Coming to the Modern Languages Association’s annual Convention, Jan. 3-6, 2013 in Boston, MA: “The Classroom As Interface.” It will feature presentations by Elizabeth Losh (UCSD), Jason Farman (U.Maryland/College Park), LeeAnn Hunter (Washington State Pullman) and me (USC Annenberg).

Here’s the proposal. I invite anybody out there — particularly teachers (K-12, college, community college, univ., online or f2f) to reach out and comment.

A “Media-Specific Analysis” is “a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium” (9). Although N. Katherine Hayles‘ subject in Writing Machines is the material construction of electronic literature, it is now appropriate — even necessary — to perform a “media-specific analysis” of the “classroom.” The classroom has always been an interface, a point of interaction between the physical and the virtual. Now that the classroom is no longer the de facto site of learning, the unique parameters of the synchronous, networked classroom may be seen, altered and tested. For the first time, learners with intellectual disabilities or even just personal predilections might use software to customize their mode of classroom engagement. Whether an ADD learner hacks virtual classroom software to eliminate distracting video feeds, or a shy learner anonymously participates in a lecture’s Twitter backchannel, ubiquitous computing is permitting a rapid proliferation of learning interfaces. This profusion merits scrutiny and interpretation.

We propose an interactive, participatory Special Session in which each presenter talks for ten minutes and the remaining thirty-five minutes are reserved for 1) twenty minutes of question-and-answers and 2) fifteen minutes of hands-on engagement with key elements of the presentations. That is, each presenter will be prepared not only to present a “talk” but also to show exemplary assignments, demonstrations of software, or clusters of data. This blend of theoretical and experiential presentation is meant to provide attendees the necessary theoretical and applicative close readings to appreciate the specific interstices of the classroom as interface. Our panel is designed to present four unique but telescoping vantages on the classroom as interface: the institution, the classroom, the software and the learner’s body.

Elizabeth Losh notes that mass distributions of handheld digital devices to first-year students on college campuses offer new ways for undergraduates to “read” the university and its interfaces and to be instructed in new modes of digital reading by campuses interested in promoting electronic rites of initiation. How should we look back on a decade of large-scale distribution efforts aimed at giving mobile computing to first-year college students? Four cases studies – the 2002 distribution of HP Jordana Pocket PCs at UC San Diego, the 2004 distribution of iPods at Duke, and the 2010 and 2011 distributions of iPads at Seton Hill and the University of Maryland – tell us about institutional attitudes about how students should decipher the messages encoded in higher education. With mobile technologies students are encouraged to read textbooks, read buildings, and even read each other. The institutions’ tacit promotion of passive and active surveillance activates competing anxieties: traditionalist fears about post-literacy and distraction, and progressives’ misgivings about usurpation of private space.

Jason Farman’s paper focuses on recent debates around the effects of digital technologies on practices of distraction and disconnection in the college classroom. Examining the lives of American college students as a lens through which to read the broader culture’s responses, Dr. Farman looks at the heated discussions about the ways that multitasking is, as Nicholas Carr argues, “rewiring our brains.” From 2009-2011, many cultural events underscored the urgency of these debates, such the 2009 shift which marked, for the first time ever, when mobile phones were used more for data transfer than for voice conversations. Farman’s autoethnographic approach draws upon his experiences using mobile media in the classroom and considers emerging scholarship on multitasking and distraction, such as Cathy N. Davidson’s Now You See It. The exhortation to disconnect, Farman argues, simplifies a complex, embodied process of engagement across the spaces of our screens and physical environments.

Software developers prize transparency: a desktop folder holds files just like a manila folder holds papers. But in the virtual classroom, where the software is meant to remediate a huge range of conscious and unconscious communication practices, “face-to-face” is distractingly literal: a Brady Bunch grid of nodding heads. Kathi Inman Berens spent a year experimenting with virtual classroom software in her classes. In this “medium-specific analysis,” Berens contextualizes the results of these software-and-pedagogy experiments with readings from Hayles, Apple’s Software Developers’ Kit, and Oram and Wilson’s Beautiful Code. How does choice of platform influence student engagement and interactivity? Should student reaction to the virtual classroom software become a subject of course content, or should it be “invisible”? Walled gardens (Blackboard, Adobe) and ad-supported services (the Google suite, Twitter) necessitate thinking through the ethical implications of commerce that openly underwrites our freedom to “make stuff.”

“I’d like to think that meeting in a physical space has value,” discloses LeeAnn Hunter. “But unless we begin to think of human interaction as a technology in itself that aids learning, I can see why publicly funded institutions would want to go the way of Khan.” Hunter proposes to formulate — or begin limning the parameters — of a technology of human interaction. What are the advantages and specs of embodied, collective, synchronous learning? How might it impact learning and growth? In an economy of scarcity, what is its cost-benefits analysis? Exploring the perspective of embodied learning, Hunter turns to the canons of disability studies and non-verbal communication such as dance to seek alternative paradigms for understanding the stakes of embodied learning in ubiquitous computing environments.

Beginning our panel with the institution and ending it with the body implies a trajectory of inquiry that has a rich history in literary studies. Decades of feminist and queer writing on embodiment, “writing-from-the-body” and the body inscribed by the institution prompts us to wonder to what extent our humanness, in this world of newly ubiquitous computing, might be a byproduct of interface?

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After an initial rejection, my experimental social media course has been renewed at USC Annenberg during Fall 2012. That’s a longer story I’ll tell another day.

In earlier drafts, the syllabus addressed the perception that social media is “smoke and mirrors,” and so unworthy of sustained academic study. That syllabus engaged a lot of scholarship. That syllabus spoke to the DH insiders of my Twitter community, not the professors and admins who are at most occasional users of social media. Call it a #FAIL: I inaccurately gauged my target audience.

I revised to include a 1,045-word glossary of my course’s bedrock concepts and 415-word Thick Description of how digital build and theory work in tandem.

I’m leery of for-profit courseware companies trolling blogs like this one for freely shared course design that they might turn into proprietary content. So I’m posting just the glossary and half of the course description, not the entire 4700-word syllabus. If you’d like to see it, reach me at kathiberens [at] gmail [dot] com .

GLOSSARY

Ubiquitous Computing (a.k.a “ubi comp”): Mobile devices have abruptly changed how we compute. We are “always on” even if we are not actually using the Internet at a particular moment because we know we have perpetual access to the Web no matter where we are. 2009 marked the first year people used mobile devices to access data more often than make voice calls. The penetration of the tablet has taken mobile computing into the bedroom and into other spaces where mobile phones were less hospitable, such as airplanes: tablets are an ideal consumption device because the screen is bigger and easier to read; it’s light and ergonomically designed. Tablets, smart phones and laptops working in tandem create the material conditions for an “always-on” experience.

Social Media: Social media is the bedrock of “Web 2.0.” Before the existence of social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, the Web was largely broadcast: a way for companies and organizations to send messages out. Web 2.0 allowed users to talk back. The fact that companies now need to monitor their social media 24/7 has given rise to many entry-level jobs in social media for those sufficiently trained in its strategic affordances and capable users of its platforms.

Social media allows people to quickly and virtually organize all kinds of social gatherings: parties, social movements, live events in support of brand launches. One trend we’ll study in this class is “social viewing”: the use of tablets as the “second screen” to connect TV fans of particular shows to each other in real time during the TV show’s broadcast.

Medium-Specific Analysis: This term, coined by media theorist N. Katherine Hayles, is “a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium” (Writing Machines, 9). Returning to the “social viewing” example above, a discussion of social viewing necessitates analysis of the device that permit such interactivity, the tablet. Why did social viewing happen in tandem with the penetration of tablets into user experience? Why didn’t it happen with mobile phones? Simple answer: the phone’s screen is too small. Deeper answer: the tablet changes our relationship to real-time virtual social interaction because with it one computes on a large mobile screen that cradles easily in the lap. The non-invasive shape of the tablet (unlike the bulkier laptop) gives rise to new social behaviors and identity construction: of time (watermarks are being built into broadcast at 1.6 second intervals so viewers can tag exact moments as they watch on big screens and engage social media on tablets), physical space (where do you watch TV?), of virtual identity formation (some fans create personae from which to Tweet and engage), and physical identity formation (how do people negotiate with others in physical space for “real time” viewing experiences: the people they live with, the people the invite into their homes for viewing parties, etc.)

Building Digital Objects: Students in this class use software and social media platforms to build digital objects. The aim of such work is not just to work with tools — though that experience grounds one’s thinking in the materiality of step-by-step procedural logic, and teaches students to learn by guessing, checking and revising. The specific communication goal of “making stuff” is to give students direct experience of how specific platform and software choices permit unique messaging capabilities.

Social Media Etiquette: Etiquette is platform-specific and involves different rates and modes of engagement. For example, Pinterest and Twitter are platforms of immediacy. A Twitter Direct Message [DM] implies instantaneous communication: even one hour might be too long an interval for effective messaging in this context. Email is more forgiving: generally one day’s interval is socially appropriate, but that rate changes based on audience and context. These are examples of elements we consider as we message on behalf of our selves, clients, or organizations in which we participate.

Curation: The act of filtering information. In this class, we curate reading links in Diigo, the social bookmarking platform. We also use the #COMM499 Twitter hashtag to draw all class members’ attention to relevant links, knowledge or happenings.

Usability: How we use an object. Testing the Hidden USC map built by spring 2012 students involved clicking every pin on desktop to make sure each pin pulled correct and appropriately sized information. When students tested the map on the USC campus, however, they found the map was too big to load quickly on their mobile devices. They had to decide whether to edit the map to make it smaller or to build ancillary, theme-specific minimaps that could be loaded in situ. Usability drives (re)design. Just as one would never submit prose without editing it, so too one would not launch a project without testing usability.

Quality Assurance: Reviewing all information to ensure it is error free, easy to find and self-evidently useful or meaningful.

Synchronous Learning: Students in this class meet at the assigned class time via virtual office software and/or face-to-face in our designated classroom.

Asynchronous Learning: Students engage with the professor and each other in various social platforms: Twitter, Diigo, Google Docs, Google Maps. We do this outside of regular class time.

Digital Natives: The mistaken notion that because today’s students were born into computing environments, they automatically understand how and why to use computers and platforms. 98% of today’s students are on social media; but their avocational use is insufficient to prepare them for the strategic demands of messaging professionally in social media. There are also potential dangers in social media (bullying, losses of privacy and reputation, identity theft or hacking) of which they should become aware.

Passive Surveillance: People give their passive consent to surveillance by willingly posting personal information in social media platforms. Their interests are also traceable and aggregated in their use of Web browsers. Rather than taking one extreme approach or another — either ignoring the dangers or opting out of social media participation — students need to learn about the afterlife of their digital traces, how to manage or erase them, and what it means to be living in a world where very little is invisible. We also discuss how commercial underwriting of “free” Internet platforms affects their lives and how it ought to influence their decision making in social media.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
If we transported a doctor or a midwife from 5,000 years ago to present day, he or she would find huge difference in the practice of medicine. The same is true of lawyers or actors or farmers. But teachers would largely feel at home. Howard Rheingold uses this anecdote to point out that our technologies of learning lag behind advances in communication practices.

This Annenberg COMM class retains the traditional practices of reading, writing and analysis. We use them in every class. But it adds to that traditional skill set a dimension of social consumption and knowledge production. It broadens the scope of our critical attention from televisual, filmic and print texts to include Tweets, blogs and Facebook posts, profile pictures, info graphics, YouTube videos and other characteristic elements of social media. It asks students to collaborate and gives students critical tools for evaluating the mechanisms and quality of collaboration.

Duke University John Hope Franklin Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Cathy N. Davidson has identified as crucial skills of the modern learning and workplaces:
• Collaboration
• Peer-to-Peer learning
• Experiential learning: learn by building
• Attention to the unique affordances of platform as an active shaper of context

As more and more people work in hybrid environments — sometimes virtual, sometimes embodied — and with teams of people from around the world with different cultural norms and etiquettes, students need to learn how to engage all of these elements. The best way to do so is practice. That’s why our class meets both virtually and face-to-face simultaneously.

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The Classroom As Interface
Call for Papers MLA 2013
Boston, MA
Jan. 3-6
300-word abstract & bio due Wed. 3/15/2012 to kathiberens [at] gmail [dot] com

The classroom has always been an interface, a point of interaction between the physical and the virtual. Mashing up concepts from MLA 2012 sessions about digital pedagogy (“Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom,” “Digital Pedagogy,” “New Media, New Pedagogies”) and interface (“Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature’s Past and Present“), this panel considers how ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp“) reveals the unique affordances of “the classroom.”

Now that the physical classroom is no longer the de facto locus of learning, the unique parameters of the synchronous, networked classroom may be tested. Generations of innovative teachers “hacked” the classroom to make it more interactive and student-centered, but their experiments rarely threatened the core mission of the university sufficiently to merit moritoria. Today, calls to ban laptops and smart devices from the classroom bespeak a deep unease about the sorts of learning practices–and student expectations–ubicomp inaugurates.

“The Classroom As Interface” will feature assignments and pedagogical design that manifest an awareness of ubicomp; such presentations may or may not involve “building stuff.” Paul Fyfe asserts in “Digital Humanities Unplugged” that “an unplugged digital humanities pedagogy can be just as productively disorienting as doing humanities digitally.” Elizabeth Losh’s UCSD digital poetry class ran an “E-Lit Writing Exercise: Locative Corpse” that could not have been done online. Jason Farman’s many experiments with mobility, storytelling and pedagogy explore the recursive loop between movement and fixed location, reflecting central tenets featured in his book Mobile Interface Theory. Dene Grigar, Brett Oppegaard and Chief Ranger Greg Shine are pioneering mobile, interactive, site-specific historical interpretation at Fort Vancouver. Many digital humanists use Twitter to expand their classrooms’ discourse communities. Literary scholars are exploring the political, social and privacy implications of the GeoWeb.

The object of this panel is to draw scholars’ attention to the classroom as an interface that can’t simply be remediated online. As Avenues of Access to higher education constrict and budget-conscious administrators enlarge enrollment through asynchronous distance-learning classes, it’s important to make visible the affordances of the synchronous classroom.

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This is the revised statement I edited after the Exhibit.

Mobile and Geolocative E-Lit: Private and Public Liteatures

Curatorial Statement for
MLA 2012 Electronic Literature Exhibit

by Kathi Inman Berens

“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.” –Baudrillard

Thirty years ago, when Baudrillard declared the map a “precession of simulacra” (1), he glimpsed the way media would proliferate as local and mobile, a superabundance of “information devour[ing] its own content” (80). Locative and mobile e-lit stand as tiny bulwarks of meaning, or meanings, among the several billion stories, images, songs, and links we drop monthly onto networks of SMS and microblogs. Mobile and locative e-lit earn the capacity to mean by being alive to the arbitrariness of their parameters. The defamiliarization, the cognitive dissonance, of encountering L.A. Flood outside on a cloudless SoCal day is one example of how locative literature might disclose strategic arbitrariness to its readers.

The human holding her mobile device stands at a ninety-degree angle to the surface of the earth, her GPS receiver deriving location so long there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. She is, in Edward Casey’s word, “implaced”: a body rooted in a particular spot calculated through geometry and represented in metadata. Except that the geometry interpolates several conflicting reference datums, which renders the metadata unreliable: “Different reference datums can produce large variation in ‘exact’ location,” note the authors of the Wikipedia entry on Latitude. “The Eiffel Tower is computed at geodetic latitude of 48° 51′ 29″ N, or 48.8583° N and longitude of 2° 17′ 40″ E or 2.2944°E. The same coordinates on the datum ED50 define a point on the ground which is 140 m distant from Tower.” Change the reference datum, and even exact geospatial coordinates produce different results. This is both a fact and a metaphor of locative storytelling.

In this, the first exhibit of electronic literature at the Modern Languages Association’s annual Convention, the exhibit hall was another of e-lit’s multivalent interfaces: a meeting point between the physical and the virtual, though mobile computing permits those spaces to be no longer discrete from each other. Room WSCC 609 was the exhibit’s physical location, but the social interactivity between the exhibit’s physical and virtual visitors–some of whom were scattered a few hundred feet from the exhibit floor– created excitement for e-lit at MLA. “The idea of the interface cannot be reduced to its medium or content,” notes Jason Farman in Mobile Interface Theory. “It is both and neither…a set of relations that serve as the nexus of the embodied production of social space” (62). “In all serious[ness],” tweeted Ben Robertson from the exhibit floor, “I feel like I’m watching something important, which I almost never get from panels or regular poetry readings[.] #MLA12 #elit[.]”

Part of the exhibit’s “something important” has to do with encountering e-lit away from the distractions of our own computers: the beeps and pop-ups that might yank us out of deep reading or play. But the other “something important” is serendipitous meeting between people. Bahktin’s word for this was “eventness”: the contingencies bubbling up from the babble (our audience might prefer “chatter”) of polyvocality. Serendipity is awfully hard to find via directed search: we prize results customized to our specifications in deciseconds. We lament the closure of bookstores, our “third spaces,” each aisle a micro-community of ideas and the people drawn to them, but we are unable or unwilling to pay for the bookstore’s true value as a social nexus. So long as bookstores remain, in our cultural imagination, purveyors of commodities and not experiences they will lose to online distribution and with them will die the eventness that made bookstores so remarkable. An exhibit of electronic literature might fulfill a similar sort of social function, providing “eventness” to people that exceeds mere questions of access: almost all of the e-lit featured in our exhibit is perpetually and freely accessible via the Web.

503 visitors stopped by the MLA exhibit in WSCC 609; but just as some people came in via Twitter, our embodied visitors wafted from the exhibit into nine Toronto neighborhoods (among many others) featured in [murmur], and the environs of South Central Los Angeles in L.A. Flood, and post-Katrina New Orleans in the desktop-viewable “Blue Velvet,” and the geocached mysteries hidden on the University of Maryland College Park campus in Blue Light Project and Glitch — both exceptional student projects created by Jason Farman’s undergraduates. The “space” of the exhibit in WSCC 609 thus became fungible: reified through use.

My initial reason for yoking mobile and locative e-lit in one category was logistical: such works can be accessed on mobile devices and were designed for mobility, either as a means of engagement, a theme, or both. Many of our desktop works could only be engaged on desktop. In practice this meant I advised visitors to access mobile e-lit via iPhone and locative works via iPad because locative works benefit from display on a bigger screen.

But upon consideration, the yoking is fortuitous, because it helps us to see the differences between mobile and geolocative e-lit. The most important of these distinctions is how the reader accesses the story because access influences interactivity. “The medium is the message,” observes Ian Bogost, “but the message is the message too. Instead of ignoring it, we ought to explore the relationships between the general properties of a medium and the particular situations in which it is used” (“Media Microecology,” the introduction to How To Do Things With Videogames, 5). Locative works imply public consumption; mobile implies private. To locate a story on a map is a rhetorical appeal to public discourse, shared meanings, and ever-changeful, PHP-fueled dynamism. Dropped pins designate parameters that constitute fictive and non-fictive communities. Mobile e-lit, by contrast, lives in the privacy of the tiny screen that’s never far from your body: a proprioceptive extension of your body into the virtual world and vice versa. When mobile e-lit changes, it’s because the creator tweaks it: fixes bugs, or (more rarely) adds a new element. This is very different from the perpetually evolving locative works. (One thinks of the afterlife of Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg’s “Implementation”: all those orphaned stickers.)

The physical intimacy of the mobile phone means that mobile e-lit can insinuate itself into one’s “offline” life. Standing in line at the grocery store last summer, a push notification from The Carrier, a graphic novel included in this exhibit, nudged me in my pocket. The Carrier remediates serial distribution: the reader waits between installments released to coincide with events transpiring in the novel. When I saw it was a notification from The Carrier, I rolled my shopping cart out of line and leaned against a mini-fridge while I read the latest installment. I haven’t experienced a locative work interrupting my day like that.

Even the Twitterfiction that launches a 6-day installment of L.A. Flood — timed to simulate the course of a catastrophic flood — permits desultory engagement. L.A. Flood didn’t push its way into my daily life, but the rupture it occasioned was no less dramatic. Driving from the Burbank Airport to Hollywood last October, my mind wandering, I crossed the Tujunga Pass over the L.A. River. Earlier that day, I’d been nodding in and out of the L.A. Flood Twitterstream. As I crossed Tujunga, I observed the familiar blue sign with a white pelican denoting the L.A. River. Instantly I peered out the window, panicked, expecting the flood to swallow my car. It was over in two seconds, this reverie, but it has stayed with me, the sharpness of the fear. Falling into such aporia has always been one hallmark of good fiction. But locative fiction anchors the aporia to site specificity, and mobility permits us to encounter its strange doubleness in situ.

One short video–on display in our exhibit–is almost all that remains of the first locative media experience, Jeremy Hight’s 34 West, 118 North, a walk through a patch Los Angeles where “sonic ghosts of another era” relay the story of the railroad industry in downtown L.A. Hight, considered by many to be the pioneer of locative storytelling, created a consciousness that is characteristic of locative media experienced in situ: the disjunction between the space and time, the awareness of one’s own immediate physical surroundings as evitable and contingent.

In Kate Armstrong’s Ping, participants receive directions culled from a telephone tree about where to go next: “the effects of the environment on the perception, behaviour and mood of individuals” is under study here. Four other projects not included in this exhibit continue in the vein of Armstrong’s pioneering work in the psychogeographical: Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, Paul Notzold’s Speak to God and Bluebrain’s two first-ever location-aware albums Listen to the Light (Oct. 2011; set in Central Park) and The National Mall (April 2011). In each case, in situ experience is elemental to the art. In Teri Raub’s Core Sample, featured in this exhibit, a GPS-based interactive sound walk puts the soundscapes of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art in dialog with the landscape of Spectacle Island and asks “what is recorded versus what is suppressed and denied?”

Where locative works wander beneath your touch, guiding you to treasures both fictive and (in the case of geocached “Blue Light Project,” literal), mobile works are instantly summoned. Jason Farman speculates that touch interface seems “invisible” because our muscle memory bypasses consciousness of how we access the story: we notice interface only when it doesn’t work. But touch is more than a navigational gesture; it becomes a vernacular–a touch vernacular, I argue–when tactile navigation becomes expressive: not just a means of accessing the story but interactively constituting it.

Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain on the Apple iOS yields an experience that demonstrates the narrative complexity that can arise when touch is treated as a narrative element capable of nuance, mood and layering much the way we think of sound. Both Strange Rain and the previous year’s Ruben and Lullaby are featured in the mobile works exhibit. Synesthetic, narratively rich because multi-sensory and choreographed both to frame text and stand alone, Strange Rain is the best example I’ve found yet of the multimodal sense/text recursive loop that augments narrative possibility beyond the familiar dyad of sight/sound. Unlike Loyer’s gorgeous but less compelling Ruben and Lullaby, which eschews text for drawn, interactive facial expressions to propel the arguing lovers’ narrative, Strange Rain is as much a puzzle as it is a sensory experience. Loyer calls his works “stories you can play,” and indeed, the tension between the narrative and ludic elements pull the reader/gamer in opposite directions. Games urge us to move quickly, to “level up.” Narrative enjoins us to slow down and feel. Strange Rain approximates synesthesia when the reader/gamer oscillates quickly between those two modes of interaction. It’s a splendid disorientation.

Jörg Piringer’s abcedfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a canny app that features crisp sound recordings of each letter. Activated by touch, these letter-sounds bounce, fly, drop and putter around the screen in any combination a gamer can create through touch. Endlessly imaginative, this game has no narrative element; but the play is so inspired it causes us to hear–for the first time in how long?–the sonic building blocks of language. Piringer’s defamiliarization creates a surprising range of euphony and cacophony. He is a member of Vienna’s legendary Vegetable Orchestra.

Silent and stark in black-and-white silhouettes, Aya Karpinska’s Shadows Never Sleep withholds the sonic and tactile gratifications of works by Piringer and Loyer. Karpinska’s play with children’s nursery rhymes and bedtime stories casts the scary “shadows” as text itself, to which the reader has to “zoom” with her fingers in order to gain access. These beautiful text panes are the creatures under your bed. In P.o.E.M.M.’s “What They Speak,” the reader glides her finger atop the mobile screen and lines of poetry spring up and trail behind, sometimes right side up and sometimes backwards. The app features poems by luminaries David Jhave Johnston, Jim Andrews, J. R. Carpenter, Aya Karpinska, and platform co-creator Jason Lewis.

“Pursue error & failure, exploit autocorrect, disturb the placid surface of interface that deceives us into believing in unshakable humanness,” exhorts co-curator Lori Emerson, guest-tweeting on Mark Amerika’s @remixthebook. Amerika, an e-lit author since the early days of hypertext, shot the first feature-length film on a mobile phone: Immobilité is on view in our mobile exhibit. From Amerika’s ’90s hypertext, to his current film, to the next generation of mobile and locative fictions authored by undergraduate e-lit artists featured in this exhibit: the history of innovation writes and rewrites itself on a palimpsest you can swipe.

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[Xposted in course blog DIY 499.]

Class Thursday Nov. 3rd, a discussion of Bennett and Mousli’s Seeing L.A., A Different Look at a Different City and Baudrilliard’s Simulacra and Simulation, set us up for the two final assignments of our semester in COMM 499 at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. We’re moving from application of hyperlocal to building a conceptual understanding of how meaning gets produced. This recursive loop between build and analysis is the hallmark of what we do in COMM 499.

Last crunch building DigiToolSC in the East Lobby, 26Oct, 10PM

Last week we engaged in two applicative activities that advanced our knowledge of the hyperlocal. We launched DigiToolSC, our app that helps students in our immediate community find courses that let them work with digital tools.

Later that morning 10/27, we walked across our campus pulling on our phones–or trying to pull–the polyphonous stories of L.A. Flood, a fictional flood simulation depicted in narratives hyperlocated to specific sites at USC, which we accessed via QR codes on stickers. There was also a Twitterfiction playing out in six days with more than seventy characters authored anonymously, identified only by their Twitter handles. We learned important lessons about UI [user interface] and UX [user experience]: 1) Content has to load quickly. Nikki observed that each LAF narrative ought to have a unique QR code to reduce load time. 2) Encountering narrative in situ is perhaps less integral to L.A. Flood than to some other geolocated stories because the fictional universe it depicts doesn’t jibe with the sunny, crystal-clear weather we encountered that morning as we ambled around campus. Check out this tweet from a University of Maryland student who participated in the LAF Twitterfiction. In some ways, not being in L.A. might have enabled fictive participation.

Now we move from those applications of hyperlocal to a more conceptual analysis of how hyperlocal informs two significant instantiation of social media. Our class will break into two teams of four to create close readings of:

#OccupyLA

L.A. as a character in USC’s brand identity

Tasks for this assignment draw together many of the skills and critical readings we’ve engaged over the course of this term. Using those readings and others will enrich the complexity of these collaborative final projects.

In class Tuesday Nov. 1, some of you said you wished to have engaged more with tools you didn’t already know during our DigiToolSC build. This assignment is your opportunity to do so. For DigiToolSC, we had a client: all students registering for spring 12 classes. We hit our deadline and delivered the app to our clients in time for spring reg.

Unlike DigiToolSC, this next assignment does not have an external client. This build is for us: learning we will present to each other.

As we discuss in class today the three essays we read in Seeing L.A. (by John Humble, Jean Michel Espitallier and D.J. Waldie), we’re going to dive into the way in which art helps us to see things freshly. In the next assignment, that means you’ll examine how communities of practice marshall images to tell stories, whether that’s the Occupy story or the USC’s deployment of L.A. to augment its brand appeal. Whether the context is political or commercial, in other words, media makers jostle us into seeing the concept freshly. This is the opposite work of a cliche. A cliche is a foregone conclusion. We have no need to see it or examine it because we already understand its properties. Occupants believe their plights have been erased, invisible to the bankers and others who have created their impoverishment. That’s why this blog We Are the 99% has been important to give face to abstractions like poverty, unemployment, blighted hopes. Some have criticized occupants for not having a set of demands. Quite the opposite. Their demand couldn’t be more obvious: LOOK. AT. THIS.

A brand needs similarly to arrest attention. Students working on this subject for the collaborative final may wish to examine USC’s representations of Los Angeles in its social media. It’s a very interesting value proposition: in an age when students can pull a lot of knowledge for free–via the Open University, iTunes U or just via YouTube–what is the role of the residential university? To my mind, the more USC builds out opportunities for students to engage in informal, extracurricular learning that CAN’T be replicated online, the stronger its case for residential learning. Consider the face-to-face engagement we experienced at the Visions and Voices afterparty on 10/27 where we hung out in the beautiful courtyard, noshed on greasy but delicious tamales and gabbbed for 90 minutes. Our class is uniquely situated to discuss the particular affordances of face-to-face and digital-born learning because we conduct class in various platforms AND face-to-face: our classroom is as much on #COMM499 and our Facebook working group as it is in our virtual classroom or ASC 223. That gives us expertise I’d like you to ruminate on in these final projects.

Homework assignment over the weekend of 11/5 and 11/6:

Finish your 300-500 word rumination on the DigiToolSC build and post it to this blog. See particular prompt and instructions here.

Read & view linked materials below.

Decide which subject you want to work on.

Decide which tools you want to work with: Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Audacity, Garageband, Prezi, Powerpoint, gmaps, Stroome [collaborative editing software].

Continue daily participation in DigiToolSC social media promo campaign, as specified in this post. Remember to post all your activity to our g-spreadsheet in order to receive full credit.

When we convene on Tuesday 11/8, we’ll shape our final collaborative builds!

Here’s the work schedule for the last four weeks of class:

Week 12
11/8 Break into teams for collaborative build: USC social media brand identity or OccupyLA [30 mins]; Audacity workshop with Courtney Miller in iLab ASC 229 [60 mins].

11/10 Meet in ASC 223 f2f to work in teams designing collaborative projects. I will come in via Elluminate. For the last 30 minutes (10:20-10:50), I’ll lead discussion via Elluminate: where are you in the build? Which platforms permit the interpretation you want to make? How to allocate work fairly, and keep track of it via a g-spreadsheets? What are the relevant lenses (quantitative, theoretical) through which to view this material?

Each group should set up an FB working group page to be the meeting place where you share & aggregate materials.

Week 13
11/15 Work f2f in teams sharing & gathering assets. Are you doing the work you agreed to do for the collaboration? Have you built in challenge with tools so that you work with a new platform? KIB comes in via Elluminate.

11/17 KIB f2f with you in ASC 223. Build presentations.

Week 14
11/22 KIB f2f with you in ASC 223. Some time spent (30 mins? 45?) with iMovie workshop in prep for your individual finals.

11/24 THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

Week 15
11/29 KIB f2f with you in ASC 223: our last time meeting f2f. Present
your interpretations of OccupyLA or USC branding to
the class.

12/1 Last meeting via Elluminate: Course review. We’ll discuss progress on your edited vlogs, which is your individual course final.

[Your individual class final remains the assignment to edit your YouTube vlogs into a statement about what you learned in social media. Keep working on that!]

Two tidbits to get you started working on either OccupyLA or USC branding. Attend to the communications strategies deployed here to convey the message. What are the media makers intending the viewer to learn from watching? Is there an alterative way of looking at the same material? (As Emily Dickinson might say: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—/Success in Cirrcuit lies.”)

This links to Occupy LA, the OccupyLA livestream, and, as point of contrast, this SocialLive FB mini-page for OWS.

This video “USC Trojans Love L.A.” deploys images and fantasies about USC and L.A. What is its message about a student’s decision to attend USC?

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My father-in-law, a recently retired cardiologist, taught at UCLA Medical School for many years. I asked one day how med students learn so quickly the many procedures they perform on human bodies?

“Watch one, do one, teach one,” he replied.

In private office hours consults with each of my students in September, HTML5 and CSS3 kept coming up. Students want to learn it. They said employers expect you to have passing familiarity with it. But code is scary. It’s a language with many libraries. Unlike social media platforms, it’s not obvious how you would just jump in and teach yourself. Ten years ago, peoples’ first encounters with code were often hand-building websites. It’s a simple and immediately accessible way to cut your teeth. But now that platforms such as WordPress to do the heavy lifting for you, learning to code by hand-building a site means choosing to publish a less functional, less pretty website than you could make in one hour on WordPress. You have to code, fail and learn for a while before what you can build by hand looks better than a template.

As the ease of making and sharing gets increasingly simple, our distance from the full process of how objects get made and published is proportionally more abstracted. For example, I had to engage with an FTP client to load this site to my personal domain on my server. But that’s it: I’m done. I don’t have to think again about how the information I type on this site gets relayed to you. WP handles the many, many refreshes and new content. Purveyors of digital platforms build the tools, and we come. Apple’s app store had approximately 362K apps for download at the beginning of last summer; by the end, it was over 500K as this cool infographic from Gigaom suggests.

Working with code sparks a new way of looking at the human/computer interface. It lets you see “an interface.” You start to see how software and algorithms organize your life: beep to get your attention, herd you into little boxes where all your “content” gets “served” and where you can in turn dish it out to your “friends.” Eli Pariser, founder of MoveOn, has written well about how algorithms block viewpoints and people they think you will not brook. [See my post about Pariser on this problem.] Algorithms anticipate your wishes like Jeanie granting wishes for her “Master” in the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeanie. But we know who really had the power in that situation, right? The blond in the false eyelashes, her bare tummy glinting to the camera. All she wanted to do was please him! Isn’t that all Google wants? To please you really, really fast. And in delivering what you want in microseconds, it performs a kind of leger-de-main in which you don’t see the not-evil hand rifling through your click behavior, extracting it, and selling it to behavioral marketing companies that will build your unique Persuasion Profile identifying your particular interests, habits and vulnerabilities. That’s why Facebook and Google+ insist upon real names: your data is most valuable when it’s tied expressly to you and not a pseudonym.

Algorithms are, in the words of poet, professor and electronic literature author Brian Kim Stefans, “an unpleasant despot.” I’ll never be a programmer. But the consciousness borne of thinking through what code does in the world, and how and why people use it has changed my sense of what constitutes freedom. It’s also made me much more tolerant of failure because I understand failure to be a precondition of freedom.

“FAIL HARDER”

declares a sign taped to the transparent glass doors opening into Annenberg’s new Innovation Lab.

Failure hatches work-arounds that may not have been thinkable until you had an urgent need to solve the problem.

That’s why working with digital tools in curricular settings is essential. It’s even better if there’s a client, a deadline, the possibility of public failure. Watching Lynda.com instructional vids isn’t an adequate supplement without the public accountability. Tutorials on YouTube foster marginally more active learning than Lynda, because you have to adjudicate among the different search returns to figure out what actually you need to learn. But those forms of DIY [do it yourself] learning are kind of like multivitamin tablets: they purport to have all you need, but in practice you can’t digest all that value in the absence of other food-borne elements. When it comes to digital learning, there’s no magic pill. No substitute for working with tools in the classroom.

Academic culture is built upon the premise that failure is shameful: a sign of imbecility, or slapdash preparation. That’s why the Lab’s “FAIL HARDER” sign shocks. We are being exhorted to override our training and instinct to shelter ideas that may not be fully articulated, or practices at which may not yet be masterful.

Whether or not we professors can take up the challenge to FAIL HARDER remains to be seen. My students are entirely up for the challenge. I am confident in our collective wisdom. I have watched with pleasure as they organized extracurricular meetings (which I didn’t attend), filled a google spreadsheet with information for our app, built a Facebook group to centralize workflow communication.

In a few hours I begin teaching those students jquery mobile, a programming language that templatizes standard features of mobile device navigation. Last summer I worked with code czarina Jeannette Altman on this film festival app. Mostly I watched her. Then I did a section, my modest “About.” Really my learning came from copying, then writing and breaking code to learn what specific calls did.

So I watched one. I did one. In four hours, I’m gonna teach one.

flickr image credit: Luis Machado

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“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

–Andrew Lewis qtd in Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble

My husband toured FB, and all I got was a new Friend List, new Subscribe and new "Privacy" controls.

Due Monday, Sept. 19 at 5PM posted to your blog (COMM 499 students will post to collective blog–see email for details), the first midterm is a case study of one aspect of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has obliged us by giving us a lot of new material, rolling out new tools that copy key elements of competitors Twitter and Google+. “Subscribe” permits asymmetrical relationships, just like Twitter: follow anyone you want without having to worry whether that person will “friend” you back. New friends lists, such as “smart lists” and user-controlled customizable lists grant Facebook users more nuance in deciding who sees what information they post or is posted about them.

In terms of leverage, there’s nothing that can touch Facebook’s 750 million subscribers. Google+, hailed by metrics company ComScore as “the fastest growing social network of all time” on August 3, 2011 tops out at 25 million users. If g+ has grown appreciably in the last six weeks, then it’s story missed by the well-known industry trackers Mashable, ArsTechnica, GigaOm and TechCrunch. That is to say: I doubt it.

We worked in class on close reading. I exhort you to choose three killer examples that let you tell a compelling story about Facebook. Case studies usually have a beginning, middle and end: a premise, evidence closely analyzed, and a conclusion. Remember this industry example we discussed in class.

In this case study, you may respond to one of four options.
1. Write about one element of Facebook that you generated in class with peers and ran by me for approval. Propose a hypothesis of how you think that element of FB affects (or will affect) other elements beyond FB: privacy, traceable personal data aggregation, brand messaging, our “persuasion profiles,” our offline social relationships.
2. Write about the new Subscribe and Friends Lists functions: they appear to give users more control over who sees aspects of our FB profiles. What are the advantages of this new functionality? What are the disadvantages? Look at the many different options for messaging: from the private message all the way out to wall posts and tags delivered to subscribers who are not necessarily one’s “friends.” Can you make a continuum of privacy or publicity? Does such control actually matter to individual users? To brands or other corporate entities? What about the idea that these privacy controls are a red herring: the real money to be made is in data aggregation, which these privacy controls will render more nuanced and possibly more candid (because people think they are acting privately.)
3. Examine one element in either the Ian Bogost piece (“A Professor’s View of Facebook”) or the BJ Fogg vids and relate it to the new Facebook. Stanford Prof. Fogg claims that Facebook is “the most persuasive technology” in human history. Look specifically at his video about Tagging in FB. Apply the three conditions to different scenarios. Do individuals respond differently to the psychological triggers than they might if they were managing public figures or businesses?
4. If you personally have managed a Facebook promotions campaign, describe the techniques you’ve learned for growing your brand’s (or your clients’) profiles. What are the metrics on your success? Do they reflect genuine brand penetration, or are the numbers misleading? How might you grow the business even further using the new tools? Is it possible that Facebook could be a “one-stop-shop” for social media? Can we now cut out Twitter and G+?

Useful Links
See the Linkroll page; scroll down for all kinds of links pertinent to this topic.

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