I may cross-post here for a bit, and then I'll add a redirect link, but if you have blogrolls or RSS feeds that link here, if you can update them, as they say, that'd be great.

Eventually, I'll transition this space back into something related to the day job. For now, find me at the new site.

]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/03/moving_day.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/03/moving_day.html Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:49:58 -0500 ]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/03/who_needs_stability.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/03/who_needs_stability.html Culture Tue, 20 Mar 2007 08:24:32 -0500

In fairness, 10 car songs that hit on all cylinders is meant to tie the rise of muscle car culture to some specific instances of popular music, but I've been doing a lot with playlist assignments lately and can't help but sense a missed opportunity. I've been conceptualizing the playlist assignment as somewhere near the textual edge of a print/media continuum that can be helpful for thinking about educational change--instead of walking completely away from print activities and toward media compositions, instructors can traverse the continuum, weaving print and media literacies together as they go.

Playlists, then, work really well, because they require very few non-print steps to implement. HTML is nice, but with a word processor or pencil and pad, you can create the list. But, when you make the list, you also delve into the world of music and sound. Sure, you'll think about song titles. But for the list to really congeal, you'll have tap into the messages and the lyrics. Even better, you need to create patterns of sound based on the musical elements of the songs. Yes, the assignment is easy and composed with print, but selecting and sequencing the songs kicks you into a process of musical analysis and arrangement.

So, I'm not that impressed with some of what's on the list:

Mustang Sally, Wilson Pickett
Little Deuce Coupe, The Beach Boys
Little Red Corvette, Prince
Pink Cadillac, Bruce Springsteen
Hot Rod Lincoln, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen
409, The Beach Boys
G.T.O., Ronny and the Daytonas
Coupe de Ville, Neil Young
Rocket 88, Ike Turner
Pontiac Blues, Sonny Boy Williamson.

Now, some of these seem like possibilities for a car list, but others just seem to take up too literal a connection between the song and the message that might be woven into the list. I'm not all that familiar with Bruce Springsteen, but I know that any song with the lyrics,

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
The girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
And the boys try to look so hard

probably deserves to jump ahead of "Pink Cadillacs," even if that song has an iconic luxury car in the title. Other observations: no songs by the Beach Boys allowed in the list--no, it's not that I don't like the songs or appreciate the cultural reflections they create; it's just that it's too easy and direct a connection.

Well, it's easy to critique someone else's list, so I should probably offer some ideas of my own. It will take a while to really put together a list, but a couple of candidates that have shuffled across the earscape lately would be,

Neil Young, Unknown Legend
OMC, How Bizarre
The Doors, LA Woman
Citizen Cope, Sun's Gonna Rise
Buck 65, Wicked and Weird.

I'll need to think about this some more. It turns out wikipedia has a heckuva list started. Now to take those raw materials and compose.

Based on a recent anthropology conversation in which I was educated about the Nuer tribe and their belief that twins are birds, I offer this poem, written sitting on an airplane with the sun streaming in the window

Sunlight Through a Window

Twins are birds,
Or so they say,
In words not yet polluted
By Cartesian sway.
We’re pulled apart
At birth. We stray
From Mother,
Sisterbrother,
Father.
Sun.

The God terms gone.

But still
There’s warmth
That shows
Through windows,
Hitting skin,
Yet heating body
From within.
It warms the core
But shines
From without.
I feel an outside world
So distant its heat
Is light years old,
Yet still brand new.

Both and.

The sun’s in me.
The past is now.
That twins are birds
Makes sense somehow.

Based on personal experience, I have to recognize some grain of truth in this piece reporting on narcissism among Gen Y college students.

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory asks students to react to such statements as: "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I like to be the center of attention."

The study found that almost two-thirds of recent college students had narcissism scores that were above the average 1982 score. Thirty percent more college students showed elevated narcissism in 2006 than in 1982.

If nothing else, the piece makes me want to think further about the links between the physical and online social activities of today. Read to the end to get to this posting's subject line.]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/want_fries_with_that_order.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/want_fries_with_that_order.html Tue, 27 Feb 2007 08:52:57 -0500

From this weekend's it feels nice outside let's roll in the dirt files, this sequence shows the fun of not just the initial roll and subsequent brush and wipe, but the re-roll. Multpily that by our three other cats and you get the idea. ]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/whats_wrong_with_this_sequence.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/whats_wrong_with_this_sequence.html Life Mon, 26 Feb 2007 08:17:10 -0500

Just a quick link to something that caught my eye merely for the headline, Meetings Make Us Dumber, Study Shows. At first I thought this was good for a laugh, knowing how many of us sit in countless meetings every week. Then I got to thinking about teaching and the penchant for relying on group work in writing classes. I still believe there are lots of good things to be had by collaboration, but the perils of groupthink do raise some intriguing possibilities for revisiting notions of the individual author. Plus, I knew there was something about all those brainstorming sessions that brought out the beast in me.

What I really like about the program are the timelines which essentially enable a kind of iMovie-like composing. What's valuable, though, is that unlike iMovie, the program has equal power in handling extensive and complex text. It also allows placement of text and any other media in the composing space, adding an arrangement dimension to the composing process. This screen capture (3 mb) represents my attempt to stitch together some videos. ]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/composing_anew.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/composing_anew.html Wed, 21 Feb 2007 21:07:04 -0500
Some cell phone shots from a dinner visit last night to Monkeytown, a Brooklyn eatery built around the premise of video immersion: a square room ringed with futons and coffee tables for eaters with giant screens on all four walls. The warm up was some bizarre video mashing, and the main feature a Thai film with the translated title of Citizen Dog. Really a fantastic mix of magical realism and satirical optimism. Dinner and a movie for even the most desensitized media aficiondo. ]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/monkeytown.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/02/monkeytown.html Sun, 18 Feb 2007 22:40:20 -0500

These times are musical
Digital packages sent
Into ears over wires
Not through the air.

What's shared is understanding
Not waves of sound,
Those target brain
But don't surround.

iPod, therefore
I'm alone.

"Storm clouds may gather
And stars may collide,
But I will love you
Until the end of time."

No one wants that
Swirled over them in public
But to hear it makes me say . . . yes
And wonder . . . What is love?

The reply rings
Like hammers hitting strings
Percussion bouncing
Clear and bright

Behind a question
Never meant to be answered
With the emptiness
Of words

If you subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education, you might want to click over to "YouTube Youniversity" by Henry Jenkins. I don't have an account and had to settle for a version of the piece passed around through e-mail, which makes me want to revise my earlier comments about e-mail--the added relative privacy of e-mail probably has its advantages. Jenkins's piece makes a number of points regarding media and teaching. There is the familiar call to move beyond analysis if we hope to provide relevant instruction in new media:

In such a world, the structural and historical schisms separating media production and critical-studies classes no longer seem relevant. Students around the country are pushing to translate their analytic insights about media into some form of media production. And they are correctly arguing that you cannot really understand how these new media work if you don't use them yourself.

Before we started our master's program [in comparative media studies], I went on the road to talk with representatives of more than 50 companies and organizations. They told me that they value the flexibility, creativity, and social and cultural insights liberal-arts majors bring to their operations. They also shared a devastating list of concerns--liberal-arts students fall behind other majors in terms of teamwork, leadership, project completion, and problem solving. In other words, they were describing the gap between academic fields focused on fostering autonomous learners and professional contexts demanding continuing collaborations. Those desired skills were regularly fostered in other disciplines that have laboratory-based cultures that test new theories and research findings through real-world applications.

At such a moment, we need to move beyond preparing our students for future roles as media scholars, wrapped up in their own disciplinary discourses, and instead encourage them to acquire skills and experiences as public intellectuals, sharing their insights with a larger public from wherever they happen to be situated. They need to be taught how to translate the often challenging formulations of academic theory into a more public discourse

I'm thinking of two episodes that lately brought home the shifting sands of online communication. In episode one, I sign my son up for the SAT exam. Peter set up a yahoo e-mail account several years back and occasionally I'll forward things to him, so I put down that address when setting up the exam. But a funny thing happened on the way to the information. Peter stopped using e-mail. "I haven't checked that in years," he told me. "I don't even know the password." And then our conversation: me suggesting that teachers and the workplace are constantly using e-mail, nostalgically reflecting on how the ubiquity an ease of e-mail made a huge difference in bringing technology into education during the last decade.

Episode two bubbles up from observations of e-mail lists during the last week. The two writing-related lists I'm on both featured the passing around of youtube URLs. I perceived an odd bit of excitement in the tenor of the messages--this is so interesting, you've got to check out these videos, etc. Of course the videos were already viral in the blogosphere, so the combination of using this (I think I'll call it lagging) medium and the enthusiasm in the e-mail messages for the emerging space just amplified my sense that a generational shift is taking place--generational in revealing the different habits of adults and children or teachers and students, and generational in helping us discover what really matters about communication.

Hint: It's not just (really) about the exchange of information. Some of the best e-mail discussion list threads bob and weave with dozens of messages building upon one another. All those commingling ideas. Wow. But still, e-mail as a message sharing technology is not all that dazzling, is it? All those separate inboxes. All that prose. It's the social energy that matters when e-mail is working and that energy is clearly moving elsewhere on the net. If I were to don my cynic hat, I'd observe the irony in recognizing that move in the slippage space of e-mail discussion lists devoted to communication and rhetoric. But, I'm still not all the way acclimated to the new spaces myself, so for now I'll embed an image into this message and let it float onto the Web.

I like the piece for the way it tries to resuscitate writing by pulling it away from professional contexts that have sucked out its life:

But as the letter fell out of favor and education became professionalized, with its goal less the expansion of the mind than the acquisition of a job, writing began to be seen largely as the purview of writers. Writing at work also became so stylistically removed from the story of our lives that the two seemed to have nothing in common. Corporate prose conformed to an equation: information x polysyllabic words + tortured syntax = aren't you impressed?

Great stuff, but not enough. The piece takes one more step, explaining that writing works not only because it helps people connect. Writing matters because it helps us make sense of the distractions and traumas of our lives, and, with any luck, writing helps people make it through these difficulties. Tired sentimentality? I don't think so. Wheeling writing back toward personal struggle and survival closes the loop. It's not just that we need a space for writing to be non-professional and alive. Instead we need a place where writing can help keep us alive.]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/01/the_need_for_speed.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2007/01/the_need_for_speed.html Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:15:33 -0500      
These three collages from the writing about literature class each interpret the poem and illustration by William Blake:

The Tyger.

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp:

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?]]> http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2006/12/visual_explications.html http://sites.unc.edu/daniel/2006/12/visual_explications.html Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:12:57 -0500