Learning Aesthetics

There’s apparently some really good stuff happening that I’m just finding:

Learning Without Frontiers.

…which confounds past modeling, but that’s what you get from reading Gibson.

This is not a pipe. It is a reproduction of "The Treachery of Images," René Magritte’s 1928–29 painting, which is also not a pipe.

Which relates, somehow, to an upcoming discussion of social media, or at least: That makes me think of…

One of the things that we’re likely to hear is that, “Social Media is not new, or perhaps News; humans, being mammals, have always been ‘social beings.” Which is certainly true and probably a good antidote for the bandwagon virus.  It does, however, leave out the factors of time and scale.  Radio and telegraph are, in the same sense, only shouting, and the internet only television writ generally producible.  If the fact that you can send a message from Europe to America in seconds rather than months seems to you not to matter, then saying that there’s no news to social media is no doubt profound.  Profound or not, it’s undoubtedly important, because when you do factor in scale and immediacy you get sea-change.

In the late ’90s you heard a lot of ed-tech conversations about whether instructional technology improved learning.  Nowadays there doesn’t seem to be much point to that discussion; technology educational and otherwise is water.  It’s not good or bad; neither useful nor a waste of time.  It’s what we do, and you do or don’t participate at your own risk. Either way you’re making the culture, the world; you always have been, nothing new there. But if you think about it, it gets confusing:

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues inSimulacra & Simulation:

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.”  (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

Neil Gaiman makes it a little more human:

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

Is this what the “Classroom of teh Future” should look like?

Image by wrex

Could you learn “Photography” this way?

Is there value to this kind of conference; enough to pay for it?

16th Annual
TCC Worldwide Online Conference
April 12-14, 2011
Pre-Conference Dates: April 5, 2011
http://tcc.kcc.hawaii.edu

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
MAKING IT WORK

The real question is whether there’s enough activity & interaction, in something like real-time, to provide a value added?

I’m reading Zero History the latest William Gibson offering, and as per usual it’s rather like an encounter with the  instruction manual for the current social state. Also as usual, there’s some interesting, and relevant to what I’m currently thinking, passages:

Addictions started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel had said, less intelligent than gold fish.

Artists tend to worry about formal structure; a bit later critics come along and start talking about material nature and genre.  Normal folks have tended not to worry about such things, being too busy liking or hating to spend much time wondering about the why of it all.  Internet usage may be changing that, possibly even changing our brain structure, but as Mr. Brand pointed out about LSD, “Brain damage is what we had in mind all along.  Chromosome damage is just gravy.”  Whatever the case, blogging problematizes the order reading.

How can I know what I think until I see what I say?

Or to put it another way, “The temporal order or creation may not the most effective sequence for cognitive comprehension.”  Which is to say that I suspect that you may get more out of the following order of posts:

Where you are

The Discipline of Do Different

The Discipline of DE

I Think That I

Which isn’t quite  history, and ignores the fact that we use physical metaphors for navigation, that hyperlinks are like worm holes, and that your understanding, or lack thereof, is different than the author’s, and that it’s either a matter of taste or logic, but who cares anyway; it’s your problem.

Or maybe better Do Something (Different).

It’s always comforting when your thinking is validated by someone who is obviously a lot smarter than you.  The normal sequence is that I get some cloudy idea and worry/write about it for a week or so and then stumble on someone who has worked it all out far more thoroughly and eloquently than I ever could.  The latest example has to do with what I’ve been thinking of as “creativity” and what Roger Schank calls “innovation”.  I was starting from “Do something; See if it works; Repeat as necessary.”  Schank’s version goes like this:

1. Get annoyed at how things are.
2. Come up with a solution.
3. Get resources to put your solution into production.
4. Fight with everyone who tries to kill your idea.

…bit more detailed but same bottom line.  Dr. Schank is/was news to me, and that’s a joyful thing.  It’s not just that he makes me feel smart; it’s that there’s a whole lot to learn, and there’s the tiniest possibility that with a bit of exploration, I might get even more annoyed at how things are… 2, 3, 4.

Sort of a follow up. Here’s a link to some of the Do Easy essay and an excerpt:

(How fast can you take your time, kid?)

The beginner can think of DE as a game. You are running an obstacle course the obstacles set up by your opponent. As soon as you attempt to put DE into practice you will find that you have an opponent very clever and resourceful with detailed knowledge of you weaknesses and above all expert in diverting your attention for the moment necessary to drop a plate on the kitchen floor. Who or what is this opponent that makes you spill drop and fumble slip and fall? Groddeck and Freud called it the ID a built in self-destructive mechanism. Mr Hubbard calls it the Reactive Mind. You will disconnect ID as you advance in the discipline of DE. DE Brings you into direct conflict with the ID in present time where you can control your moves. You can beat the ID in present time.

Take the inverse skill of the ID back into your own hands. These skills belong to you. Make them yours. You know where the wastebasket is. You can land objects in that wastebasket over you shoulder. You know how to touch and move and pick up things. Regaining these physical skills is of course simply a prelude to regaining other skills and knowledge that you have and cannot make available for your use. You know your entire past history just what year month and hour everything happened. If you have heard a language for any length of time you know that language. You have a computer in your brain. DE will show you how to use it. But that is another chapter.

DE is one of those things from the my past that tend to hang around on the edges of consciousness, and every now and then reassert themselves as something I should pay attention to, perhaps as a message form my higher or lower self that things could be a bit better, but in a good way. The real usefulness is up for grabs though; here’s a counter argument. It’s an argument that misses the irony of Burroughs’s essay and Van Sant’s film, but irony makes things difficult, pretty much like reality. The point is that DE works, at least as well as anything else, and the real secret is: If you have not as yet attained the state of perfect bliss, do something different.

…guess that I just don’t know.”  Don’t want to come off like a motivational speaker, but:

The Two Essential Secrets of Excellence:

You Have Time

&

You Have the Power of the Creative.

Leaving aside the fact that “Excellence” is a MORE or less meaningless term at best signifying: “some state better than right now” we can proceed with the workaround.  All problems fall into one of two categories: 1) I know what to do, but don’t have time to do it, and/or 2) I don’t know what to do.  It’s “and/or” because these two excuses are invariably combined to form a meta-reason for postponing change. But here’s how to Make Things Happen: Begin with the Power Mantra:

What Prevents Me?

(repeat as necessary)

Make this a real question; if you think “too busy” then spend the next hours watching what you do, is it really the case are you really constantly busily productive?  Could you find 20 minutes to think, plan, write, and another 10 to act?

Now that you’ve eliminated, as you most surly should have, “no time”, your mind will be full of confusion and guilt, overwhelmed with should, convinced by can’t, paralyzed by the perceptions of possibilities, failure, humiliation, destruction, devastation, even death, while if you do nothing, an easy choice, all that could possibly happen is what happened yesterday and the day before.  But by now it will seem that you’re taking this all a bit too seriously, yesterday wasn’t all that great, today’s no better, maybe a bit worse, and really the worst thing that’s likely to happen is not much, which is why you think you’re “Not Creative.” Because if you were Creative you’d obviously Know how to become Excellent. You would Know What To Do!

But What Do You Mean By CREATIVE?

Let’s explore.  It is generally known that Poets are by nature and definition CREATIVE, so let us consider two relatively contemporary examples, Alfred Joyce Kilmer and Thomas Stearns Eliot.  Both American with British overtones, and both have “created” works or at least phrases that haunt our culture.

Joyce Kilmer: Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land

One or the other is no doubt poetry at its finest. You may prefer Joyce Kilmer who was a good and brave soldier who was shot in the head dead by enemy sniper but who lives forever either as a hero or an example of truly bad poetry, if you think hero you’ll probable like the poem. But if you are of a more modernist mind you will prefer Mr. Elliot who like a good intellectual smoked himself to death, which along with his poem you may find a bit off putting, even a little pretentious. Either way it’s a very good argument for a subjective definition of being creative.  And thus frees me to offer:

The SECRET to being CREATIVE!

DO SOMETHING!

It really doesn’t matter what; the first thing that pops into your head.  If you have more than a single thought and you can’t decide, flip-a-coin.  Seriously, chance will eliminate the possibility of prejudice or expert bias.  What matters is trying things and keeping an open mind; what’s critical is paying attention to the results.  This is the secret to being what is called creative, The Willingness to Try Things and the Courage to Decide What Works.  All that is required of you, and it is small yet different from external things, is a certain mindfulness. Just a little practice and you’ll be ready for the next step:

A day early and somehow important at the current political moment:

As part of my official job duties I had a mid-morning meeting with the director of the University’s Office of Disability Services. if they are in the market for a website redesign, and we’re in the process of rolling out a new simplified content management system based on WordPress. His enthusiasm for the project was infectious, and it occurred to me that there was at least the possibility of making departmental website management something like fun, or to put it another way: “Everyone an artist.”

Joseph Beuys’ famous slogan, “Everyone Is an Artist,” was not meant to suggest that all people should or could be creators of traditional artworks. Rather, he meant that we should not see creativity as the special realm of artists, but that everyone should apply creative thinking in their own areas of specialization. Beuys imagined that an expanded application of human creativity —and the broader definition of “art” that would follow—would result in something he called “social sculpture.” While the term encompassed many things for Beuys, it might broadly be defined as a conscious act of shaping, of bringing some aspect of the environment—whether the political system, the economy, or a classroom—from a chaotic state into a state of form, or structure. Social sculpture should be accomplished cooperatively, creatively, and across disciplines.

The following links are intended primarily for internal consumption, but should prove useful to anyone interested in using WordPress as a CMS. For openers here’s a link to a Boston University training video, what you want pay attention to is how they have redesigned the WordPress admin interface to make it friendlier for the novice user. following that here’s a list of 35 WordPress CMS plugins. Page.ly is a WordPress hosting site which might give you some interesting ideas, and a link to one of their clients: Orange Slyce which matches student designers with client projects. Then there is the Tierra Innovation WordPress CMS Toolkit and it’s worth taking a look at some sites that have been created for the Public Broadcasting System. Beyond all that it might be worth checking out the WordPress Showcase particularly those sites with the CMS tag.