the school system puts great emphasis on being right and never making mistakes. kids aren’t afraid to be wrong but as we grow older we become more afraid of being wrong because the institutions around us push us to be right.  if you’re not prepared to be wrong then you’re not gonna come up with anything original. education system restricts creativity by not allowing being wrong at all. we grow out of our creativity. again this relates back to design fiction. we need to be able to think ahead, to speculate and not just live in the present where we are told what to do and whats right and wrong. nothing can ever be created in an environment where creation is inhibited.

next came the description of the hierarchy of subjects in school: maths at the top, then humanities, then arts (and within arts is art and music then drama and dance). and all these relies on academic ability – aimed at creating the university professor. in this model, most useful things (subjects) for work are classed as more important. we need science and we need doctors and lawyers and maths. but the problem with this system is that highly talented people don’t realise they are because what they are good as is not classed as important during school. kids who are brilliant at music or dancing or acting are forced into those horrid methods or physics classes and are told that they are not learning right. and so the actual talent is suppressed. who knows what these kids could create? and now we might never know and the whole world has missed out.

the second video emphasised the difference between knowledgable and knowledge-able and the importance of the latter. Wesch describes knowledge-able as “being able to find, sort, criticise and create new info.” again this is similar to what we were hearing from adrian back on day 1 of Networked media, we want the “know-how” not the “know-what”. anything can tell us the know what or give us the knowledge but we need to know what to do with that, how to use it or even how to create our own.

there was also a lot of talk about the impact of media on communication and the world in the recent years. how “media has mediated our relationships” for example us changing the layout of our living rooms to be situated around the tv. our programs and conversations have been shortened and are punctuated by commercials. tv and media is a one-way conversation. you have to be on tv to have a voice or be significant. in the classroom, the students are trying to finding meaning in the word and find their significance in the huge world online. media is a global conversation, and now, even though it is easier to connect and share than it ever was before, it is also know eve harder to actually get out there.

Welsch also discussed the video he made with his students. check it out below if you haven’t already because it was actually brilliant and describes how most students feel at uni or even high school.

just so interesting, it’s like what’s been discussed previously in the lectures and classes. we need to create our futures. what we are learning right now isn’t necessarily the best or most conducive way to learn what we need. problems with technology now, we all have our fancy laptops open in class but are we always working? sit at the back of a lecture theatre and at least half of the screens will be showing facebook or some other social networking site. the sentences i found the most interesting in the video were about how much reading and writing would be done for their classes compared to their online life. which is why i have found keeping this blog is so great. it encourages us to contribute in a way that we are familiar with. i feel i’ve written more in this blog for the subject than i would have for any other class this year so far. and that’s the importance of creating and introducing these new modes of learning that better suits the way society and students function today. the current education system is practically archaic and students tune it out purely because most cannot focus for that long. we are used to 6 second videos, not 2 hour lectures.

so, all my essays have been wrong?

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now, those first assigned readings are pretty lengthy and heavy. and i’m so tired that my eyes are turning each letter into some strange hieroglyph that probably wouldn’t even make sense to Cleopatra. so i decided to leave those nice long essays for another time and move onto to something a little nicer on the brain. and i’m glad i did. the age of the essay, by paul graham, was really interesting and has really changed my whole view on essays. unfortunately however, i think if i actually took any of this advice and wrote a proper “essay” for an assignment, i would prob fail. but, it’s interesting stuff either way.

it was interesting the way Paul explained how the way we write essays is similar to hows lawyers present an argument. even though i’ve never really watched law an order, i’ve seen enough law shows on tv to see how that makes sense. an opening statement, presenting the argument with evidence and witnesses and then delivering a closing statement. pretty much an essay word for word. also, i absolutely hate the conclusion of an essay. kinda like how Paul described, it’s pretty much just summing up the previous points but no new ones?? then whats the point of the rest of the essay? like he said, it’s just finding a way to smartly re-word the intro, and it’s often really hard to do, especially when you’ve already spent so much time smartly wording the intro itself.

my favourite part of the article was when paul tells us what a real essay is. essay literally means try. now, as i mentioned before, i wish essay we write at uni could be like this. when i was reading the stuff he was describing about a real essay, like, not starting with a thesis or definitive point to argue but rather going in with a thought or question and just exploring where it could take you, to me that kinda felt like my blog. i start to write something as a blog post and as i write i’ll realise something new or one thought will take me on a completely unintended path or thought stream. thats why half my blog posts end up so long! my mind likes to make weird connections that i don’t even realise until i’m half way through a paragraph that i had not intended in an way.  for a couple of my previous blog posts i actually had to go back and change the title or the first paragraph because the rest of the post didn’t follow it at all! but i could just be crazy. similarly, in high school i could never plan an essay, even in english, like for the final exam. like, i would write practice essays to prepare but i would never get to an essay and write out  plan and dot points on what i would say. because for me, each sentence would form the next sentence and these would often lead to new ideas that you just can’t think about in the pressure of giving yourself 5 minutes to plan an essay at the start. so when beginning an essay i was never entirely sure where it would end and often had to go back and change the introduction accordingly.

like paul said, a real essay is thinking out loud. and to me that’s pretty much what blogging is! it’s a search search for truth but is supposed to meander, not get straight to point. the random tangents we take are where the exciting stuff happens. the surprises. and these are our most valuable experiences. not only are surprises made from what we don’t know but often they contradict what we thought we knew. and that’s where we lead to new discoveries and ideas. they can’t just come from no-where. they come from the unknown or the strange and are built upon to create something great.

it was pretty good advice, that stuff towards the end. an interesting way to look at life. allow yourself to be wrong because what made you wrong could be interesting or surprising. don’t simply accept everything you have been told by society. search for the truth in what is usually a given fact but seems wrong or “off”. and then you can write an essay.

and now i know some interesting facts about vikings in the 900’s too. gotta love them vikings.

charles cabbage and other class activities

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ok, maybe calling Charles Babbage, “Charles Cabbage”, is a bit disrespectful. but it’s not my fault that his last name sounds like cabbage. it just flows better.

in this weeks class, after some pretty light discussions about how most people enjoyed this weeks unlecture, we were thrown headfirst into research for our niki pages. who is niki do you ask?? niki is the networked media wiki. but niki sounds better than nmwiki so lets stick with niki. as i’m sure you’ve guessed by now, i was lucky enough to pull charles babbage out of the hat, along with 4 other class members. and while others in the class were sitting happily with stuff like written “youtube” on their little slips of paper, my table just had the dumbfounded faces. “who the hell is charles babbage??”

well now, i’ll tell you who charles babbage is. mr. babbage pretty much invented the calculator. now, i’m not talking about the pocket calculator, coz you would need pretty big pockets to fit this 2 story, 50 tonne beauty into your pocket. but back in the late 1800’s, babbage didn’t like the inaccuracy of calculations and so devised a machine to eliminate human error in arithmetic.


try fitting this in your pocket

so, after each of us spent 15 minutes googling (crazy that googling is a legitimate verb nowadays!) our mysterious subject, we were tasked with coming up with some ways of creating our niki page so that it would reflect his voice. you know, like an interview. except that he’s been dead for like 100 (almost wrote 1000!) years. and here we struggled. not because it was such a hard thing to think about, because i’m sure if we set our minds to it we would come up with something constructive (and if you by chance want to see what we came up with, and it’s not much i’ll just warn you know, you can check it out here) but our problem was that our attention span is just too short. everytime one of us came up with an idea, or the start of an idea, or even brought up another fact about the interesting life of mr babbage, we would all sidestep onto some completely random topic that would go on for another 10 or so minutes. so, by the end of class, our best idea was to ressurect charles as a zombie and try to talk to him before he tried to eat our brains. as you can see, a very productive class. but at least we’re getting somewhere….kinda.

wicked problems and future speculation, a successful “unlecture”

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so, yesterday marked the first unlecture that i thought really felt like an unlecture. we had prewritten questions that were all very relevant to what this course is about (rather than “Why do we have to come to this?”), many good points and contributions from the symposium team and also people asking and having their questions answered within the lecture itself. my main point, it was a very enjoyable and informative 50 minutes.

my favourite idea from the discussion was adrian’s explanation of the “wicked problem – a problem with no simple or single solution. where any response may cause other problems” and that design fiction is important in this area because it is not limited to straight, singular answers but can think broadly and more adaptbly (not a word but let’s roll with it). this idea linked in again with the ideas of the speculative thinking of design fiction and why we are studying this course in this method. the world is changing. as adrian said “print changed the world” and now the internet is doing it again and we are all getting pulled along for the ride. we need to think about what the future will be and look like. what we will be doing and how and where and when and what. what will our jobs look like in 5, 10 or 15 years? everything could and probably will be different.

another interesting point was that “content is not king”. people pay for the experience and a platform that can provide the content that people want will make the money, not the content itself. because the content can be replicated but the outlet to access that content is what is unique. we live in an ever changing society and if we want to succeed we need to find that edge up on the millions of people who can just create content with the technology readily available to them. we need to utilise the possibilities of design fiction and speculation in order to be prepared for the future of our industry. and then we’ll have to do it all again5 years later.

(trying to get my blog posts shorter. getting there but not quite just yet. as you’ve probably noticed, i tend to go on and on a lot. there is just so much you could write about. but i want to try and keep theses short, or they have the possibility of never ending. here i go ranting again. ok. imma stop now)

maps, maps and more maps

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adrian posted this article in the subject blog and i really enjoyed it so wanted to share it with you all (that is, if “you all” is actually anyone at all). link is here.

some really interesting maps on this one. i found that australia and russia seem to be on almost opposite ends of the spectrum in nearly every case. in a lot of these maps, australia is well up there in the, lets say awesome, section of the spectrum, such as our high economic equality, we’re pretty welcoming to foreigners (although you wouldn’t think that now with all those awful “Stop the boat people” ads going around), we’re one of the the best places to be born and apparantly we are one of the top countries to be a mother in 😀 although we are pretty emotional (although not as emotional as america.) but i guess that contributes to why we all feel very loved (yes, one of the maps showed that we feel the most loved compared to many other countries. here’s a virtual hug to everyone in the blue/sad countries on the love map)

a funny one was the russian guy who speculated that the US would break up into 4 separate countries run by canada, mexico, russia and europe. and who knew there were so many atheists in china?? but that time lapse map of the earth from space was really cool. i’d love to visit one of those icy countries. yeah, it would be cold, but it would also be pretty cool (see what i did there?) and i’ve always wanted to build a proper snowman.

the one that’s really scary is just how far some of hamas’s rockets can reach out into israel. i’ve stood on the border of israel and gaza and it’s not a happy place. the towns along the edges of the border have a bomb shelter every 3 houses in each street. what a terrifying way to live. (wow, that just got pretty political, didn’t mean to go there. the map did it! blame the map!)

what i did find really interesting (and here’s me getting slightly political again, sorry!!) was how we had one of the highest percentage of tolerance towards homosexuality (even higher than america) but we still have yet to legalise gay marriage!!! there was a pretty high number of countries who have already (we can worry about the ones who’ve ruled it punishable by death another time) but isn’t it about time that we legalise it too?? IMO we need to take a leaf out of New Zealand’s book and make it legal. but that’s enough political stuff from me. i feel pretty strongly about this but you don’t need to suffer through my rantings. but i was happy to see that we weren’t in the highest percentage of smoking per person so at least aussies (well, some at least) are getting something right.

lets lighten the mood up a bit before signing off, how crazy is this map!!!!

Kane’s mansion building the future of technology

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so, this week’s readings were a bit heavy, mainly because to me, they were so old and, lets say “outdated” technologically, that sometimes i found myself getting lost in all that talk of hypertext. i mean, i’m just assuming hypertext is a hyperlink coz i know what a hyperlink is (well,not really but kinda)

but i know its not. and then it just started talking about the Xanadu program and all i could think of was that huge Xanadu mansion from Citizen Kane because we were forced to watch that movie over 50 times in VCE for media. reading through the document and all the talk of introducing hypertext and saving files online, i was just thinking, “how old is this?”. then i passed the sentence saying that a new product called “CD’s” were coming out and i realised just how old it was, it’s really crazy just how much technology has changed in the last 30 years.

what was interesting was just the innovations and ideas that people were created based off this very, dare i say primitive, system. that already the ideas were being created of storing multiple files on a computer or online rather than on floppy disks, this forward thinking is what got us where we are in technology today. the predictions about the fate of print were interesting too, because although print is not completely dead, it looks to be heading that way with the advancement of our technology.

i think the main ideas to take away from the reading is not necessarily the technological stuff (because lets, face it, we’re way past CD’s now) but more the ideas behind it. how to improve and expand on what we have and make it better and more accessible and simple (yes bad grammar, but that’s the beauty of the blog). coming back to design fiction, its not what we can do with our technology, but what we could do that takes us into the future.

Quantum levitation and warp speeds

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so, in class this week, among other things, we got into some interesting discussions about the potentials of design fiction and current scientific innovation. the main idea i took away from design fiction is the speculation. it’s not about what we can do but what we could do. discussing the reading about design fiction, jake brought up his blog post about design fiction in sci-fi which included some interesting tuff about NASA being at the concept stage of developing the ability to travel at warp speed!! just the possibility of that being feasible is so awesome. who doesn’t hear that and picture themselves sitting in a fancy captain’s chair (like Kirk’s) and telling someone to “jump to light speed”? so cool.

another new scientific development was brought up in class after i continuously rambled on about how cool it would be to have hover boards (see my previous post about hover boards) and this was quantum levitation. here’s a video so you can see just how cool (and i mean that literally, check out the video and you will get it) this new science stuff is.

now, i don’t really do physics (which is prob why i’m doing a media course. well, i also like media) so the actual “how” of quantum levitation makes no sense to me whatsoever. and i think the stuff has to be like really cold for it to work. but, just the fact this is a possibility is what is so awesome, and the possibilities of where it could lead to is what’s really exciting.

if you want more info on the actual science and stuff behind the quantum levitation, check out this video here which has  dr Boaz Almog explaining the whole thing. more awesome science advancement stuff coming out of israel, love it

Blogging success!

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since we started doing these blogs, i’ve been keeping up to date with adrian’s posts on the subject blog and my one aim was to get a mention in one of his posts. after a week and a half of random rants, success! i have made it in. granted, my mention was just about me liking the course but not the recent lecture so much, rather than me actually having something useful or intelligent to contribute in regards to like, the subject or readings or anything (my blog posts tend to be more along the lines of random and unintelligible rantings, most of which involve pokemon) , but a mention is a mention!