Teaching & Learning
I’m teaching a class this semester. “Viral Video”- a title I’m not terribly happy with, but it was christened over a year ago when it seemed a bit fresher. It’s a blended-learning class, which is to say that most of it is going to happen online. In many ways the class is more about learning to be online than it is about video. That user generated video is, or is becoming, a prime information carrier on the Web is less important than the ’simple’ fact that the Web exists.
For many of us being online is our society, just as much as going to work or coming home, and a good deal a more part of our lives than watching television. We live in an expanded world and frankly we don’t know much more about how to live in the online part of that world than in what we commonly call the real life. One of the up things that’s happened as I try and get this class started it is that I look for a signifier adequate to our situation; talking about ‘real life’ seems increasingly unreal. Talking about Email or the web as though they were somehow different from our daily lives seems a serious error. We simply need to do a better job of living, and we’re blessed with new tools new means and please God new ideas.
One of the students ask, if the class was an experiment. Reflexively I replied that it was a metaphor. It might have been better to say that it was life, or a part of life, like everything else. I suppose one way to think of life is as nature’s experiment. I don’t know that we’d learn much more from that statement than we do from talking about new technologies or the power of the Web; it’s just life. It is what it is, you make it, you listen to it, and it’s not clear whether the making we’re listening is more important.
