Proposal and Pitch

I'm asking my Digital Culture class to formalize their project ideas with a "proposal and pitch" assignment.

Students must join a team and create a pitch video and blog post. The video is a two-minute pitch to bring clarity to their project, build enthusiasm and gain further social proof. It is also a kind of initial prototype for the proposed project. Here are a couple of examples from a Shakespeare class:



This video should be embedded in a blog post which includes the following components. The pitch video and proposal material can appear on any of the team members' blogs or on a project-specific blog if you wish to start one. Here are the things to include in the proposal:

Ignite Your Ideas With Social Proof

Once again I'm pushing my students to get social proof of their ideas. It's a simple principle: at each stage of development, circulate your thoughts to get feedback. When others show interest (or provide suggestions), then you start taking your own ideas seriously and have the fuel to invest more effort into what you are doing.

There are several different types of people one can seek out for social proof:

1. Homies
   People with whom you have close, friendly relations and would be willing to listen to anything you say just because of that relationship. 
2. Peers
1. Those you know who are in a comparable position (e.g., fellow students)
2. Those you do not know who are in a comparable position (e.g., others who are beginners with your topic also)
3. Enthusiasts
   Those that demonstrate a great interest in your topic, as manifest in content they have curated, events they have been part of, or efforts they have organized to serve that topic
4. Experts
   Credentialed people like scholars, scientists, or other professionals whose job it is to know that topic. Their expertise is evident in formal publications, degrees, or positions of authority.

(I describe these types of people in more detail in "Make Your Content Legit: Four Phases of Social Proof")

These types of people roughly correspond to three types of content or three different levels of development I've discussed previously:

Literature: A Lifeline in the Sea of Digital Culture

Literature is a great way to come to terms with digital culture -- and I'm just talking about novels that explicitly deal with technology or its consequences, though there are some good ones of that sort. No, I mean the classics and I mean popular fiction. I mean travel literature and romance. I mean detective fiction and postcolonial fiction and all the rest. Digital culture is a swelling ocean that engulfs us, and works of literature can be our lifeline.

Coping with digital culture -- its novelty and utility, its efficiencies and distractions, its marvels and its tedium -- is a major theme of this blog and of my course in Digital Culture. To help in this regard, I've offered ideas on digital literacy; tools for better consuming information like Google Reader and diigo; as well as thoughts on using the new media with purpose, creativity, and for exploration. Consider literature one more strategy.

Miranda and Prospero from a seaside
production of The Tempest
(creative commons licensed by pyrogenic)

Literature, as it happens, provides a particularly rich mode of making sense of our brave new world.  This blog is called "brave new digital" in imitation of Miranda's comment in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, when she first meets people on her enchanted island:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

The name Miranda literally means "ought to be beheld," and the idea of wonder pervades Shakespeare's play: there is magic, spectacle, and surprise throughout. Much of this comes from her wizard-father, Prospero, whose powers have come about through what? Books.

Books have always been associated with secret knowledge, and they can unlock benign powers (like Prospero's) or more corrupt sorts (like those of Dr. Faustus). Like the new media of our day, the Renaissance's new medium, the printed book, spread the hope and vision of new worlds (Thomas More's Utopia), or it indulged in the scandalous, the trivial, and the ridiculous. Literature has always been a coping medium and a conceptual vehicle -- providing lenses that help us to shape our responses to changing circumstances. It seems more than appropriate to make use of its powers now.

Beyond the Book Report: Better Book Practices in the Digital Age

This is a post against that oh-so-common school assignment, the book report, and an argument in favor of better book-reading practices now available to us. What's more, I'm going to argue against the digital book report, that half-breed that gets posted into a learning management system (LMS) or onto a blog, but is essentially no different from a paper book report turned into a teacher in the 1950s.

In the digital age, there is no excuse for book reports (either from teachers or students). Books --and our individual and communal experience with them -- are just too important, and the book report is more likely to kill engagement with that book than it is to invigorate one's literary experiences. So let's be done with it, replacing it with better practices.

Why I Can't Stand Book Reports
Where is this coming from? Well, one of my students, assigned to write a book review for my Digital Culture class, dutifully posted his on his blog and then linked to it with the phrase, "Book report time!"

That really bugged me. What is this, 7th grade?

It bugged me in part because as a parent, I've suffered through many a book report my children have belabored--usually at the last minute. And as a teacher, I've suffered from reading so many superficial or tedious responses to books or other readings. But mostly, it bugged me because it meant I had failed to get across to my students the more consequential ways that books can be part of their learning nowadays. So, I'm going to try to fix that, and I'm going to do so by arguing against the book report genre.

Creative Commons Licensed
Flashy Soup Can - Flickr

The Classic Book Report

1. Student reads the assigned or chosen book
2. Student writes a response that partly summarizes, partly analyzes the book (sometimes using a prompt from the teacher).
3. Student turns in book report to teacher.
4. Teacher grades book report, using it as evidence that the book has been read and its ideas understood.
5. Rinse, lather, and repeat

What is wrong with this picture -- especially given what books can be in the digital age? Let's take a look.

Using Google Reader to Consume Content Intelligently

The icon for RSS feeds
(really simple syndication)

A feed reader (or news aggregator) like Google Reader is an efficient way to curate one's incoming content stream. Almost any website nowadays has an RSS Feed (really simple syndcation) which allows for one to port the content from that site into an aggregator or reader (so that you don't have to go out to that website; as new content is produced, posts will show up within one's feed).

There are many feed readers and each has its benefits. Some are more visually oriented (as Flipboard on the iPad); others look more like the inbox for email programs like Outlook or Gmail. Feed readers for mobile devices will lay out the feeds differently than how they might appear on a PC. Some readers play up the ability to star, tag, sort, or share items. But no matter the case, a feed reader is an excellent way to practice the "consume" part of digital literacy efficiently.

Here is video tutorial in which I explain using Google Reader as a feed reader for blogs. Following the tutorial, I provide a subscription link to all the blogs from my current course in Digital Culture, in case you wish to subscribe to that aggregate feed of 33 blogs.

Review: Digital Culture

Digital Culture by Charlie Gere

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Gere's Digital Culture is among the best overviews on the topic I've encountered (after spending a summer immersing myself in many books on this subject). This book is readable, current (as of mid-2012) and manages not to immerse one in too much tech-speak. It covers the history of computing from a cultural point of view, and ties in 60s counter culture and arts movements in ways that I never realized were so formative of our current digital environment.

As someone who has studied the history of civilization and tried to connect this to our current day's digital world, I was especially appreciative of how he was able to describe various movements that led to what we would now call digital but which predate even electricity: capitalism, industrialization, intellectual practices of abstraction, algorithms, systems of cybernetic control -- various movements and ideologies from science, industry, economics, math, and language theory that are part of the conceptual infrastructure of our day as much as silicon is part of the technical infrastructure.

I'll never believe that computers are what make up digital culture again. They are a manifestation of other tendencies well under way and that we should appreciate separately from the briefer (though important) history of computation or communications technology. Great perspective.

A provocative concept from the book is the idea that in the modern world people have been fashioned into data objects (even prior to computers):

"...people are made visible as pieces of digital data. They are individuals, but their individuality is rationalized and normalized in a system of signs that also homogenizes them as a mass, and makes them interchangeable and manipulable as data."

Yikes. I've heard of people being objectified, but am I data-objectified by virtue of being a citizen of our modern world? We're all just a number, and that number is some combination of zeroes and ones.

View all my reviews

Creativity and the Big Picture for New Media

We need to get the big picture for learning and using new media and feel their potential for bringing out the best in people through creativity and collaboration. This was the theme of our third class in Digital Culture today (Recordings of all class periods can be found here or via the recordings tab above).

To this end, I showed some examples of collaborative creativity. First, Eric Whitacre's virtual choir:


This project from 2009-10 was remarkable due to its manner of creation. First, Whitaker put his musical scores up on his blog for anyone to download:

A Call for Digital Explorers

Would you consider yourself an explorer? If the worlds of tech and media are a vast expanse of wilderness, are you just wandering, or actively wondering? Have you used the new media and available technology to set forth on any voyages of discovery?

These people did. Who needs billions of dollars and millions of man-hours to launch something into space? They used a digital camera, a GPS-enabled iPhone, a weather balloon, and a desire to see the heavens for themselves -- and successfully launched and retrieved their own space vehicle. Galileo would be proud. Check it out.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

In my last post about finding a purpose for learning and using new media, I made a critical omission: exploration. We need to learn new media because we need to explore.

Give me a purpose for learning new media!

creative commons licensed
by godserv (Flickr)

Do you have a purpose for learning and using the new media?

Recently I asked a student in my Digital Culture class what she hoped to get out of it. Other students have said they hope to get more proficient at blogging or becoming more informed about digital issues. But she surprised me. In fact, she seemed to push back a bit. Why should I learn yet another thing to do online when I already waste enough time there?

Wow. That really made me think twice about asking my students to learn another social network, to blog, and to learn the other skills I've listed in my expectations regarding digital literacy. I don't want my students to waste time or overdo it with media and technology. I worry all the time about my own children becoming cyberkids. Just 10 minutes ago I made my 14 year-old son pause from playing his favorite online game ("Realm of the Mad God") to be sure he'd practiced his cello and read from the scriptures before getting caught up in something less important.

"I need a purpose," my student told me. She didn't want another tool necessarily; she wanted a good reason to be using these new media at all. This is a totally fair response, and a thoughtful one. And I've been thinking about it.

Here are some purposes for learning to use new media as I am requiring: