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Back in London: DeL 2015

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London, 2015

First off, a note to my future self. If you aren’t me from a point beyond this one in time, please feel free to skip ahead to the actual trip recap. Now that it’s just us, Nick-to-be, please remember that traveling to the other side of the Atlantic for both a conference and to catch up with multiple friends is great. But following it up with a 19+ hour travel day and then four trips to campuses is not really advisable. Not if you want to be coherent during the next week. And you like being coherent.

Reflections

While it was a short affair at just two days, Designs on eLearning offered an extremely rich experience for attendees at the 2015 conference in London. Having attended for the first time last year in San Marcos, Texas (to present on the Palmer Guide project), I was curious to see how DeL would adapt to the decidedly different environment.

I was not disappointed.

Sessions were remarkably well-curated and presentations built nicely off of each other. The inclusion of day-ending student keynotes was stupendous, especially since the students themselves were incredibly adroit and engaging. Conversation, across the board, was thoughtfully skeptical, prompting attendees to ask tough questions about technology access, implementation and necessity both in session and in hallways. And, speaking of hallways, the venue, Central Saint Martins was inspiring in and of itself, all of the above not-withstanding.

Some particular highlights for me included:

  • Kathryn James of Edinburgh Napier University shared her doctoral research which focuses on the adoption of technology in teaching practice. By focusing on understanding the “lifeworld” of each academic involved in her case study, Kathryn was able to get deeper into the day-to-day of faculty in the humanities. What she learned confirmed for me one of my own observations: instructors refer to themselves as “luddites” as a defense mechanism and avoid technology not just because it makes them feel vulnerable, but also because many technologies made mandatory aim to provide an administrative benefit to the institution, not to their teaching. Kathryn has synthesized these findings into a recommendation that ed-tech professionals shift focus towards “discipline enhanced technology” – basically, tools that are chosen and supported for the purpose of furthering an academics’ teaching of their field of expertise. At the same time, recognition of negative feelings caused by experience taking a back seat to familiarity with arbitrary tools needs to be always present when taking part in any conversation around adding tech to a course. This was possibly the best session I’ve attended at any conference – I seriously had to fight the urge to give a standing ovation.
  • Ahead of our presentation in the afternoon of the first day, Ann Luther presented on her own research project called ENTITY MAPPER. A cross-institutional project between UAL and Parsons, ENTITY MAPPER allows users to input coded qualitative data sets and then visually sort them in a fluid online interface. The entire project was created out of Ann’s need for a tool with a better interface for mapping her own data – and a refreshing “I’ll build it myself” attitude towards getting one. I’ve already been talking with Heather about possibly using ENTITY MAPPER to analyze We Listen stories and really think it’s got amazing potential.
  • As mentioned, the student keynotes were all excellent – in fact, possibly better than many paid keynotes I’ve encountered. In particular, Jon Clair’s presentation on the quantum nature of the creation of art in a digital/physical world was both graphically excellent as well as very thought-provoking. The audience definitely seemed to enjoy picking his brain about how to build lab and studio spaces in future. Gabrielle Edlin, on day two, shared a hard-hitting presentation focusing on equality, sexism, gender performance and harassment in the online space and how digital creativity might be used to change the conversation by flooding the multitude of information channels with the right message. I hope these sessions were recorded with the intention of making them broadly accessible as they really show what level of presenting is attainable for students. Our students included.

Of course, the real reason I was there was presenting with Heather Hughes on our work with We Listen and specifically the early programming in Pittsburgh at the Penn State Center. (If you’re just tuning in on this topic, you can start here and work your way forward through this post and then this one to get caught up.) First off, thank you to Ann for ending just a bit early while presenting on ENTITY MAPPER and to Charlotte for being a benevolent timekeeper: those extra minutes let us get through all of our video examples, of which there were many. Heather really did yeoman’s work laying out the history of the program and unpacking its ethos and implementation trajectory. Jumping in at the Pittsburgh portion, I had the pleasure of talking the attendees through the summer LArch internships and the fantastic projects Jeff and Emily put together (entirely without being mandatory, I did not fail to stress). We had fantastic questions from the audience and then many conversations with lots and lots of great feedback – from a chat with fellow Penn Stater, Rose Cameron straight through to dinner at LASSCO Ropewalk that evening.

Download the Presentation

Tourist Time

Getting back to London for something like my fifth or sixth time was pretty wonderful, especially since I finally felt confident completely in getting around. With an Oyster card in hand and not nearly enough hours to spare, I stormed through 25-30,000 steps a day worth of exploration. Heather and I started out with lunch at Inn the Park, my favorite spot and one I’ve been to on each visit followed by a stroll around St James’s and Green Parks. We also got in a visit to the Tate Modern and tracked down fish and chips before hitting the town in Soho with a new friend from Texas State University, Maia Wright.

Naturally, I also relished in the opportunity to catch up with my friends Ben and Andy, transitioning to staying at their newly renovated flat at the end of the conference visit. They graciously took me out to see Pomona at the National Theatre followed up with a requisite late dinner at Ben’s favorite, Joe Allen. And, since my time in town just happened to coincide with the arrival transplantation of yet another friend, Susan, I was able to get in a daytime visit and dinner out with her, as well.

The only downside to all of this is, of course, desperately wanting to go back – or at least get caught up again on both email and sleep. Until next time, London…

I’ll never curse Adobe again (probably)

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There’s always been a part of me that has pondered what graphic design would have been like as a job pre-InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop (or any other digital tools). This video from Sean Adams at Lynda.com walks through a typical layout job using the analog process.

And…no. Just. No. I would have lost my mind (or, at the very least, cut myself on the hour with an Exacto knife).

Montréal (or “my weight in poutine”)

Architecture, Art, Internet, Technology, Work by

Much like this time last year, I’ve just returned from the EdMedia World Conference, held in Montréal, Québec (providing me an opportunity to use accented characters frequently). Unlike the 2014 conference, though, I was not only an attendee this time but also a presenter since the brief paper Heather Hughes and I submitted was accepted and published in the proceedings. So, my favorite conference, my first published paper and my first trip to Montréal all in one go?

Most excellent.

For 2015, the conference was compressed (rather suddenly) to three days from four which lent a feeling of urgency to the schedule. Though they were intense days, they were also chock full of interesting sessions from presenters representing institutions around the globe.  Some highlights:

  • A different keynote speaker kicked off each morning and my favorite was certainly Tuesday’s: Jennifer Howell from Curtin University in Australia.  Her presentation focused on the sense of self one both creates and interacts with while navigating many different curated “selves” in digital spaces.  She raised the very good point that we become increasingly disconnected from our true selves as we spend all of our time tending to “best possible selves” across social media platforms and beyond. But she also called for recognition of this trend and the overarching reality of total inundation in media – both our own and others’ –  in our teaching and learning.  Her call to action for the attendees was to shift towards transmediated learning which she defined as “the convergence of popular culture, media, cultural studies, socially mediated connections, networks, technology and learning”.
  • An interesting trend across several conference sessions was commentary on working with indigenous populations. In fact, Monday’s keynote from Norman Vaughn (Mount Royal University in Canada) casually mentioned “A lot of you work with indigenous peoples…”. Another session attended was one on respectful research practices when dealing with these communities presented by a Canadian working in Australia with the Maori. There were more on the schedule, as well. While my initial reaction in the morning was “Do we?”, I actually took a lot away from that later session (presented by Michelle Eady from University of Wollongong) on research practices and realized that, yes, in fact we do something fairly similar when interacting with the diverse communities that make up the campuses and their surrounding regions.  I have a feeling the notes taken here will be called upon several times more.
  • I also really enjoyed learning about mobile and augmented reality tools in a session presented by New Zealand-based educational technology lecturer, Thom Cochrane. His was more a demonstration of the tools that have worked in his own teaching experiences – including examples of student work and hands-on opportunities – than a dry reading of a paper and was a great way to get things kicked off on Monday. I have plans to check out Wikitude for place-based projects with the Penn State Center and hope to find the right instructors at some campuses to try similar tools alongside travel abroad opportunities as they develop, especially for repeating campus trips (setting up past students’ AR map overlays would be a great resource for first time student travelers).

Oh, and that presentation. After getting used to presenting in 50-75 minute class periods, the reality of a 20 minute time slot is that it’s now so short. That is to say, the presenting was done before it even really felt like Heather and I had started. Lucking into a post-coffee break afternoon timeslot was a fantastic boon and the room was nicely filled-out and attendees were attentive. My favorite keynote speaker was even in attendance, which was a very nice surprise. Though time for questions was limited with the next brief paper presenters needing to set up while we tore down, a few good ones came our way from those in the audience and we hope to get more emailed to us once people have a chance to unpack what they learned last week (I know I’ve barely had time to do this just yet).

Download the Paper

Download the Presentation


More photos, as usual, on Flickr
 
Of course, I did get to spend some time out and about exploring Montréal, too. I kicked off a week of walking everywhere by strolling 7 miles out to Habitat 67, an amazing residential development leftover from Expo 67 (and still inhabited today).  From there, I made my first visit to Old Port and took in the life in the square in front of Notre-Dame Basilica – as well as taking in caffeine at the totally excellent Tommy café. On other outings, I found myself walking 400 steps up to the top of Mount Royal for the spectacular view, hiking a few miles over to Café Venosa, a new cat adoption center and vegan coffeeshop (that might be my favorite discovery) and eating my way through all of the poutine the city had to offer. (I can definitely say I now know where to find a three poutine “flight”, for instance…) Montréal was far more sophisticated and way more inviting than I ever imagined and I’m happy to have learned of yet another North American city that I wasn’t giving enough credit (the first being México City). Always good to know what’s in your own backyard…
 

Explaining a paradox

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Kurz Gesagt (don’t feel bad – first I’ve heard of, too) has published a truly adorable look at the Fermi Paradox, something I find myself pondering more than is healthy. It’s really clear and informative and terribly cute, as well but it mostly caught my attention because of how much it reminded me of these animations from 2005’s take on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Anything that can remind me of this gem amongst novels and its film adaptation…well, its creators must be “good people”.

(io9)

A Gulf Tower beacon I’ll be able to read

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Gulf Tower Project

So, part of the Pittsburgh skyline that I’ve not really learned how to interpret is the Gulf Tower and its weather beacon lights.  I guess I’ve never bothered with learning their language because I just view them as “pretty” – and then check the weather app on my phone.

Anyway, the very same lights are about to get a whole lot more art-y – and a lot more phone-y – as Antoine Catala kicks off his Gulf Tower Project on February 11th. The installation will transform the building’s beacon into an Instagram-based mood analysis tool for the entire city, lighting up with progressively more red or green as software decides whether posts to the photo sharing channel are negative or positive in tone.

The final results will be part of Antoine Catala: Distant Feel at the Carnegie Museum of Art and is another part of the same Hillman Photography Initiative programming that brought the live premiere of the lost Warhol Amiga experiments documentary I attended back in May.  Should be cool stuff!

(via Engadget)

The generated book

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It’s National Novel Writing Month, but for those of you less interested in human-generated works, the National Novel Generation Month might be of more interest. As The Verge shares, NaNoGenMo, a creation of Darius Kazemi, is about celebrating the best in creative narrative writing code, and there are some really compelling (if not entirely readable) works to be found in the GitHub repository. Below are a few of my favorites.

From Generated Detective #1:

a noir comic with Project Gutenberg text and magna-fied Flickr pics by Greg Borenstein

From Threnody for Abraxas:

Pro-tip from the author: The enjoyment of reading this work may possibly be enhanced if one imagines it narrated in the voice of, say, David Attenborough or James Earl Jones.

Elsewhere nearby, the amusingly European sculpture, whose perfect key is cynically surveying the transparent stick and an incredible junkie and the heart behind the classical image, is approaching the mouse-cheesecake and a homunculus under the taxicab. A partly rare escutcheon is leaping on top of an axiomatically salty disease. The tedious oyster is lauding the clementine, while a brain-flavoured après-ski is an extraneous easel.

…

The breeze is chasing the meaningless entrepreneur and the florid shin-bone, whose shoe is decaying smoothly on top of the spring and a rainy jug of baubles, while the fire extinguisher is curtly caressing a shaman. An iceberg is the robust servant. The shoe is surveying a gooey statue, which is forgiving an irascible ladle on top of a mannequin, inside the sword-swallower. A supersonically cynical quote is the comic book.

“a phantasmagoric Surrealist word/concept-painting” by Chris Pressey 

From Seraphs:

an automatically generated Voynich Manuscript style text by Liza Daly

From The Last Appetite:

Sun Dried Corn Grit Fettucine

Ingredients:
  • 310 milligrams of corn grit
  • 660 grams of clam
  • 20 grams of mango
  • 270 grams of mustard
  • 20 milligrams of mozzarella cheese
  • 240 grams of french toast
Method:

Stare at the corn grit and clam for 10 minutes. Broil the mango and mustard until a thick layer of mould forms. Marinate the mozzarella cheese and french toast until mushy. Contrive a fettucine. Chill overnight.

modernist cuisine recipes inspired by Nathan Myhrvold, created by Phil Lees

And so the tracking begins…

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Grande Sicilia Rolls Out

I got word this morning that my Q3 has been loaded up. It will be making its Atlantic voyage via the Grande Sicilia and seems to have already left the German port of Emden. So, this whole obsessive tracking of the cargo ship thing is about to begin again.

I apologize in advance to those around me for how the next week or two is going to shape up.

Funded: a frame from the future

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With just under a month still to go in its campaign, I’m happy to say that I’ve become one of the backers that have pushed the EO1 from Electric Objects well (read: 811% as of this morning) past its funding target.  It’s going to be a long wait until May 2015 when I can get my very own infinite-art-collection-in-a-frame.

Watch: Warhol’s lost experiments

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I had the very good fortune of attending the debut of this latest episode of the Hillman Photography Initiative’s video series, The Invisible Photograph, over the weekend at the Carnegie Library/Museum of Art. The film is just 20 minutes or so long and covers the nerdtastic work of artists and retro computer boffins who extracted Andy Warhol’s mid-80s Amiga experimentations.

The event itself was both a screening of the above video and a panel discussion with Cory Arcangel, Golan Levin, Keith Bare, Michael Dille and John Ippolito – the latter being my favorite part as it was both deeply philosophical and extreme humorous. What’s more, some of the original Commodore engineers who were tasked with working alongside Warhol in preparation for the Lincoln Center Amiga reveal turned up in the crowd and shared amazing anecdotes.

Definitely check out the Hillman Photography Initiative via NowSeeThis.org.