I Can’t Get to Class, So Participation?

This is called a STICKY post which means it stays at the top of the page so you see it. More recent stuff appears underneath. So if you’ve come back a few times and don’t think anything new has appeared, scroll, please. Down.

A simple premise come central tenet of this subject is that you are responsible for your learning. This translates in normal talk as you are responsible adults. I’ll be blunt. From my point of view you are all old enough to:

  • vote
  • get a gun licence (and shoot ducks, rabbits and foxes)
  • get a drivers licence
  • get married without your parent’s consent
  • join the army (and receive the training to kill people)
  • join the police force (and receive the training to use a weapon lethally and arrest people)

Given all that, if you can’t come to class then you’re certainly mature enough to:

  1. tell your teacher before the class happens
  2. print a copy of the participation diary (it’s included as part of the participation sheet)
  3. fill it in
  4. scan it at any printer at uni or photograph it with your phone
  5. and have it sent to your teacher that day

if you’re so sick you can’t do this, then you’ve gone to the doctor so you can include a copy of a medical certificate. If you’re not so sick you need a doctor, then you can manage this as a) a courtesy to your teacher, b) as understanding what taking responsibility for your learning means. (In your job you don’t take time off work and then tell your boss you couldn’t make it afterwards. Not sure why anyone thinks treating your teachers, your classes, or your learning any differently is OK, it isn’t.)

Liveness


(image: On Classical Blog. The Guardian. March 3, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2009/mar/02/classical-music-great-orchestral-debate)

Today’s Age has a story about Barry Palmer (Hunters and Collectors guitarist, oh, that’s my middle age talking, isn’t it?) and a new app come service that lets you view live concert footage. The app and service is soundhalo. This is cool. However, the point? On TV and radio what carries the most value (in terms of audience interest and $) are events that are live, where the liveness matters. This excludes drama, game shows, and the like. It does include the new forms such as ‘reality’ game shows as they are designed and intended to be live. Sport is the biggest of them all (one billion Australian dollars to broadcast AFL), but music is the next biggest.

Sport matters because seeing it live is part of sport. You don’t want to watch it a day, a week, later. Not only because you will now the result but because sport’s pleasure is in its performing in the now. Um, that’d be the same for a concert, wouldn’t it? Rupert Murdoch understood this many many years ago when he paid a then unprecedented sum for the rights to the English Premier League (people thought he was mad), then stuck it all on SkyBSB. This is what made Sky viable. People will pay for live sport. And people will probably pay, or at least enjoy, seeing live music (can’t get to Glastonbury, then live is next best). So this app and service could be a winner simply because it can leverage what matters, which is the liveness.

For us, outside of the specifics of networked media, this is another nail in the coffin for heritage media. Not only does soundhalo offer an alternative revenue model for bands, but it reinforces the fact that the traditional power of TV was its control of time. If you wanted to watch your favourite show you had to be in front of a TV set at the time it was on. This meant they could charge lots of money for advertising since you had to be there to be part of it (in front of the TV). When was the last time you made sure you were at home, in front of the TV, to not miss something? That wasn’t a live event? I never do this for drama. Ever. The opposite of this was once normal. Just like we think those images of the family gathered around the radio to listen to something are, well, sepia quaint, this was my childhood, adolescence and early adult life for television. Not any more. If you can’t guarantee audience, you lose the basis of your revenue model (advertising). Things are changing, have to change, and will change. You will be at the vanguard of this.

The Paddle

Christopher has a post about the speculative metaphor I wrote about the subject. He observes that

The message seems that to get through, one must simply paddle in order to explore and discover our own outcome.

Notice though, that the boat has knowledge, it knows stuff. And that you can think of the whole thing as more like a system, there are waves, wind, eddies, the boat, the oar. They all inter relate, but it isn’t really clear that one has more importance than another in deciding anything. After all, if I were in the boat I could choose to row, furiously perhaps, but it is clear that “one place is as well as close enough, or further away, than any other” so where I might be trying to get to wouldn’t really be clear, or matter that much. So, sometimes, you don’t even need to row (you paddle a canoe, you row a boat), you might just follow with, and even be part of, the flows.

Growing

Christopher picks up some good points from the first unlecture. Organic, yes. Let’s be blunt here. Some thrive in this sort of experience. Some struggle. Most find their way. I thrive. This is a problem, and a serious one. Because it means I tend to teach to my own cognitive strengths (I’m an associative thinker, no one had to teach me the ‘network’ I got it from day one) which means while I get that others don’t get it, I often miss the big and small things that help others join what to me is already very obviously connected. Not good, for a teacher. (For instance I taught Integrated Media One, a second year subject, last semester. All work produced is documentary and is a very creative engagement with new forms of personal documentary. This was obvious to me, but I never actually said so to the class. So I was sort of surprised to read a blog post from a student this semester in the next subject excited that now they’re working in documentary!)

So one reason for the unlecture is for others, including my teaching peers, to pick my brains, to make me join the bits and pieces. Often things flash together so quickly that they seem to live together, but when slowed down to talk through the connections, they might not be so close after all. Or they are. But the ‘why’ of the connection is left hanging and so one role of the unlecture is to return to and insist on that ‘why’.

Now, Christopher thinks about why he’s studying, and one reason is the piece of paper. Two things. Anecdotal industry evidence is that no recent employee in the film, tv, radio industries has not had a degree in the field (heard this at the recent Australian Screen Production and Education Research Assocation – aka ASPERA – conference). The other thing is that most in industry do not employee you on the basis of that piece of paper. The paper says you might know what to do, but they will rely on word of mouth (reputation), for instance from your teachers, as well as what you’ve done, to judge your worth. And then, the final proof of the pudding, is your ability to do the job. Here, knowing how to be (a media practitioner) trumps specific technical skills. For example, knowing how to edit does not equal knowing how to use Final Cut, and does not equal knowing how to just cut bits of video together. It’s a craft, just as knowing how to make a table is not equal to being able to saw timber and swing a hammer.

Anyway, back to Christopher’s observation of it being an organic learning style. It is organic to the extent it is very orientated to helping you all grow into being active critical thinker makers. Thinkermakers. The organism, if you like, is about growing. Old skool that.

When I Was a Media Student

People smoked in class.

In the first unlecture Adrian touched on the some of the changes in media since he was a student (in the pre-digital dark ages of the mid 1980s). One of the things mentioned was how the video camera was large, very expensive, and that the format was U-Matic (Betacam was broadcast quality, U-Matic was sort of next best). The edit suite needed two separate large video players, one as source the other as destination, and you had to load, fast forward, rewind, to the clips you wanted. Each tape held 30 minutes of video, so if you’d shot several takes you might have 4 or more tapes that would need constant loading, unloading, fast forwarding and so on. Since you edited from one tape to another and tape is linear, you nearly always did butt edits, as an insert edit meant putting video over the top of what was already there and so erasing whatever was ‘under’ it. This often meant re-editing everything from that point onwards, again, so you really only did it if it was so important that it just absolutely had to be done.

So things are, obviously, much smaller, and an order of magnitude faster and easier to do. However, the other thing is that because you dubbed from one tape to another, and it was analogue media, the edited copy would, by definition, not be as good as the original. In analogue media every copy introduces noise and so is less good than the original. Once you’d edited, then made a VHS quality from the original tape, the decline in quality was already noticeable if you looked hard enough. This meant the original tape was treated as something to be guarded, protected, and only used sparingly, as even watching it caused damage (which you would have to admit was taking things a bit far, you can watch a tape 100s of times before the video player heads – which are rapidly spinning metal drums – would wear out the tape) and you never paused it because the tape might have been stopped but the drums were still spinning madly!

So, first enormous now forgotten-take-for-granted of digital media. Infinite reproducibility with no loss of quality. You can copy a video file 1, 10, 100, 1,000,000 million times, and it is the same. Always. This means there is no essential quality or attribute given to the ‘original’ in digital media, since each version, being identical, is the same. (This second point is seriously radical if you think – speculate – about it, we have a culture that privileges the first as what matters, first place, first at something, first in line, first in the class, first film that did x, and in media this continued so the original copy mattered because it was the master that had to be preserved so future copies could be made. There is no longer any privilege, in the artefact – the object – in being ‘first’, does that mean the idea of first as best or better will slowly erode, or change?)

To see the difference, the YouTube clip above illustrates just how much quality is lost each time a VHS video tape is copied.

Second Cab

Don’t worry, we get worn out by this pretty quickly. James enjoyed the bluntness. I too, am interested in what might happen in next week’s unlecture. Unlecture is not a vague term, by the way, it is inspired by the unconference movement, with the main thing we are working on is erasing the ‘top down’ model of the lecture. Brian, Elliot, Jasmine, and Adrian (that comma after Jasmine, that’s called the “Oxford comma“) know a lot, differently. So pick our brains. Please.

First Cab Off The…

Gold star, elephant stamp, and congratulations to Edward Wong for first official blog post about the first unofficial unlecture.

Edward notes that when I was blogging in 2000 he was starting primary school. Not sure if that freaks him out but it does me. I started blogging I think in 1998, only stuck at from 2000. On the other hand I started video blogging in 2000 (on a good day, depending on the wiki editors, I even get mentioned in the wikipedia history of videoblogging). BTW I think chocolate before a 2:30pm lecture is just a bloody good idea (seriously). Your blood sugars are getting low then, meaning concentration is harder, and a decent sweet something will and does make a difference. (It was an iPhone 4s, btw.)

The ‘Take Away Idea’

For the classes, and maybe too the unlecture, let’s introduce the concept of the ‘take away idea’. Each of the readings, even where they seem to cover a lot of ideas, theories, arguments, and so on, are written around a basic idea, concept, or problem (that is three ways of describing the same sort of thing). They are writing directly to something that the author feels the need to think about and think through.

(Think of the readings not as explanations of something, but as people using writing to think about an idea. This is a much more productive way of approaching essays and chapters and other material than thinking their role as writing is merely to explain something to, or for, you. Their role, in the first instance, is to let the author think out something. Approach them in the same way, and they become invitations to think along with them, rather than road maps detailing what is already known.)

So, the ‘take away idea’. Each of the readings can be thought to revolve around and respond to some kernel that matters. The take away idea is, to begin with, not you figuring out what this might be (but by all means go for it), but is your take away idea. What is the one key thing that matters to you from what you read, or hear? Why?