Sirius Reflections

September 22, 2014

Thinking Animals – The “Why” for a New Connected Course

My “why” for previous connected courses has centered on developing empathy (closeness) and analytical perspective (distance) for things that really matter. For me, those things include: people, animals, and an appreciation of the unique cultural contexts in which we relate to each other.

In an honors colloquium on domestication we worked to unpack the assumptions we have about what domestication is (answer: on ongoing multi-lateral interspecies relationship, rather than an event or engineering feat). We gained insight about how our historical assumptions condition our current experiences with real animals and left the course with a more robust analytical toolkit for moving those relationships forward.

Last fall I shifted my Soviet History course to a “100% class-sourced” model, by having students research and author blog posts for a weekly digest. Rather than trying to convey my understanding of the Soviet experience to them and then testing them on it, I helped them identify high quality research materials for topics and events that were interesting to them. We produced a rich compendium of analytical posts in which students not only demonstrated competence with the research process, but, more importantly, developed an appreciation for historical contingency and cultural relativism. Studying a history steeped in negative stereotypes and a society that seems quite “foreign” on their own terms gave us a more constructive perspective on the contemporary political climate and an appreciation of our own cultural baggage.

I’ve been amazed and invigorated by the power of networked technologies to amplify the learning experience. I still have a lot to learn and will continue to develop the two connected course models I currently have in play. I am also looking ahead and thinking seriously about a course that would connect students and faculty from different campuses in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies. The why of that course is that relationships between humans and animals are fundamental, essential, but often unacknowledged or certainly unexamined aspects of our lives as social creatures embedded in historical contexts. Animal studies, a developing academic field that mobilizes practitioners from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and applied fields to study our relationships with non-human animals in theory and in practice seems ideally suited for a connected course. Such a course could bring together faculty with different areas of expertise, practitioners outside the academy, and students at any level to create a dynamic web of inquiry, expertise and action. I will be knocking on the doors I know exist shortly. If yours isn’t one of them and you are interested, please let me know!

September 17, 2014

Old Meets New in the New Media Seminar

Despite the best efforts of a recalcitrant widget, a freshly pressed motherblog is just about ready for a new cohort of seminarians. The New Media Seminar kicks off tomorrow, and while the syllabus addresses the “Awakening of the Digital Imagination” (i.e. the intellectual and cultural history of new media up to Web 2.0), the workings out and implications of that history in the twenty-first century will be front and center, especially as they relate to networked teaching and learning. We are a talented group of faculty, staff and grad students representing fields as diverse as music, math, architecture and music, as well as librarians, IT specialists, sociologists and computer scientists. And of course there are historians!

Many of us are also participating in the Connected Courses Initiative that is just getting underway across the country and here at VT, which enhances the possibilities for cross-fertilization of ideas and networks. It’s should be a rewarding adventure, and I am eager to begin.

And…I almost forgot – the newest part of this year’s seminar is The Learning Studio where we will meet. Picture an expertly equipped, almost infinitely flexible multi-media, networked space that facilitates collaboration, creativity, learning and listening — sometimes all at once. More about what’s happening there soon!

August 29, 2014

Connectivity

I’m excited and delighted to be joining the connected courses initiative. Thanks, Gardo, Shelli and Tony Brainstorms for helping get this far. Let the games begin!

May 14, 2014

Final Feast and Course Awards

Carrying on the tradition established by last year’s cohort, Deep History and Domestication finished the semester with domesticate inspired food and course awards. We had quite a feast! From silk-inspired gummy worms, to “dog biscuits,” goat-cheese dip, chocolate (cow’s) milk, “pigs” in a blanket, yeasty bread, and (back for lack of a better idea) domesticate cookies, we noshed our way through the animal imaginary that shaped the course this semester. We declared Corinne’s human-dog biscuits a success, lauded Kelly’s and Corinne’s culinary explorations, admired Peter’s resourcefulness, savored Cara’s goat cheese dip, and polished off Tanner’s chocolate milk and french fries (provided as “food that is eaten with hamburgers but not offensive to vegetarians ;-)). And we all agreed that Molly’s cupcake tableau of animal cracker camels traversing a desert was amazing!

The research projects are complete and posted, and anyone who visits this site should check them out! They share a common structure, but are unique and inspiring in their design and execution. We gave out several course awards, including, Best Overall Project, for Camel, The Most Undervalued and Invaluable Creature (which also won the Best Design category), and “Cutest Pictures” which had strong finalists in Dogs and Their People, Domesticating Wilbur, and Goats. There was firm consensus that the winner in the “Best Title” category was “A Fungus Amongus” (although I must point out that yeast might be a domesticate but is not an animal). Tanner’s chocolate milk reminded us of the importance of lactase persistance in the evolution of human society, just as his project on cattle emphasizes how reciprocal the domestication process is. Peter kept us on our toes all semester (synthetic meat, anyone?), and offers some intriguing insights about the influence of silk on human history and happiness.

Thanks so much for a wonderful semester! I learned a lot and enjoyed our explorations of domestication tremendously.

April 29, 2014

Anthopomorphism and De-humanization

It seems that rats really made us think this week. As Megan says, go team rat! I’m looking forward to a good careful discussion today of the paradox that many of you noted in your posts – namely that we seem to project the worst parts of human “nature” onto our images of rats in order to deny them consideration and validate their destruction, at the same time we embrace their suitability as research subjects due to their similarities to humans. I was thinking about your posts this morning as I read this fascinating piece about (human!) empathy and our penchant for dehumanization. It turns out that animal behavior tells us a lot about ourselves. We often criticize non-scientific explanations of animal behavior as “anthropomorphic,” and yet it seems that attributing human-like qualities to non-human entities (such as Wilson the volleyball) or the geometric shapes in the puzzle (see video in the article) is just something we like to do. The stunning twist (for me at least) is not our penchant for anthropomorphism, but the ease with which we de-humanize people and attenuate the empathy we instinctively feel for non-human animals.

For more on my thoughts about rats, click here.

April 16, 2014

Your motherblog might need a (mostly invisible) spouse

Course blogs are everywhere these days. While Tumblr and instagram might be the “it” social media of the moment, a course blog’s suitability for exchanging ideas, presenting research, and engaging in an open, distributed conversation is hard to beat. Course blogs come in all shapes and sizes of course, but the format I’ve been using extensively this year came about with the help of Gardner Campbell. I’ve deployed it in a range of course settings, from seminars with six undergraduates to upper-level courses with thirty-eight. It has worked beautifully for helping new graduate students come to terms with historiography as well. Several people have asked me about the set-up, and although it can be explained with spoken words and hand motions, it will be easier to lay out here. So what follows is partly a plug for this particular configuration and partly a “how-to” for those who want to try it themselves.

Why does a motherblog need a spouse?

Like many course blogs, this format uses a “motherblog” that syndicates posts from all of the contributors’ individual blogs. Each student has their own “childblog” which they can customize according to their own preferences. The student’s blog becomes an eportfolio of their work, a “deliverable” they can take away (and continue to build on) when the course ends. The motherblog aggregates the feeds from all members of the course in one easy to find and search place.

Mother Blog

Child Blog

But how do you handle the comments? One of the main advantages of having students blog is the amplification of the audience. Instead of completing an “assignment” for me (“Is that what you wanted?”), they are writing for a much more diverse and interesting audience — it includes me, but is mainly comprised of their classmates and anyone else who happens to be interested in what they have to say. Commenting gives us a chance to engage in a multilateral conversation about the substance of the posts over a few hours, several days, or the entire term. But since every student has her own blog, the comments on a particular post are going to be attached to the individual blog, rather than the course blog. (You can set the motherblog up so that comments on the syndicated posts appear on the course blog, but then they won’t be attached to the student’s blog.) This means you have to click around and look for a conversation to join, which could be serendipitously fun, but might also be a pain in the neck.

The solution is a second blog that aggregates all of the comment feeds from the students’ blogs. I think of it as a (mostly invisible) spouse to the motherblog, because it does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of pulling content together and pushing it forward. But like many spouses, it does this quietly and without much recognition. It will work just as hard as the motherblog, but never rise to a search engine’s attention. This blog of the collected comments from all of the students’ blogs appears in an RSS feed on the mother blog. When someone goes to main website to see what’s been posted recently, the comments on those posts are visible on the front page as well. Clicking on a post or an interesting comment will take you directly to the student blog you want to engage.

Comment feed on Mother Blog

Student Blog Post

It’s elegant, functional, and not hard to set up:

1) Create and set-up your motherblog to aggregate the posts from all of your contributors. (If you don’t have access to a WordPress enterprise installation, you can use an RSS multiplier to get the similar kind of functionality as you have with the syndication application.)

2) Create another blog to do the same for the comments.

3) Syndicate the individual blogs to the comment blog:

4) Select the “comments” feed:

5) On the motherblog, pull the comment blog through the RSS feed and relabel the RSS feed as a comment feed:

6) Drag the “recent comments” widget on the mother blog to the “inactive” area of the dashboard:

7) Create a link to the comment blog on the motherblog (optional):

8) That’s it!

April 2, 2014

Porcupine Condos

Bill Viola‘s “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is one of the richest and most perplexing readings we engage in the New Media Seminar. As rhetorical questions go, “Will there be Condominiums in Data Space?” is a bit consternating, since the point of view behind it is not immediately clear. Going in, you don’t know whether Viola thinks condos (in data space or elsewhere) are a good thing or not, so it can be challenging to work through an essay that starts with an observation about the unbroken nature of individual existence and then spends quite a bit of time exploring the ways different cultural practices work to create memory systems and idea spaces that presume a kind of holism of experience and creativity. But then you get to this: “There is always a whole space, which already exists in its entirety, onto which ideas and images can be mapped, using only that portion of the space needed.” (NMR, p. 465) Ah ha! someone committed to an infinite conceptual geometry is probably not a fan of sub-divided, individually owned living spaces. Therefore condominiums are probably bad. Whew. And near the end, Viola (writing in 1982) says they would indeed be built into data space: “Today, development of self must precede development of the technology or we will go nowhere — there will be condominiums in data space (it has already begun with cable TV).” Got it. Take care of ourselves or be colonized by condos. Nurture your networks and pull the plug on the YouTube cat memes. “Little boxes, on a hillside…..” Then, in a most un-McLuhanesque moment, Viola warns that “Applications of tools are only reflections of the users — chopsticks may be a simple eating utensil or a weapon, depending on who uses them.” (NMR, p. 469) Lots of food for thought there.

But the kicker comes in the form of a coda about a porcupine’s encounter with a car on a dark night:

Late one night while driving down a narrow mountain highway, I came across a large porcupine crossing the road up ahead. Fortunately, I spotted him in time to bring the car to a stop a short distance from where he was standing. I watched him in the bright headlights, standing motionless, petrified at this “dose encounter of the third kind.” Then, after a few silent moments, he started to do a strange thing. Staying in his place, he began to move around in a circle, emitting a raspy hissing sound, with the quills rising up off his body. He didn’t run away. I realized that this dance was actually a move of self-defense. I cut the car headlights to normal beams, but he still continued to move around even more furiously, casting weird shadows on the trees behind. Finally, to avoid giving him a heart attack, and to get home, I cut the lights completely and turned off the engine. I watched him in the dim moonlight as he stopped his dance and moved off the road. Later, while driving off, I realized that he was probably walking proudly away, gloating over how he really gave it to that big blinding noisy thing that rushed toward him out of the night I’m sure he was filled with confidence, so pleased with himself that he had won, his porcupine world-view grossly inflated as he headed home in the darkness. (NMR, pp. 469-470)

What do you do with that???? I’m sure our fearless discussion leaders will have their own ideas about the significance of the porcupine’s “grossly inflated” world view, and I look forward to hearing what the group thinks about Viola’s advocacy of matrix structures.

I find something new and invigorating in this piece every time I come back to it. This time, I was struck by Viola’s artistic commitment to tap into the essential aspects of our humanity – the life cycle and our collective experience. (You can check out many of his video installations on You Tube.) I also appreciated the understated summons to think about the “why” as much as the “how” that underlies “Will there be Condominiums…?” The first video below offers a more explicit discussion of the importance of the why. The second complements the middle section of “Will there be Condominiums” really nicely it you still aren’t sure how data structures relate to art. If you are already clear on that, check out the last bit (starting at about 4’15”) on the internet as a representation of human social relations and the “real” meaning (and limitations) of “code.”