Composing Spaces

What better way to get back to blogging after a 2.5 month break than with The Daily Show, Photoshop, and Rick Astley:

Pangea Day is this Saturday, May 10th. I’ve been working with two students to plan the only public screening event in Southern Jersey. The planning is getting intense and exciting. We’ve posted signs everywhere, invited local schools and community members. One of the student co-coordinators has been on the radio (.mp3). We’ve got a Facebook page, and we’re hoping for a respectable turnout. And for the weather to be nice, as expected.

The Pangea Day folks have released a new trailer which seems to include portions of the 24 films that will be shown:

In 2006 Jehane Noujaim won the TED prize for her wish “to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film.” Pangea Day is the realization of that wish—a global event with thousands of screenings in homes, fields, stadiums, and, like at Rowan, auditoriums. In these public and private spaces people will come together to get to know each other, to learn about each other, to celebrate each other in ways that only film can provide. Photographs and video that we take at the event will join those from around the world, adding Rowan, its students, and the South Jersey community to a world-wide text that encourages openness, curiosity, friendship, and hope.

Here is here 2006 TED talk:

Last night my colleague, Tara Timberman, texted me, telling me to go to CNN and watch Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the NAACP. I’m glad I did. The speech is excellent—a multimodal text that yokes together cultural critique, linguistics, learning theory, music theory, and classification theory. (The coverage of the speech as it was re-aired on CNN was atrocious. CNN cut away to commercial, it seemed, at exactly the points in the speech where cohesion was an asset, where cutting and distraction took away from the overall effect and affect.  CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was horrific, doltish, a deer caught in headlights, clearly unsure of how to respond to the speech’s academic grounding, and pedantically labeling the speech at one point "entertaining" as he jumped over the text and language and ideas to tautological discussions of the effects on Obama’s campaign.)

Below in three parts is the speech, uploaded to YouTube by someone who was recording their TV via video camera. The part that most interests me about the speech is this:

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient. Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient.

Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient. And vice versa.

Whites saw black as being deficient. It was none other than Rudyard Kipling who saw the "White Man’s Burden" as a mandate to lift brown, black, yellow people up to the level of white people as if whites were the norm and black, brown and yellow people were abnormal subspecies on a lower level or deficient.

Europeans saw Africans as deficient. Lovers of George Friedrich Handel and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart saw lovers of B.B. King and Frankie Beverly and Maze as deficient. Lovers of Marian Anderson saw lovers of Lady Day and Anita Baker as deficient. Lovers of European cantatas—Comfort ye in the glory, the glory of the Lord—Lovers of European cantatas saw lovers of common meter—I love the Lord, He heard my cry — they saw them as deficient.

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been.

Miseducation. Miseducation incidentally is not a Jeremiah Wright term. It’s a word coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson over 80 years ago. Sounds like he talked a hate speech, doesn’t it? Now, analyze that. Two brilliant scholars and two beautiful sisters, both of whom hail from Detroit in the fields of education and linguistics, Dr. Janice Hale right here at Wayne State University, founder of the Institute for the study of the African-American child. and Dr. Geneva Smitherman formerly of Wayne State University now at Michigan State University in Lansing. Hail in education and Smitherman in linguistics. Both demonstrated 40 years ago that different does not mean deficient. Somebody is going to miss that.

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale’s first book, "Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style." Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin.

Here, Wright is touching on the the primary tenants of classification theory: that how we classify structures how we compose and act in the worlds around us. Bowker and Star (1999) in their important book, Sorting Things Out, define "classification is a spatial, temporal, or spacio-temporal segmentation of the world. A "classification system" is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production" (p. 10). Wright’s list of perceived deficiencies of the Other and his discussion of US education pedagogy showcases real-world examples of how our perceptions of the Other shapes now only how we view them, but the policies we create. Labels such as EMH, and diseases such as ADD, are social constructs, boxes in which we locate those who do not conform to some pre-set standard that is often based on faulty, if not overtly racist, classist, ageist, and sexist assumptions.

In Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Fleck (1939) points out that classification studies are studies in the history of ideas (facts are ideas). His unit of analysis is the concept of syphilis—a term for an illness that is essentially a socially constructed idea that has evolved over time. Similar studies have looked at the social construction of HIV/AIDS. The US is currently engaged in discussions of the concept of marriage. Wright’s attempt to redefine as "different" how we interact with those once perceived as "deficient" is significant because he is asking us to embrace each other by embracing our differences—and differences historically situated are not classifications.

Back in January I posted a video created by Richard Miller and colleagues at Rutgers that described what they are calling the new humanities. Part of that future is in the form of video compositions. This morning Richard posted a new video called WOW (as in, OMG! No Way! not World of Warcraft) in which he details the distributed effect of the distribution of the New Humanities video. It takes its model from Michael Wesch’s ground-breaking "The Machine is Us/Using Us" and builds on his work by incorporating invented writing spaces, Google Earth mashups, and images of the video on multiple blogs (disclaimer: including this one). Take a look.

He announced his video to the WPA List, a post that was forwarded to the techrhet list—(virtual) reality imitating (virtual) art imitating (virtual) reality, in a way. The list has, as lists tends to do, immediately taken a negative view, labeling it self-aggrandizing and self-promoting. Perhaps because I have known Richard for over a decade I cannot help but think that something else is going on. That the WOW is just as much about the fact that Richard is doing this kind of work as it is with the impact that his New Humanities video had on his career, travels and Rutgers English’s evolving reputation.

The WOW is also to show other not-as-tech-savvy faculty the impact that new media technologies can have on the distribution of information in so short a time period (and, hence, on their own careers). I also think it is about play—playing with new ideas, new technologies, new techniques. A kind of play that was just beginning at Rutgers in the days when as their first director of Instructional Technology in the Writing Program I, for example, began playing with web design and created their first web site—a web site that was woefully inadequate, but it was the first time we had attempted such a thing, just as these videos are his (their) first foray into video compositions. Our reaction to the web site: WOW. My reaction to the fact that I built it: WOW.

The imitation is homage here and is used just as we would use in writing and new media classes. We ask students to take a look at what other, more experienced folks have done and as a way of getting to know the technologies, imitate their methods, modes, and processes, and then see what you come up with. Often a student’s reaction is just that, WOW.

My initial reaction to this video (sent to me by a colleague at Rowan) was a loud, sharp, guffaw. After recovering from seeing Obama as Rocky doing one handed pushups, I began to realize that there is quite a bit of masterful visual rhetoric going on in here taking off from the boxing conceit afforded by the movie. A semiotic reading of the video would, I suspect, reveal a host of modes, discourses, and meanings.

Via Ewan McIntosh, introducing Animoto, an application that mashes together the images you upload with music you select to create a unique video production. The folks at Animoto—"a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out"—have developed "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film." Way cool, I think. The below video contains their 60 info bit as well as an extended introduction to the application and its features.

Due to popularity in education, Animoto (like Voicethread) has created an Educators site. The possibilities for video compositions are growing rapidly. I can’t wait to take advantage of this in the near future.

Johnny Chung Lee, grad student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, at TED 2008 shows how the Wii remote can be used for more than just swinging virtual bats:

For more of Lee’s hacks as well as the code, see his Wii projects page. More on making any surface a writing space:

Teaching with computers just got a whole lot more interesting. . . .

"Be an active citizen [because] . . . we have a sclerosis in our democracy and we have to change that." Here, here.

Referenced at the end: The Alliance for Climate Protection’s We Can Solve It campaign

I recently put together a grant proposal called, "Mapping Relationships among Web 2.0 Applications: A Preliminary Investigation into a New Information Literacy," to be consider for a Non-salary Faculty Grant. These grants are given annually at Rowan and provide up to $5000.00 to support the initial stages of faculty research. I have also recently submitted two conference proposals that consider similar issues and themes. The project summary:

As literate readers of web pages we understand that the hyperlink is used to connect together different web sites and that the web is a system of interconnected hypertext documents. When we hyperlink from one web site to the next we read these sites as discrete entities, each with unique texts, symbols, navigations, and artifacts that define it apart from others. CNN.com, for example, has a different look, feel, and usability compared to Yahoo! Other than the content of some reports we generally do not expect their features to overlap in any meaningful way.

Web 2.0 applications complicate our understanding of how to read web sites by requiring a sophisticated kind of reflective, elastic, semiotic eco-spatial information literacy that evolves with the web. This new (as yet unnamed) literacy involves, for example, becoming a critical reader of the similarities among Web 2.0 vocabularies (“widget,” “feed,” “reader”) from which new modes of composition are emerging. Literate users will be able to recognize Web 2.0 applications as writing spaces that contain multiple symbiotic genres, and will have an ability to transfer knowledge of application functionality from one site to the next. They will understand both the meaning-making and compositional possibilities of working with and among, for example, static pages, blogs, RSS readers, and social bookmarking sites.

Little, however, is known about the literacy of Web 2.0 applications. This project begins that process of understanding. The project requests $xxxx.xx. A portion of this money is to support two undergraduate student co-researchers. The remaining money is for computer hardware and software, which will facilitate our work. The end result will provide the seeds for a larger study that will investigate the processes of how web users (students, faculty, the general public, and so forth) become literate readers and users of Web 2.0 applications. The ultimate goal is to identify the characteristics of and name this new literacy. Doing so will have broad implications for the fields of composition, internet studies, rhetoric, ontological studies, and any discipline concerned with Web 2.0 applications.

The complete grant application will be available shortly on the Research page of this web site.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged regularly, partly because I have been traveling. I also got a new toy: a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 digital camera, which I am becoming more fond of every day. Here is a small selection, though representative, of what I have been seeing lately through its (wonderful, 12x digital zoom) lens, shown in roughly the order they were taken.