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)
Critical Commons
Critical Commons is a research platform and resource for media scholars and educators that launched in Spring 2009 with support from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning competition. The Critical Commons database contains hundreds of high-resolution video clips and was recently redeveloped to include a mobile application. It is being used widely in support of classroom teaching, electronic publication and as an online space for scholarly research and writing. Along with the Shoah Foundation, the Hemispheric Institute, and the Internet Archive, Critical Commons has been selected as an inaugural partner in the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, a Mellon-funded initiative in the digital humanities. The goal of Critical Commons is nothing less than a transformation of the way media is used in research and teaching and an expansion of fair use protections for educators across multiple disciplines.
IKEA as ARG project at HASTAC conference
On Friday April 16 as part of the HASTAC Grand Challenges and Global Innovations virtual conference, I will be “presenting” (live via pre-recorded video) a project from my class last semester titled “Interactive Experience and World Design: IKEA as ARG” in which graduate students from USC’s Interactive Media program infiltrated an IKEA retail outlet to analyze the spatial and narrative design of the store as part of an Alternate Reality Game experience. The video offers a summary of the course context and project assignment, focusing on the concept of “scripted spaces,” drawn from Norman Klein’s book The Vatican to Vegas. This video also marks the first time I have had content automatically removed from my YouTube account due to the inclusion of copyrighted material. In representing the transmedia context for this project, the video includes clips of television programs, feature films, advertisements and popular music, at least one of which was flagged by YouTube’s copyright-filtering system on behalf of the Fox/News Corp. media conglomerate. I have filed a counter-takedown notice with YouTube in the hopes of having the video reinstated for public viewing, but for now, it is viewable as a Quicktime file or on Vimeo.
Project Documentation Talk at Art Center
I just gave a talk at Art Center College of Design to students in the graduate Media Design Program about video documentation. My basic thesis was that, for many interactive media projects, installations, performances (etc.), the documentation can be as important as the work itself. Good documentation begins well before the project is complete, often incorporating video and still images of the process, iteration and underlying technologies associated with the project. Although I have been teaching documentation strategies for many years, this was the first time I have attempted to outline a taxonomy of documentation genres. Slides from my presentation are posted on Slideshare; most of the video samples are available online.
Administration: program design and direction
During the past six years, I have participated in the creation and administration of two academic programs at USC that are devoted to merging theory and practice through the use of media and technology. I was the principle architect and for three years (2004-07) served as Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, a four-year undergraduate program that seeks to develop innovative, media-rich modes of academic production across multiple disciplines. In 2008, the program graduated its first cohort of 31 students from disciplines as diverse as Biophysics, Engineering, Theater, Music, Cinematic Arts, Classics, East Asian Literature, Linguistics, Broadcast Journalism, International Relations and Business, each of whom had created a media-rich project based on research in his/her major; the program currently enrolls more than 150 students from across the university.
In my current position as Director of the interdivisional Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. program, which I helped design and found in 2007, I have had a rare opportunity to create a graduate program that responds to rapidly shifting practices in media and technology-enhanced scholarship. Having welcomed our fourth cohort of students to the program in fall 2010, I believe iMAP has the potential to set an international standard among universities seeking to recognize emerging forms of scholarship at the intersection of theory and practice.
USC’s establishment and support of these programs signals the importance of research that responds to changing paradigms of scholarship in the 21st century. Indeed, the university’s visionary strategic “Plan for Increasing Academic Excellence” (2004) cites the need for USC to continue its commitment to scholarly work that links fundamental research with applied research as a key element of its future success. I am proud to be associated with several of this university’s most provocative efforts in this direction, from the reshaping of undergraduate and graduate education through media and technology to the redefining of scholarly research and publication at the faculty level.
New to the School of Cinematic Arts in 2007, the interdivisional program in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) situates technology and creative production alongside the historical and theoretical contexts of critical media studies. This practice-oriented Ph.D. program provides students with both practical experience and theoretical knowledge as they work to define new modes of research and production in the 21st century.
Media Arts and Practice was inspired by recent developments in media and technology that have altered the landscape of media production, analysis, distribution and display. Our goal is to support a new generation of scholar-practitioners who are able to combine historical and theoretical knowledge with creative and critical design skills. Students who complete a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice will be uniquely prepared to shape the future of media and scholarship, and to actively engage in the emerging cultural, technological and political dynamics of a global media ecology.
Honors in Multimedia Scholarship is an innovative four-year program for undergraduate students from across the USC campus who are interested in exploring new forms of scholarship and research. Working closely with leading USC faculty, students develop critical and creative abilities in the use of images, video, sound, text and interactivity, crafting media-rich forms of scholarship.
IML Island in Second Life
IML Island is an experimental learning environment created in the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life. Development of the island was supported by the USC Provost’s Technology Enhanced Learning Seed Grant Initiative (2007-08) and developed in part by staff members of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and students in CTIN 478: Designing Multi-User Online Game Environments (fall 2008). Documentation of the development of the island may be found here and here. This space represents a significant intervention in pedagogical uses of virtual environments, the vast majority of which are modeled after physical spaces and do not take advantage of the unique affordances of a virtual environment. IML island is deliberately non-representational, choosing instead to refer metaphorically to spaces such as the Panopticon, theorized by Michel Foucault as an exemplary structure for thinking about cultures of surveillance and our own position as subjects who are both viewer and viewed.
To visit IML island, it is necessary to create an account in Second Life (this is easy and free), after which you may follow this link to teleport directly to the island.
The Recalcitrant Panopticon
The Recalcitrant Panopticon is a live action 360 degree interactive cinema production created by students in CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision during the spring semester of 2003. This project emerged from work with the Interactive Media Division’s Immersive Lab, which conducted a range of experiments in interactive panoramic cinema using an eight-camera, 360 degree recording and editing system. The multi-camera system uses a game console and controller to deliver fully navigable, live action video. This work is specifically designed to explore the properties and limitations of immersive experiences in relation to the codes of cinematic narrative.
Recent research in immersive cinema at USC focused on two courses: CTIN 532: Interactive Experience Design, taught by Mark Bolas and Michael Naimark, and CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision, taught by Steve Anderson and Susana Ruiz. The two courses may be thought of as functioning in tandem on a conceptual level, providing divergent platforms and prototypes for exploring the possibilities of immersion as realized on a psychological level as well as in a volitional, interactive environment.
Ironically, immersive technology, which at first glance seems to represent another step on the path toward realism, also suggests ways of questioning our fundamental relations to space time, knowledge and visual perception. Interestingly, the majority of work in both classes yielded projects which departed from the representational conventions of realism, depicting fragmented, disjunctive, or deliberately distorted spaces. In gravitating toward conceptual investigations of space and perception, several of these projects resisted the presumptive ideals of immersive media. Work with the 8-camera 360 degree system, for example, resulted in two completed projects – The Zooetrope and The Recalcitrant Panopticon – both of which eschew the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema in order to explore notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship as an alternative to traditional storytelling.
Mechanical Cockroach stalks Zemeckis Center
Garnet Hertz’s infamous Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot made a surprise appearance in CTCS 505: Survey of Interactive Media last night during a presentation by Critical Studies grad student Amelia Guimarin and IMD’s own Sean Bouchard. The Roachbot was Hertz’s Master’s thesis project in the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, using a Madagascan hissing cockroach that controls a modified trackball to maneuver a three-wheeled robot. I for one would like to see some IMD thesis projects explore the possibilities of cockroach as CPU.
EKO & Theory/Practice presentations
A couple of people have asked to see the presentations from this week’s seminar on Evocative Knowledge Objects and The War Between Theory and Practice, so here are links via Vuvox and Slideshare:
Vuvox: Evocative Knowledge Objects
Slideshare: The War Between Theory and Practice
Online Multiplayer Game class featured by SCA
A feature story on the development of Second Life spaces in support of SCA classes (including CTIN 482: Designing Online Multiplayer Game Environments) and programs (including the IML’s Honors in Multimedia Scholarship) just went live on the Cinematic Arts website.
Virtual Campus design declaration
This Wordle image is a visualization of the initial discussions in CTIN 482 about the design of a virtual campus for the School of Cinematic Arts. Wordle is a free online tool for computationally visualizing the frequency with which certain words appear within a block of text. This image was generated from the contents of the course wiki, which includes student reflections, the course syllabus and our initial design challenge. It will be interesting to see how this visualization transforms over the course of our design process. In my ongoing attempt to figure out the right mechanism(s) for documenting our design process in the class, this Vuvox document brings together a combination of images, inspirations and reflections by students on the initial design stages. Currently in beta, Vuvox functions on the principle of “cloud” computing, offering a free online tool for designing presentations and/or web-based documents. Although still slightly buggy (particularly text functions and embedded video playback), its simple authoring mode and gestural interface is a welcome relief from the page-based metaphor of Powerpoint.
Sandbox phase continues in CTIN 482
The ‘sandbox’ phase is continuing for CTIN 482 on IML2. In last night’s class, we broke up into three design and development teams to begin concrete planning of projects to populate the SCA virtual campus. To begin establishing group dynamics and workflow, each group was tasked with completing a simple lab exercise: create a simple learning object that makes use of all the basic affordances of objects in Second Life (sound and animation scripts, particle effects, textures; notecard, landmark and URL attachments, etc.).
Bjorn created sample cubes to demonstrate these basic functions and deliver the exercise parameters. Part of the exercise also involved simultaneous group construction, with multiple avatars performing modifications on the same object as a way to ingrain principles of collective authoring and to begin figuring out possible distributions of labor within the groups.
The three projects that the class decided to undertake represent a range of the kinds of learning environments and objects that we have discussed in lecture and in readings. One group will focus on designing a toolkit for teaching various principles of film production using embedded video and the interactive delivery platform of Second Life.
Another group is focusing on sound design and the potentials of designing a creative space for dynamically generating combinations of sound and visuals. Although this project veers the farthest away from the “virtual campus” mandate, the full potentials of sound in Second Life are rarely exploited and this project offers an opportunity to experiment with combinations of environmental effects, music, and event sounds embedded in a responsive environment.
The last group will research the subject of media censorship and design an analytical space for performing transmedial comparisons. The space will be architected to support media analysis based on different critical lenses, with the potential to substitute various media sets and modes of criticism.
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.