Shake and Repeat!

5.    Prototype — build fast. test and improve it together.
 (Shake and repeat.)
 
Wednesday, April 13 – Always in development
• pick 3 ch we have not read yet in any book, according to your interests
• project workshop 

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Now we enter into the prototype stage of our class: where a version of what you have been thinking about is tried out, where some trial and error allows us to see more about what does and doesn't, might or might not work, and where the resources offered to you at the conference might be used.

So think about this next stage, about what folks offered as help to your group, about what you noticed about other grps stuff that you might help with, how to put your vision into some action now in order to see what could happen right away and so on.

And we also now want to consider what this term "scholarship and practice" means (click the link presented and go to p. 18). The university is very big on it now, this class is itself a prototype of doing this, I need your input into what that phrase could/should/might mean. How is the class itself a prototype and how can I and you get feedback and from where about how to make it work out? What should the next version of the class look like?

Please read my talk for my Sweden trip and consider what role it does or could play in all this? What does it reveal about intentions and possibilities here?

How do we all frame what we need and want to know in order to see how to work with our prototypes?


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Wednesday, April 27 – What happens next?

=> • demo your prototype

A final exercise: here.  

Prototyping the class.

Worlding! 

• Donna Haraway
 & vid if you have silverlight


• Worlding Project!  

people, people and more people!

    4.    People — who are you trying to reach? how can they help right now? 

Wednesday, April 6 – Creativity, people, things and relationships
• look again at Zandt 2010, Boler 2008: ch 17, 11, 15
• projects and conference workshop: how do we include the workshop and conference into the process we are learning? how can any people who attend be invited into the process? in what ways are they part of the people to reach? in what ways are they some of the people to help? how can we share with them the strategies, stories, tools, other people and prototype? Explain that this is a PROCESS, that they are part of it, and where you all are in that process! 

SATURDAY, APRIL 9 – THEORIZING THE WEB CONFERENCE
• we are creating a workshop for the conference! Be there! Art/Soc 3203. Be there at 8:30 AM to set up for 9:30 event.


 
=> • people analysis in written form with contact log
Some students will be developing a project with an NGO or activist group in mind. Others will be thinking about audiences for projects. In these and other cases analysis of who is involved in what you are doing and what it is supposed to make happen are essential. You will write this up and may include a contact log of people involved. 

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Megan Boler with Stephen Turpin: "The Daily Show and Crossfire: Satire and Sincerity as Truth to Power":

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Boler 385: "New counterpublics" and "ironic citizenship." 386: "Coping with Complicity in Spectacular Society"

390: referring to Deleuze 1967: "the location of a problematic. The empty square is the very possibility of forming a problem that intersects a variety of different planes or registers (government, the family, race, gender, class, etc.)--without falling victim to an apathetic passivity nor filling in the square of meaning with any final determinant (the desire to fix cause and thus determine course of action too simply)." 

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And more about the addiction paradigm, panics, research, digital natives, and more:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110405132459.htm

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tools can be processes as well as products....

Wednesday, March 16 – Creative processes and products as tools, using tools, generating tools
• Ito, chapter 5 on gaming (note PROCESS not product)
(during the break read chapter 6 on creative production as well)

boundary work: 
• 235: "making distinctions between different kinds of gaming identities and between the world of gaming and mainstream culture...."
• some forms it takes as discussed in Ito: gamer/non-gamer; killing time/hanging out vs. rec. gaming expertise; boy/girl; digital native vs. older generation; addiction & compulsion vs. social health & maturity  
• other possibilities? ethnographic ecologies vs. game designing; extensive vs. intensive; disciplinary differences, eg. HCI & English vs. ethno-methodological sociology of knowledge; inclusive practices vs. exclusionary & specialized forms of expertise; insider vs. outsider? game scholars vs. gamers? game scholar-gamers vs. play & learning scholars 

• what counts here as "accessibility" or exclusion?? what about gripes like "boys with toys"? or status driven sports identities vs. interest driven gamers identities? commitments of time and energy, greater and lesser? "I don't have enough time for my First Life..."? ebb and flow of intensities

• games as learning as play
 

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Johnson 2005: 10: "the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them."

• what kind of boundary work does Johnson do?
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Some vocabularies: King, Johnson, Bolter & Grusin
* From Steven Johnson, Everything Bad (Riverhead, 2005) [these are Johnson's terms, Katie's definitions] 54-89:
Probing--learning the rules of a simulation by trial and error, while necessarily also checking out its edges, limits and unexpected artifacts or patterns
Telescoping--apprehending simultaneously all the structures of nested hierarchy and mobilizing them in various sequences
Flashing arrows--signposts to help the reader entangle themselves properly into the book
filling-in--tentatively trying out possible materials in spaces left empty in production, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently
multiple threading--keeping track of many story arcs and a range of narrative frames, noting which ones are currently active and which ones are latent but potentially significant
texture--noting which details are irrelevant but added tacitly for the pleasures of seeming realisms
layered jokes--rich associations built up humorously over long time frames that animate a complex intermedia intertextuality

* From Bolter & Grusin, Remediation (MIT, 1999): 68:

"What is remarkable is that these seemingly contradictory logics not only coexist in digital media today, but are mutually dependent. Immediacy depends upon hypermediacy.... The desire for immediacy leads to a process of appropriation and critique by which digital media reshape or 'remediate' one another and their analog predecessors such as film, television, and photography."

"The entertainment industry defines repurposing as pouring a familiar content into another media form; a comic book series is repurposed as a live-action movie, a televised cartoon, a video game, and a set of action toys. The goal is not to replace the earlier forms, to which the company may own the rights, but rather to spread the content over as many markets as possible. Each of those forms takes part of its meaning from the other products in a process of honorific remediation and at the same time makes a tacit claim to offer an experience that the other forms cannot. Together these products constitute a hypermediated environment in which the repurposed content is available to all the senses at once…."

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Only a taste of exciting resources and research on gaming and learning:
Gee 2003, 2007; Salen & Zimmerman 2004, Juul 2005, Jenkins 2006, Pearce & Artemesia 2009, Taylor 2009




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Us at Theorizing the Web!

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WHAT SHOULD YOU BE DOCUMENTING AT JARAH'S SITE? remember, do it with an eye to what senior seminar students in WMST should be synthetically gathering together (we discussed here) This site well be your "logbook." And everything else should go up here too. How will you put in your storyboard for example? Figure out how to use this site to do all the things asked for: this will take some ingenuity and will be a contribution to our program!

=> • tools & skills: demo and write up of what you learn new and what you get better at
You will participate in skills building in the course of the class, perhaps in workshops, with team members or partners, or on your own. You will demonstrate a new skill or something you got especially better at and write up how that happened and how it matters.  

=> • inventories and brainstorming write ups, document online presence, logbooking
All through the class you will keep a logbook of what you have done, what you are in the middle of doing, what you are working toward. You will turn in a cumulative log each time you work through one of the five stages of the class. [Learning Outcomes Assessments or LOAs are taken for our department from this class.]

=> • storyboard (crafty, electronic, or online), includes presentation & digital picture
A storyboard is a form of visual thinking and planning. It allows you to visually demonstrate to yourself and others a sequence of steps in an interactive and/or collaborative process. It allows you to reorder your procedures, to brainstorm with others, and to create consensus. You will present your storyboard and turn in a digital picture to document it.

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Wednesday, March 23 – SPRING BREAK

4.    People — who are you trying to reach? how can they help right now?
Wednesday, March 30 – KATIE IN SWEDEN, JARAH TAKES ON
• projects and conference workshop 

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Tooling around?

3.    Tools — set up simple tools that make it easy for contributors to see what’s happening and get involved.
Wednesday, March 9 – What counts as a tool? “Tools” across technologies and media.







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Flanagan: Jarah's site: link: twitter: podcast:

Games for change:
http://www.gamesforchange.org/channels/human   


Tiltfactor: Pox:
http://www.tiltfactor.org/pox 

Tiltfactor: Layoff: 
http://www.tiltfactor.org/play-layoff 


Grow a game, online:
http://www.tiltfactor.org/growagame/play.html   

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• Boler, chapters 4, 9, 10, 16 (online here)
• is your project a tool? does it use tools? what are the tools you have to offer or that you need? 

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• Boler helps us wonder (eg 233ff), why do we want what we want? in corporate media? mainstreaming media as community media? what we come to expect, what we come to want and why? 

• how to make the news (or what else? anything else?) be about "building knowledge in a cumulative way" (235)?

• how in our projects do we take to heart the point Fernandes makes to Boler that in the US we tend to think we have "everything to teach and nothing to learn" (236)? 

People's Production House, link here. 
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Media-digital Media and Democracy
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touching: physically, emotionally, interactively

Wednesday, March 2 – People and their lives, how to touch others, to empathize
• read ALL BOXES in Ito. Remember what Zandt has to say about empathy and sympathy.
how are these stories? what do they do? how do they help people understand the arguments of the book?
• how does your project touch you? how can it touch others? how do you plan to reach out? 
digital youth research homepage:  
media ecologies, friendship,  
intimacy, families, gaming, creative production, work 

=> • inventories and brainstorming write ups, document online presence, logbooking
All through the class you will keep a logbook of what you have done, what you are in the middle of doing, what you are working toward. You will turn in a cumulative log each time you work through one of the five stages of the class. [Learning Outcomes Assessments or LOAs are taken for our department from this class. At the end of this course you will turn in extra copies of some assignments to be used anonymously in department assessment efforts.]

=> • storyboard (crafty, electronic, or online), includes presentation & digital picture
A storyboard is a form of visual thinking and planning. It allows you to visually demonstrate to yourself and others a sequence of steps in an interactive and/or collaborative process. It allows you to reorder your procedures, to brainstorm with others, and to create consensus. You will present your storyboard and turn in a digital picture to document it. 

Activisms begin telling stories.... and how?

Wednesday, Februrary 23 -- Activisms & Stories 
• we will examine the four required books, Ito, Boler, Zandt, and Hands, together with the recommended books, Mitchell and Rodgers, to think about the activisms feminists consider, implement, critique, share, disagree about, and entangle. What scholarly maps do these draw upon? [Pluto Press] In addition to what you have read of these books already, you should also read for this week the last two chapters of Hands' book: Chapter 6 on Alter-Globalisation & Chapter 7 on Constructing the Common. 

[If for any reason you are unable to complete that reading, then choose two chapters we have not yet read from Ito and from Boler. Bring in all the books you can too, including the optional ones if you have them, Mitchell and Rodgers. You should have completed Zandt by now. Be sure you are caught up on all the reading we have already done. We are going to try to put all these books into inter-relations with each other, to consider the kinds of relationships they have to various kinds of activisms and various kinds of feminisms.]

• we will work on the stories for projects, for the workshop we will participate in for the Theorizing the Web conference, and for the learning outcomes women's studies considers meaningful for those finishing the program. How might these all come together in a meaningful way? What will it take to interconnect them? 


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After taking an entire program of study in women's studies, finishing at the end with the senior seminar, women's studies would hope that all students would be able to:
1)  identify and develop a coherent analysis of women and gender in relation to significant issues -- in this case, social media;
2)  demonstrate understanding of social and/or cultural differences, inequalities, and/or relations of power;
3)  draw appropriately on a range of work in women's studies scholarship, creative work, and theory (both from this class and other courses already taken);
4)  know how to document evidence and/or research (make good arguments and use proper citation practices);
5)  show competence in presentation skills: writing and other forms of presentation. 


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think flexible, think all this (together and separately) is not about being perfect, but about engaging, trying things out, and participating with energy, creativity and effort! But not something written in stone, or fill in the formula.

Jarah has updated her blog and it is now ready for you to use to think about and share your thoughts, experiences with brainstorming projects, and to ask other students, Jarah and myself for feedback. Go to: http://femsocmedia.wordpress.com/  


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• first half hour of class we will spend time on your posts to Jarah's blog, responding to her questions, connecting all to ideas about projects and collaborators. A quick break then.
• a big chuck of time then next mapping out some feminist approaches to social media, and the idea of how stories might work for us here. The story is the argument you make for why you should do this, in the most accessible form possible: think this way: first there was this concern, then there was this idea about how to address this concern, then there were these things to do, then these people get together to do that, then various things happen, then a project emerges. Consider this essentially a project plan that is visualized as well as written.
• finally last bit of class: we can try to brainstorm ideas as a class for the conference workshop, using the list of LOAs as a foundation. This gives us your input and you a chance to think on your own.

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View Larger Map
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MAPPING? Think Google maps, think scaling down to the backyard of a house, and then up and around a neighborhood, then back up to whole region, part of the hemisphere, and then choose our lovely planet itself. What do we mean when we say "local" and "global"? Think instead of layers of locals and layers of globals. Think of scoping and scaling -- not just these geopolitical maps, but ones across time (local nows how they looked to folks at that moment, and globals of various sorts: the second wave, the twentieth century, late capitalism), and also ones of scope of knowledges and activisms (Redstockings in the Women's Liberation Movement, The Boston Women's Health Collective and OBOS, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, transnational feminisms, women of color feminisms in the US, women's studies or gender studies or sexuality studies). 


What does it take to map the books we are reading? What sorts of geopolitical entities, historical moments, feminisms & politics are they examples of? How can you tell? What helps us consider these questions? 


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Stories of Friendship

Brassard www.flickr.com/photos/brassard/138829152  clickit!

Wednesday, February 16 – Friendship
• read Ito, Hanging, section 2 (79-116), look through Boler, Hard Times, read the Introduction (1-50) 
 
• what stories are you going to tell?
 
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Just seen on Twitter, I favored and retweeted it:

hrheingold Howard Rheingold

I'm learning openly as I go along, which means experiments & failures. I try to sell that to my students as a feature, not a bug. ;-)

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Boler, 38: Tactical Media:
"expressions of dissent that rely on artistic practices and do-it-yourself (DIY) media created from readily available, relatively cheap technology and means of communication.... 'projects that people do opportunistically--seizing available or unclaimed resources....'"
• personally I call these "worn tools." Not the cutting edge ones, the hottest thing either technically or commercially, but stuff that is around easy to pick up and mess with. One of the reasons I use blogger for class websites, for example. Found tools, like found art....

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See MeganBoler.net too: what does it add to our readings?
Check out the new project: women videobloggers and YouTube.
Note: "New research directions regarding women’s online practices. We aim to explore vloggers’ insights regarding
• diverse expressions of gendered identities,
• online audiences and cross-gender dialogue and response,
• our Open Access Research Design using their platform of choice, YouTube
• women’s under-representation within web-based communities"


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What about transmedia storytelling?
What about transmedia activisms?

Katie's talk You are not the author anymore: transmedia
Our earlier post, description of the class: transmedia

Boler, 33: "Contradictions will be central to all we study." 
 • How enabled/disabled/created/altered are these by the networks of technology and commerce they are embedded within? 
• What about the hard to resolve optimisms/pessimisms Boler works hard to consider fairly? 

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clickit!

Callahan: http://feminism3pointo.blogspot.com/ 
Srivastava: http://linasrivastava.blogspot.com/ 
  

clickit!

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