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.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 09:33 AM
Taged as >> the sounds of cars reverberate through the earscape | Permalink

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.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 09:07 PM
Taged as >> dabblings in the new media waters | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:40 PM
Taged as >> a citizen dog in a monkey town | Permalink

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

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:40 AM
Taged as >> youknow who youare | Permalink

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.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 09:04 AM
Taged as >> it's the social exchange | Permalink

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?

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 03:12 PM
Taged as >> Blake poem forged anew | Permalink

Learning bits of Korean history from teachers and my parents, I've always felt bad about not being able to do anything about our history when I've known such sad facts. This is why I wanted to do my video collage with a Korean related topic. There are even more tragic poems written during the Japanese occupation of Korea, however, I chose Kim Gi Rim's "The Sea and the Butterfly" because I thought the clear blue and white images would go well with a visual project. The white butterfly is our nation's innocent students who would come to the world with bright hopes and ideals. However, the dark period of that era would drench their hopes like the soaked butterfly's wings in the poem, and leave them mostly in despair.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 09:22 PM
Taged as >> moods and moments placed into motion | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 12:09 PM
Taged as >> muals into collages into flow | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 06:41 AM
Taged as >> from the teaching files | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 02:13 PM
Taged as >> cell phone video makes abuses of power public | Permalink

The second half of the video deals with the gnomewatch blog, a site that really pushes the limits of familiar conceptions of information literacy. The site is social, multimodal, intricately linked with print and television media, heavily situated in economics and pop-culture, and subtly deceptive. It takes way more than clicking past the first page of a set of search returns to read it.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:39 PM
Taged as >> Literacy gnomes are hard to find | Permalink

Captain Planet 1.2mb	The End Game 5.4mb	Pretty Woman 1.5mb

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:30 PM
Taged as >> I almost forgot how much I like teachmix | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 09:43 AM
Taged as >> audio messages sway with sound | Permalink

Using applications on the Web is a bit clunky still, but there are some clear opportunities for writing and teaching through the new Web. In addition to the bubblesnaps image and the mychingo voicemail recorder embedded here, I've been experimenting with snapvine, which brings the cell phone into the mix.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 12:56 PM
Taged as >> teaching through applications of the second Web | Permalink

Second, if you click on the ProCreate tab, you can see that the Web site makes explicit calls for participation from new media writers.

The only limitations are please use the logo provided, a positive campaign message and the website URL somewhere in your video.

• Large Green Apple logo.
• Download our footage from the e-waste yards in China (67MB) and India (34MB). These files are large Quicktime files for editing only. Here are our videos suitable for viewing.
• Large photos you might want to use.

If you want to send us a video, publish it on any popular video sharing site and send us the link. We'll feature the best videos here on the site. But some of them we'll only share with you first by e-mail, so be sure to sign up.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:50 AM
Taged as >> greenpeace spoof writing bites into apple | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:18 AM
Taged as >> time maps over space no matter | Permalink | Comments (1)

Paris Hilton Voicemail

Batman Voicemail

Mother Nature Voicemail

I'm thinking of a number of twists that might go with this assignment. The first would simply be to have both the voicemail prompt like these, and then to record a message from a caller that demonstrates a different character or perspective. As a challenge, I'd like to tell a story or make a point using a series of calls left on a voicemail.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 02:55 PM
Taged as >> profiles in audio presence | Permalink

Rain & Voice 1.6 mb mp3

Rain & Voice & Text 12.5 mb mov

Voice & Image 2.6 mb mov

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 12:30 PM
Taged as >> dogwood poem worms its way and has its say | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 11:13 PM
Taged as >> learning the way of the link | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 11:35 PM
Taged as >> wav files fly like birds | Permalink

1.) As a writer, I'm eager to use mash ups to create new messages. My Yomamma Mash was great fun to make, but also helped me see through the issues circulating around the controversy over Stephen Colbert's speech at the correspondent's dinner. Yomamma offers strong virtual slaps to the face, and blending Colbert's words with the video clips from the M-TV show made me realize the serious criticism and angry challenges beneath the humor of the speech.

2.) As a writing teacher who favors new media, I'm encouraged by the trend to remix video content because it results in sentiments like

Top-down marketing, when the company creates a message for consumers to absorb, is an antiquated approach, said Tim Hanlon, senior vice president at Denuo, a division of the advertising firm Publicis Groupe. Consumers are savvy about the messages companies send and are now empowered to offer feedback about those products. "They don't need marketers," he said. "It's the new landscape."

3.) As someone who studies writing and media, I wonder similarly if and when mash ups will make it into the conversations of scholars. I don't mean, when will scholars talk about mash ups, like now in this blog posting. I mean when will they talk through mash ups. Jeff recently posted a video trailer for an academic article. My Mission Improbable mash up was done mostly for fun and does not work as well as the Yomamma clip, I think. What can scholars make of with these alternative forms of expression?

The Washington Post includes with its article a mash up challenge. I'm going to try to use the raw materials to create a response to something academic, probably to follow up on the recent discussions composition teachers have had about writing outcomes. Anyone care to join me?

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:47 AM
Taged as >> let's mix it up academically | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 01:27 PM
Taged as >> screencast reflecting teaching at the edges | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 01:43 PM
Taged as >> new writers take the lead | Permalink

I’d like to send out a message aimed at two different audiences. It’s a post to weave together two threads of conversation I’ve been considering of late. The first thread is Web 2.0. I know: not another summation of what makes the second Web different from the static Web. But, remember, I’m thinking of two different audiences here. And one of them needs to learn more about the current state of the Web, and especially about writing on the Web. Consider the composition outcomes offered by the Council of Writing Program Administrators:

By the end of first-year composition, students should have a critical understanding of digital literacy, including:

• using the computer for drafting, revising, responding, and editing
• employing research strategies using electronic databases
• conducting web-based research and evaluating online sources
• understanding the difference in rhetorical strategies used in writing traditional and hyper-text prose/graphics.

I should note that these outcomes are the current set listed on the WPA technology plank blog and they may have shifted some after discussion at the recent WPA conference, but they will serve to highlight the need to explain something about the second web to the WPA audience. The outcomes represent a static understanding of the Web and technology-mediated writing. (For expansion on the concerns regarding the statement, see the recent discussion collected nicely by Kathie Gossett and Derek Mueller.) I’m in an odd position, since I really know just a little about Web 2.0 and even less about how to construct outcomes for writers. Further, the members of the WPA community represent an audience of sophisticated writers, expert teachers, and gifted scholars. I feel, though, that I can address this group to say, focus more on the nature of writing today on the Web. I can say this because I, too, need to think through the kinds of writing outcomes that might play out on the current Web.

So, what might writing teachers remark about the Web today? Well, clearly the Web is growing functionally and visibly social. Take the communication activity that characterized healthy e-mail or newsgroup discussion during the first years of the Net boom (say, 1994-2001), and then translate it into Web space. The Web and its mechanisms of subscription, notification, trackback, and comment now facilitate a more public and spatialized version of e-exchange. If e-mail once eclipsed the letter, it now sits in the shadow of the social Web. Where does that leave writing teachers looking toward the future (present)? Note: this is not a train on the tracks argument. (It's not about technology's ubiquitous nature and reach. The claim is that writing can be a social act, a claim nearly every writing teacher would support, but a claim often not reflected in many classrooms.)

Perhaps there really is only one audience addressed in this message, since the second audience I had in mind concerns itself as well with the nature of writing. This group might be represented by the sample in the latest Pew report on the state of blogging. Members of this group almost certainly “get news from the Internet” (97%) and most of them (77%) “have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, and videos online.” Seventy-seven percent. And, get this:

Bloggers also like to create and share what they make. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material they find online – like songs, text, or images – and remixed it into their own artistic creation. By comparison, just 18% of all internet users have done this.

And this:

[F]our out of five bloggers (80%) post text to their blog, but nearly as many (72%) display photos on their blog. Nearly half of all bloggers (49%) say they have posted images other than photos to their blog – items such as drawings, graphs or clip art. Close to a third (30%) of bloggers had posted audio files to their blog and another 15% vlogged, or posted video files to their blog.

True. Writing rules the blogosphere, but three quarters of bloggers posting images? Thirty percent posting audio files? Fifteen percent posting videos? That’s a lot of writers dealing in multimedia.

Of course, not all bloggers post multimedia. More to the point, not all writers blog. So, maybe this is just a fringe element, a blip. But I don’t think so. The Pew report notes the rapid growth of blogging. Twelve to nineteen year olds blog more than twice as much as older bloggers. The percentage of blog readers has shot up since 2005. No, this is not an insignificant shifting of the ways people are writing. Writing is moving into social Web space. And Web writers compose with multimedia.

And, that’s exactly why I’d ask a group of teachers, scholars, and practitioners of writing to think about the activities and opportunities (tag as outcomes, if needed) afforded by the second Web. It’s a chance to put forth some suggestions about what you need to know and what you need to do to write today. To write today you need to

• Conceptualize networks,
• Find and move materials,
• Make rights decisions.
• Edit images,
• Edit sounds,
• Use a movie or authorware program,
• Compose prose,
• And what else?

You need to spatialize the net. Understand computing metaphors, established (desktop, server) and alternative (bus stop, kitchen sink). Know about files and applications. Understand and shape your computing environment. Find archives and databases. Compose searches. Get into the public domain. Know not to be thwarted. Capture. Screen shot. Exercise your fair use. Make decisions. Give credit. Know about layers. Resize. Crop. Add text. Move among media. Compose with a timeline. Fade in. Say something. Shape it. Fade out.

I list these needs as expectations. I would hope students leaving a writing class could meet such expectations. I list them because I feel there are more important outcomes that these activities might facilitate. One, they might enable students to participate in written exchanges with currency. And, two, they stand a good chance of engaging writers with their materials. The outcomes might be the ability to say something meaningful personally and relevant socially. Only then are we likely to discover that unnamable suspension felt when writing well, forgetting (I would hope) the assignment, and instead fixing on the mixing

 

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:57 AM
Taged as >> weaving the second Web and writing outcomes together | Permalink | Comments (3)

Moreover, publishing within such a network seems increasingly crucial to media scholars, who need the ability to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about, and for whom form needs to be able to follow content, allowing not just for writing about mediation but writing in a mediated environment.

Point two:

The move from the discrete, proprietary, market-driven press to an open access scholarly network became in our conversations both a logical way of meeting the multiple mandates that academics operate within and a necessary intervention for the academy, allowing it to forge a more inclusive community of scholars who challenge opaque forms of traditional scholarship by foregrounding process and emphasizing critical dialogue. Such dialogue will foster new scholarship that operates in modes that are collaborative, interactive, multimediated, networked, nonlinear, and multi-accented. In the process, an open access scholarly network will also build bridges with diverse non-academic communities, allowing the academy to regain its credibility with these constituencies who have come to equate scholarly critical discourse with ivory tower elitism.

I don't want to come of as hyper-critical. I'm eager to see this play out. There is also a pedagogical dimension that is really worth a look. I'm excited about such moves and want to plug them.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:54 AM
Taged as >> new venues and process may mean new ideas and relationships | Permalink

On a side note, the interview was conducted with an M-Audio Microtrack--a portable digital recorder that will run a phantom powered microphone. I'll report back when I experiment with the equipment a bit more.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 12:29 AM
Taged as >> reflecting images through images and sounds | Permalink

My take is that, while it's possible to balk at a single print essay in a composition or literature course, an assignment that takes that essay and works it and reworks it over the course of a semester might mitigate against concerns about abandoning print (which I share). The realization, though, wouldn't have happened without the compressed schedule of summer. In four weeks, it makes sense to work steadily on an essay, but I wouldn't have seen that in the middle of a fifteen week semester. I don't see why the strategy couldn't translate to a larger session. Zooming out, I see what I'm trying to do is take the spread across genres from a typical compostion class--profile essay, research essay, persuasive essay, etc.--and translate it using media--print essay, audio essay, collage, video essay. Keeping the prose composition going the whole time somehow makes sense in this context.

Let me also share a couple of projects from the classes.

The first is the podcast, The N-Word, by Josh Wallace. I don't think this piece should be heard as offensive, though it does take up offensive language. I do like the way it weaves in music, television, and student voices to explore the topic.

Next, let me point to a collage by Crystal Borne, who also did the Poke Hemingway profile. I