I would hope that we can share resources and ideas about new media education and education in general, entering dialogue with activists and artists.
In my own experience, I have always relied on lots of teaching-materials and ideas from other teachers. But it is perhaps hopelessly naive to think that new media curriculums and networked brains can set a pretty future for education? Copyright legislation and corporatization of academic culture and performance are indeed making us more rigid, less eager to define and articulate the more anarchic moments.
But I believe that the classroom is still a little bit of a special space where big nerds and young geeks hang out and colaborate. Aren't we always thinking about how to negotiate the complex dynamic between personal-cultural background, heterogeneous mobs of students, academic institutions as expansive market-driven zones, surveillance technologies that monitor our performance? There is for most educators a highly bureaucratic and corporate driven evaluation systems at work in the USA, which makes its simply hard to talk about "what is really going on in the new media classroom.” Even though these evaluation systems may have emerged as a good idea, a move to include varied responses from students and colleagues to our performance, they may produce very quirky data that become “patterns” and “profiles” following us around. So how to discuss our performance with the wider network?
But yes I really do think that the new media classroom should be everything that we would hope this very network to be. I prefer to think of a zone where students can read and write comfortably and in different languages, body included, using fresh compositional modes such as ‘list’ and ‘blog’ and essays with images and sounds. Students want to be on these lists too, as they can then experiment with writings and postings and experience the vibe of being big interactive nerds. That vibe cannot be so easily cast aside? We express views through a kind of hybrid-mongrel language that is changing fast yet totally new to academia. I don’t think that we could clean out this language and recreate a “more rigid” type of scholarship. It would be good to get the views from abroad though, from the activist and the artists on this list.
So I would like to participate in some kind of symposium to think about the following issues:
How to build a discussion vibe for new media education (as opposed to an 'educational edge') something that is not drag for people to get into? How to engage in frank political discussions about US education and culture? The situation right now? I also think students should be included in this discussion.
A dialogue between educators, open source programmers, new media artists and activists to think through power and practical issues such as: how to build a 'freecoop' kind of web-based classroom zone with appropriate software (e.g. interactive message boards and blogs, software tutorials for students)?
How to create media labs with unusual but not too expensive furniture?
How to deal with academic firewalls and password protected courseware packages such as Web-CT? It is just not fair that artists, programmers and activist make a lot of their materials and models available to academics, whereas academic institutions are buying these streamlined packages.
What else?????
Katrien Jacobs
Some of my work and syllabi can be viewed at
http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/Katrien_JacobsArt in the Age of Digital Culture (an Emerson College team effort containing 4 courses)
http://www.digital-culture.com