[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?

Share this:

“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.

Share this:

Sort By: Eli Pariser on how to encounter difference & challenge online

In his recent TED Talk [March 2011 in Long Beach, CA], Eli Pariser calls on leaders of Facebook and Google to encode civic ethics into the algorithmic editors that serve up links to us based on our click history. (What’s an algorithmic editor, you ask? See Rand Fishkin’s smart comparison of algorithmic editors and pre-Internet tastemakers.)

What follows is a close paraphrase of Pariser’s conclusion. He begins by talking about human editorial gatekeepers of the twentieth century: “You couldn’t have a functioning democracy if you didn’t get a good flow of information. Journalistic ethics weren’t perfect, but it got us through the last century.

We need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of [civic] responsibility into the code they’re writing. I know there are a lot of people [at this talk] from Google and Facebook: people who made the web what it is today. And I’m grateful to them. But we really need to make sure that these algorithms have encoded into them a sense of the public life, of civic responsibility. We need them to be transparent enough…so that we can decide what gets through [the algorithmic editors] and what doesn’t.

We need the Internet to introduce us to new ideas, people and perspectives. It’s not going to do that if it leaves us isolated in a Web of 1.”

For a comically chilling take on this subject, see “G-Male.”

Thanks to my students @zackstahl for surfacing the Pariser talk and @kksquared for Gmale YouTube.

Share this:

People have emailed me to ask about “F2F in the New Media Classroom,” an advanced social media class I’m teaching at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication starting 23 August.

So I made this 6 min. video overview. It discusses why

• we build and not just consume 
• students must bring their devices to class and consult them at will
• the class meets 65% online and 35% F2F 

Those of you who read my post about The Flipped Classroom know that I believe that everything that can be moved OL should be.  OL can deliver experiences that are themselves uniquely valuable: some killer guest speakers are slated to Skype in, for example.

What remains in the physical classroom is the unique value of F2F: embodied, thrilling, spiritual, ephemeral.  My version of the classroom is face time ++.  The students and I will amble outside classroom walls to snap photos on campus to gather assets for our first lesson in visual composition; we’ll visit LACMA, view street art, engage with locative digital art in situ, wander.  Digital flaneurs.  I’ve had Baudelaire unshakably in my head for months as I’ve dreamed up this class.

Share this:

I’ve been thinking about how learning to code changes what I think is important to teach.

Here at the end of my post-doc fellowship at the Mobile Tech Research Initiative, I’m building an “About” page in jQueryMobile for the Columbia Gorge International Film Festival.  Finally, I’m seeing what I’ve learned about code authoring syntax translate into keystrokes.  That’s a big deal.  Groking is one thing.  But when it comes to building, it’s like I’m seated at the piano bench, trying to find the right finger placements before I can play my song.  My fingers had to learn how to do this.  Honestly.  I can’t explain except to say that there’s a kinetic quality to the learning to code that was completely beyond my apprehension ten weeks ago.  I spent time shoving concepts and tags into my brain.  It didn’t matter, none of it mattered, until I learned how to type code by, say, opening and closing a tag quickly, then spacing to insert the specific calls.  I used to type exactly the sequence.  Now I type in syntactic blocks.  Without the typing, I wouldn’t know anything.  It feels hubristic to claim I know anything at all.

The vulnerability of making bonehead mistakes, especially if you’re a professor and are hanging out your total ignorance  like undergarments drying on the community line, can stop you in your tracks.  A few of the Fellows in MTRI do not, will not code.  They work their tails off collaborating, editing and generally “getting” code.  They are vital to the process.  But they are not pushing the keys and sitting alone in front of the screen.

Here’s why it’s a mistake not to try.

Waaay back in 2002, my pal Norah Ashe McNalley and I got a USC Innovative Teaching grant to start an online student journal, which our founding editors named AngeLingo.  (Two years ago, AngeLingo was rebranded “SCribe.”) Our first coder, Jason, was charged with building the site over the course of an entire school year.  Everything was HTML: CSS hadn’t been invented/adopted yet.  Jason–one hell of a coder, by the way, who went on to build games for Dreamworks, etc., etc.–procrastinated epically.  Norah and I didn’t know enough about code (read: we knew zilch) to understand just how far, far behind Jason was in the build.  At that cultural moment, before crowdsourcing and Wikipedia, before pervasive broadband and YouTube videos that explain anything you want to know, it was impossible to educate ourselves.  Without the intervention of our code-savvy husbands (and without growing a pair: my first lesson in management) AngeLingo would have died.  Over the years, AngeLingo has published hundreds of student-authored and -edited academic essays, stories, poems, songs, movies, and the like.  Back in 2003, we tripped on how amazing it was to publish without the need for print, paper and $$$$.  In 2011, as smartphones make publication a daily, common, WYSIWYG experience, we’re in another watershed moment.  Faculty need more than a little code literacy (hat tip to Douglas Rushkoff) to give students a learning experience they can’t get on their own.

Do faculty need to know how to code?  Is it a nice to have, or a gotta have?

At the Modern Languages Association’s 2011 Convention (see my post-convention overview here), Stephen Ramsay declared “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of Digital Humanities and I say ‘yes.’. . . Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things. […] If you are not making anything, you are not … a digital humanist.”  See Stephen’s summary of his MLA talk here.  This comment rippled through the field in the weeks subsequent to the MLA.

(For more on the DH “to code or not to code” debate, see Stephen’s thoughtful clarification “On Building,” Matt Kirschenbaum’s ADE piece “What is the Digital Humanities, and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” and Marilee Lindemann, who is “supremely uninterested in determining whether or not I am a Digital Humanist.” Of course there are many other resources, to which Matt’s piece can lead you.)

Returning to the “About”

My magnificent partner in this summer’s appland, Jeannette Altman (cellist, code and Illustrator teacher, perfectionist, goof), has created almost the entire app for the CGIFF.  “About” is my foray.  Jeannette is gray-eyed Athena, building not one interactive map with the Google Maps API, but *ten*: one for each venue at which the films will show in two weeks.  We’ll see if we can get it all to sit still in such a light little app.  Messing around with her has been one of the highlights of this unbelievably cool summer. (Check out, btw, MTRI’s rich resources page, loaded with all kinds of goodies: a little souvenir from our summer trip.)  God bless Creative Media and Digital Culture Program Director Dene Grigar for insisting that stuff on the web should be free & shared.

I now know enough about code to appreciate that it’s an accomplishment to be playing even one note at a time.  I’m really happy to make something tuneful no matter how slowly.  An echo of that song “Fill In the Words” sung by Robert Klein in the 1979 musical They’re Playing Our Song has been plunking lightly in my ear.  He taps a C on a kiddie piano: “You play a C, you get a C.  That’s simple.  That’s easy…” (It’s a quiet, introspective little number: no YouTube vid to show you. Here are the lyrics.)

As I set my syllabi for the advanced social media classes I’ll teach in August at USC and at Washington State University, I am modeling the daily activities on what we’ve done at MTRI.  Building teaches differently than conceptual work.  Conceptual work equips students to make sense of the task long after the urgency of a particular build is finished.  There’s a shelf life for the skills.  (One example as an index of how quickly it’s moving: the jQuery Mobile code updates frequently: you have to check daily to make sure your header files are current.) Conceptual work allows students to forge the important critical thinking that John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas extol in A New Culture of Learning.  It’s vital.

But I would say that I’m with Stephen Ramsay on this one.  Learning how to build rewires your sense of how things work.  As I said, it’s in the fingers, this knowledge.  There’s some kind of recursive loop between the fingers and the brain. Please indulge me this long quotation from Stephen’s piece “On Building”: I read it in January and loved it then.  But now my fingers know it to be true.

As humanists, we are inclined to read maps (to pick one example) as texts, as instruments of cultural desire, as visualizations of imperial ideology, as records of the emergence of national identity, and so forth. […]  But making a map (with a GIS system, say) is an entirely different experience. DH-ers insist – again and again – that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. It’s the thing I’ve been hearing for as I long as I’ve been in this. People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, create visualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring DH-ers to the same table. Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic – one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects. Media studies, game studies, critical code studies, and various other disciplines have brought wonderful new things to humanistic study, but I will say (at my peril) that none of these represent as radical a shift as the move from reading to making. [Emphasis mine.]

Share this:

The Flipped Classroom inverts the typical way teachers and learners engage: lectures are delivered via video podcast; class time is spent in collaborative problem solving.

As you watch this video overview, ask yourself two things:  1) why was the Flipped Classroom was borne of collaboration, not by one teacher alone?  2) How does it exploit the unique properties of F2F learning in the digital era?

Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams are high school chemistry teachers in Woodland Park, Colorado.  They create video podcasts of their lectures which students watch outside of class via laptops, mobile devices, tablets or DVDs.

This means that students can access the lectures on-demand.  They control the pace of information delivery, which they can’t do F2F.  Crucial: screens allow MORE student participation in their knowledge acquisition, not less.  This is obvious to many of us working in the field, but remember that we are still a tiny subset of educators.  High school students in my local school district are FORBIDDEN to bring any screens the classroom: there’s still a deep distrust of screens as portals to distraction or cheating, and the false but abiding sense that occasional distraction is inherently a bad thing.

In the Flipped Classroom, students come to class primed to do the applied problem solving, what we typically call the “homework.” Instead of struggling in isolation, learners work the problems in small groups.  Peer-to-peer  engagement in quite natural in this setting.  The teacher, as master tutor, wanders around answering questions and sparking further engagement in the problem solving.

Maybe “homework” no longer means that “work you do at home,” but “the work” you do IN CLASS that drives the concepts “home.”

The takeaways for the superiority of hybrid learning environments are pretty obvious:

• Screens are better at conveying lecture-style information 
• Screens are ubiquitous and permit learners self-paced knowledge acquisition
• F2F is better for problem solving (more on this later, when I write about what I’ve learned, done and observed as a post-doc Fellow at the WSU’s Mobile Technology Research Initiative)
• The social dimension of learning F2F doesn’t suck time away from knowledge acquisition.  It doubles the learning.  Social in tandem with screen cements learning ways previously unavailable in the pre-digital era.  

Silent work in a F2F classroom punishes learners for their natural inclination to share and collaborate.  It mistakes the animation of collaboration and its occasional “distractions” as barriers to serious knowledge acquisition, rather than the bursts and rests of how we think/work in real time.  Ever get up from your screen to go make a cup of tea?  Even looking up from your screen and staring into the far distance for a minute can refresh your attention and enable greater focus and retention.

Thanks to the folks at DML Central for surfacing this today!  See this to join the Flipped Classroom social network. Here’s a Colorado Springs TV news affiliate describing the Flipped Classroom: useful to be sent to local school district admins in your neighborhood.

Why do you think the Flipped Classroom was borne of collaboration?  Drop me a comment and I’ll tell you what I think too!

Share this: