“what does youtube mean to you?”: my students’ videos

by Bill Posted on February 25, 2009

This semester in my Writing, Research, and Technology course students are learning how to create idea-driven video compositions. The larger project is to create a video oral history on an important contemporary topic. To help students get familiar with the Flip Ultra video camera we’re using, as well as learn some of the basics of Windows Movie Maker (one student used iMovie and another used Final Cut Pro), I assigned a shorter project called “What Does YouTube Mean to You?” The goal was to try to try to get past the hyperbole often associated with YouTube and come to an understanding of how YouTube is perceived by the general public.

To complete the project students we were asked to interview 25 – 30 random people and ask them three questions: What is your name? Where are you from? What does YouTube mean to you? From the interviews, students had to locate a representative sample to use, and mash up those clips with clips from YouTube videos that provided evidence for what the interviewees were saying. They also had to have a Creative Commons-licensed music track(s) and apply their own Creative Commons license.

I am more than please with the results. The videos show a diverse group of opinions about YouTube—from those who think it is a U-shaped-pipe used in plumbing to those who think it is for watching skateboarders crash to those who tend to equate it with the meaning of life. More importantly, they show how much the students learned in 3 short weeks about video editing, composition, and visual arguments. There are 15 in all (listed in no particular order), so please continue below the fold. Enjoy.

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siftables

by Bill Posted on February 20, 2009

Via @christateston: Created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi at the MIT Media Lab, Stables are “cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them – piling, grouping, sorting – to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications.” In short, they are revolutionary.

Take a look at Merrill’s TED 2009 talk:

Cross-posted at the IAOC Blog.

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the metaphors of class discussion

by Bill Posted on February 5, 2009

Information Architecture began in earnest this past Monday with the discussion of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal Metaphors We Live By. Lead by Joe Sabatini’s discussion questions, and informed by student responses to the reading posted at the IAOC Blog, students began to think about the nature of language, how it shapes meaning, and the social aspects of its construction. In graduate classes I tend to let the students talk for the first 30 – 40 minutes, listening as they work their way through a text’s main ideas. When I feel the discussion moving to far from the text or an important point has been glossed over I will interject.

My goal for the class was for students to see the how many metaphors we use and come across on a daily basis. I thought I would show students a sample New York Times article and had lined up one of several Super Bowl videos.

But as discussion progressed I realized all the examples I needed were coming from the students’ mouths. So, I got up and began transcribing the metaphors I could catch and wrote them on the board:

What a range of concept metaphors displayed. For example, we have (my concept names might not be completely accurate):

  • ONLINE SPACES AS CONTAINERS: I posted on Twitter
  • LANGUAGE AS LIVING: Dead language
  • CONVERSATION AS A JOURNEY: derailing a conversation; get conversation back on track; where do we go from here?

I was hoping that by putting the metaphors on the board we could begin to talk about our unconscious use of metaphor and how they begin to structure meaning in our lives. But the opposite happened. Students became so utterly self-conscious about their language that they stopped engaging in conversation (CONVERSATION AS SUBSTANCE) altogether. Never in my history of teaching had I witnessed a full class simultaneously reflect on the words they had just spoke and think so carefully about what the words they might eventually speak. That reflection froze the conversation (CONVERSATION AS SUBSTANCE). In the end there was silence.

I’m still not sure what to make of all if it—if the reflection was a good thing or if I my actions made them too self-conscious of their own language. I tend to err on the side of reflection being good and that any reflection on language is doubly good. We’ll see what happens when I bring all this up in class on Monday.

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replacing online advertising with add-art

by Bill Posted on February 5, 2009

Via @timoreilly, Add-Art replaces online advertisements with curated art images via a Firefox plug-in:

This will obviously raise eyebrows in the the advertising community, as well as in companies that depend on advertisement revenues. But it also raises important questions about authorship, the dissemination of art, hacking theory, and web site design.

Who, for example, is the author of a web site with an add-art replacement? What are the ethics of hacking the site to replace, for example, the New York Times’ rotating selection of advertisements in certain locations? Eye tracking studies have shown us that users are now reading web pages in an F pattern that essentially makes invisible most web page advertisements (which very often appear in the space between the two horizontal lines in the F). Could this impact the way we read? Or, more exactly, what we pay attention to on web pages? These kinds of hacks are exciting because they help show how maleable texts are and how antiquated the term “single-authorship” is.

The the add-art web site for installation instructions. Cross-posted at the IAOC Blog.

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