A Pedagogy for Original Synners
What will the class of 2020 expect when we (the teachers) meet them for the first time? What should we expect of them? This chapter uses the science fictional device of a time-traveling machine to frame these questions. The aim is to provide a context for examining currently under-recognized styles of learning emerging from contemporary game and remix cultures. We will examine a range of educational practices and suggest three key elements that support learning as a process of critical and creative synthesis: 1) open source scholarship, 2) social networking and 3) youth as cultural mediators.
Written with Anne Balsamo.
Published in Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected edited by Tara McPherson for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Learning (MIT Press 2007)
History TV and Popular Memory
“A remarkable and misguided consensus exists among both historians and media critics regarding television’s unsuitability for the construction of history. Notwithstanding The History Channel’s promise to provide access to “All of History – All in One Place,” television viewers are often characterized as victims in an epidemic of cultural amnesia for which television is both disease and carrier. TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst, it actually impedes viewers’ ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past.”
This essay examines an array of television shows, ranging from Star Trek and Quantum Leap to Meeting of Minds and You Are There, to argue against prevailing assumptions about TV and history and the culture of amnesia that television is supposed to produce.
Technologies of History Interactive
The interactive iteration of Technologies of History is a case-study, an opportunity to put into practice some of the arguments I have been developing over the past few years thinking about the entangled relations among media, history and memory. These arguments, in fact, may only be fully articulated through media. By this I do not mean simply taking advantage of the digital format for providing media supplements or illustrations, but literally aiming to think through the media under analysis, developing relationships between media elements themselves, rather than privileging the discursive affordances of text over images. Technologies of History draws substantially on the ideas developed in my book manuscript of the same title, but the interactive format allows for a much more detailed and nuanced form of engagement with the historiographical models under consideration. In some ways, then, this project is not primarily about the JFK assassination; but the dense layers of mediation to which this historical event has been subjected provide a particularly rich set of opportunities to think about the construction of history itself.
Although certain aspects of the design may initially appear to resist easy navigation, our aim is neither to frustrate the user nor indulge in aestheticized design experiments. The project presents several clearly defined modes of exploration, beginning with the “Analyzer,” in which media elements are subjected to a process of tracking and fragmenting designed to simultaneously reveal and obscure the contents of a film or video clip. The user may then follow connections that are suggested by either the video segment or its accompanying text to explore further text arguments or a connection between two media clips. Each connection that is made is logged in the user’s history and may be revisited at any time. The experience of moving through the project is therefore intended to be partly experiential and partly curatorial; users may select from categories of content that are based on genre, format or (primarily) threads of historiographical concern. The multiplicity of opportunities for revelation or chaos function as both a metaphor for history’s own lack of resolution and as a rhetorical strategy for resisting narrative closure.
Steve Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts & Practice in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is the author of Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth 2011), co-Editor of the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. A scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, culture and technology, his research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.