ParticipatoryCulture

Here is the preface to our #digiwrimo book club book. Seems it ought to have some catchy new name that shows it is a new creature not some dinosaur we call a bookclubosaurus.

I found myself on Kevin's website this morning at a loss to comment.  All I could say was, "I am feeling stuck in this week’s make: everything I do is remediation. Everything." Let's take the original newsletter and its translation into a youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiYpTmp0J-4 Now let's remediate that with Vialogues just in case someone wants to annotate our happy crew from Uof I Writing Project. Or perhaps you are trying to close a blindspot about accessibility and tech equity especially for the visually impaired so you translate into audio   Then you think you might want to make this sound file annotatable so you upload it to Soundcloud.   Perhaps you decide that you want to use a multimodal tool to share your take on matters.  That would be PopcornMaker which is being (as the software folk delicately refer to) 'deprecated'.  Since it is dying a slow death the YouTube mashup part of PopcornMaker no longer works so you have to use Soundcloud for your musical soundtrack. Roll with it, but save often. Or maybe a gallery of animated gifs of the UIWP team Or perhaps you want others to collaborate in your remediation with a Hackpad. View Re'media'tion on Hackpad. Or perhaps a Diigo annotation page full of remediation itself. There are limits to this because it already looks like I am just gilding the lily here, but there are also some observations I can bear witness to. Why remediate? Remediation is a way to translate for yourself and to even internalize a learning object that speaks true to you. Remediation is a way to give heavy duty reciprocation to someone who has made a difference. Likes, plusses and such are not remediation. They are kinda pusillanimous pussyfooting that I do too often instead of remediating. Remediation is a way to understand an idea in a different way through a different medium or multimodal ways. The remediation here is not so much to create a product as it is to undergo a process. Even reading something outloud is a way to remediate a text's power through the animating genius of your own breath. Close reading of text is remediation. I just call this 'translation'. Do we need any more jargon? Is the term just a plea for attention when a simpler word would do? And is the new slant on the word just confusing? Does it get in the way? Perhaps it should more aptly be spelled re-media-ate. Yeah, that's not going to work. Convince me, UIWP. If you do, I will add it as a category in my blog here. That is quite a prize, a pearl without price.           I might even do a happy dance.      

I was inspired to write this post by the work of Kim Douillard and Kevin Hodgson in a project called "Slices of Life". I was especially struck by Kevin's photos here (and I am avidly awaiting Kim's).  In Kevin's night picture, however, I found myself wondering about what I could not see just as much as by what I could see.  Having taken night photos before, I also thought about how limiting the camera is as it tries to record the fullness that the night can seem.  I know that is not a fair comparison in many ways, but technology is almost always like that.  In other words, in the fair light of day or night, technology reduces, delimits, and otherwise 'cheapens' experience. It makes the world more legible, but less wise. For example, below is a photo of a rectangular platte of ground shot this morning just outside my back door. What we see has little to do with it means.  For one thing, the metaphor of the 'frame' makes legible only a very small portion of the available universe.  In a way this is exactly what the brain does so very well--it uses an 'ignorance' filter.  And by 'ignorance' I mean that we accent the second syllable.  Based upon some idiosyncratic and lifelong evolving algorithm, each of our brains takes from the picture above what it will and ignores the rest. A collander metaphor jumps to mind.  Or maybe it actively pays attention to some stuff in favor of other stuff, a pattern bias unique to each of our own sets of experience.  Schrodinger's Cat? Or Maxwell's Demon? But our views signify uniquely.  Each of us comes to the photo with a different filter.  Thinking out loud here, perhaps the metaphor is a loom, a Jacquard loom with a punchcard template (read schema) that weaves the sensorium back and forth.  Or as early neuroscientist Charles Sherrington called it "the enchanted loom". The quote below is the loom in action according to Sherrington  as our brain wakes from sleep.  The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns. I  am not thinking of the  kind of loom below as a metaphor although it is cool and tempting. This weaving of the senses in with the schema we already have in our minds, that's what I have in...mind.  Now, back to the matter at hand, the practical matter of what is seen in the rectangle of ground outside my back door. First, I see or infer dozens of holes in the ground. Worms, beetles, and other critters are pouring from the warming soil looking for I know not what.  Perhaps they are like Mole in The Wind in the Willows. They've  got spring fever and are saying to themselves, "onion sauce". The are holing out of the ground and checking out the surface because they can and because they feel the need.  Fanciful? Yet the holes are there and my mind weaves in some Kenneth Grahame Second, I know what the holes signify--soil health.  There is much to eat and many to eat it.  In a way it is as the hermetic philosophers insisted, "As above, so below."  Another weaving of the loom that contemplates the health of the soil.   Third, it means that spring has sprung. This cliche is reinforced by the 'frogged' thrum of peepers in the background ready to move and mate and carry on with the ancient seasonal struggle. And all the other heaves and sighs and blats and tweets of spring. Not to mention the smell and breath of spring, its earth and touch moving in between what I see and hear and what I have seen and heard in sixty years of springs. The camera's purpose, like the brain's,

Tl;dr: I did some stuff. It sorta failed. Maybe I learned something. I suspect so. Maybe not. Kept on. You keep on! One might call it the "James Dean" effect--die young and make a beautiful corpse.  Unfortunately, I am neither young nor beautiful. Fortunately, I am not a corpse.  Yet this week has already seen some incandescent failures or as some might say in kindness--some fiery results. Maha and Kevin both were concerned.  I wrote back to Maha indicating that all was in flux but OK and to Kevin I responded to his voice with my own.  I have promised more reports from the field, more feldgangs (field walks).  This is one. So much pride cometh before a pratfall. So proud of myself that I had created a YouTube playlist for my freshman comp classes that would reinforce what we were working on this week-argumentation essays.  Now that I look at in the clean light after the storm I see it for what my students saw it as--just another foisted thing, another dull scene in the saga of being a strategic student.  I created it as a gift, but to their eyes it was just another intrusion in the zero sum game of academia. Above  is my  pride and joy, utterly scorned by my students.  Well, not utterly scorned by my students as you can see below. But almost utterly.  There is a glorious brutality to numbers that forces you with a slap to the face to wake up.  But to what?  In part...to the foolishness of excessive scaffolding, to the impossibility of managing chaos and the unknown unknowns that float through our lives like black swans paddling furious and unseen.  Nicolas Taleb would say that I need to wake up to  "the critical issue ... the artificial suppression of volatility -- the ups and downs of life -- in the name of stability."   I think I do that.  I think I am aware of it in my teaching.  I know that the more locked down I approach the classroom and the more I try to "teach", the more volatile it gets.  That volatility appears in the my playlist through disaffection. They ignore me. In no uncertain terms, they ignore me. And I know this because I asked them in class about it.  What playlists?  The data of the analytics doesn't lie. What playlists? But crickets are a good source of information about the ecosystem.  Their absence tells us even more.  Perhaps email has failed.  One student mentioned after class was over that she subscribed to so much stuff via email that she often missed important signals--out of sight, out of mind, never seen, neglect benign.  Or perhaps when confronted with my playlist, students saw noise not signal. Or perhaps it was and is noise.  Just bad vids.  Here is a copy of the email I sent them but with my reflective annotations for this post. Should I send this to them?  Probably. But I do know that a sizeable minority saw the little throwaway at the end of my email., hence they saw my email. They told me they enjoyed it so we all watched it again in class. Lesson learned?  I originally learned this lesson from Vizzini in The Princess Bride, but obviously have forgotten it. When you go up against a talking porcupine, expect to lose.  But all is not lost.  Today I will send another email reminding them of the playlist as a way to take another look at a template on how to write an argument paper and as an opportunity to send me questions if they have them.  But that's not all.  If you read on you will get two free Google 20% projects that arose from my debacle. Students have been doing this assignment at their own pace all semester.  Some have presented publicly and some privately.  I had two present yesterday.  Both made me proud to have made this open-ended and  'odd' assignment  (or so  both colleagues and students alike tell me). Derek's was simplicity itself--a comic He approached me before class to ask if this was OK as a Google 20% Project.  I said sure, but... I wanted to know more about how it came about.