Goldsmiths’ “After New Media” Online

By Ben Craggs, Goldsmiths’ University, London, UK

Over the past six months Sarah Kember and I have been working hard to develop the Goldsmiths’ University course After New Media with a view to giving it an additional, online presence. Originally a formal option module for Goldsmiths’ University MA students, and comprising the conventional pedagogic media of lectures, seminars, printed reading packs and small cohorts of students, we began to ask what the course might become were it to be made freely available online.   Our intention was not to create just another MOOC, but something less proprietary, less branded and ultimately more open; something that, inspired by the work already done by FemTechNet, we have begun to think of as distributed, open-access, and collaborative.

Still from "If It Reads, It Bleeds" (2010)  by Joanna Zylinska;  courtesy Joanna Zylinska

Still from “If It Reads, It Bleeds” (2010)
by Joanna Zylinska;
courtesy Joanna Zylinska

This project really began two years previously, in late 2012, when, with the assistance of Goldsmiths’ University’s podcasting service, we decided to record the entire series of ten lectures that made up the After New Media course. At the time this was done with no real plan other than to podcast a small selection of lectures using the university’s new iTunes U platform. The three lectures that we eventually made available proved far more popular than we had either hoped or expected and we began to receive enquiries about the remaining lectures and from there the project has spiralled!

This year the course will be available entirely online — we are releasing all ten lectures in MP3 format, adding a number of explanatory texts, including video content and a ‘liquid reader’. The ten lectures (released on a weekly basis between November 10th and February 9th) are available on the Goldsmiths University website, and a more comprehensive course, including video content and slides is available using the iTunes U website and app. There is no restriction on the number of students who can enroll and we are keen to encourage as many participants as possible.

The liquid reader is intended to be a dynamic and constantly changing resource, both entirely open, providing access to publicly available research and editable, enabling students to add to the course with additional links. We actively encourage experimentation in this space and are inviting participants to upload their own responses, which could include essays, articles, video or photography. The reader is entirely open access, although registration is required on the Liquid Books website if you wish to contribute (please include a brief note about yourself in the message box when registering to help us identify After New Media participants and keep spam to a minimum).

After New Media is in essence a ‘media studies’ course, but it builds on and challenges existing approaches — where media are often discussed as separate, discrete objects (television, film, photography etc.) — and moves towards debates on mediation. The course asks what it means to study ‘the media,’ not as separate entities, but as a complex process, one that is simultaneously social, psychological, economic, political and technological. We trace the origins of this question in debates on remediation that are critical of new media teleology and explore its (creative) evolution through a range of philosophical and contextual approaches, particularly those from the field of feminist studies of science and technology.

Throughout this course we explore the inseparability of media and mediation in the context of specific media events, including the global economic crisis (or the Credit Crunch), the search for and ‘discovery’ (or not) of the Higgs Boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider project, the world’s first face transplant surgery, and the ongoing quest for life on Mars. What, we ask, is the relation between the event and its mediation — do media simply represent such events, or, would it be more accurate to say that these events are performed through mediation? If events are performative and do not entirely pre-exist their mediation, how might we respond to them in our critiques?

In part this course — and our experiment with ‘going online’ — is already an attempt to explore this question and to recognise and respond to our own pedagogy as mediation. An academic course is itself always a highly mediated event, one co-constituted by lectures, seminars, reading packs, text books, students and academics — none of which can be separated out and taken in isolation, and none of which entirely pre-exist the other. The relationship between the event and its mediation is therefore just as complicated here, and the media with which we engage never convey our meaning in an uncomplicated way, never simply representing pre-formed knowledge to ‘passive’ students. For this reason ‘going online’ is far from neutral, it does something to the course, and it does something to ‘us as ‘we’ are stopped, paused or skipped over on a participant’s iPad. Going online does not simply mean reproducing the same material on a different platform, but nor does it mean ‘upgrading’, or ‘adding value’ to an otherwise ‘staid’ and ‘obsolete’ method of teaching. Instead, it demands an openness to potential changes and transformations over which we may have little control — as teaching always has. What these changes and transformations will be we have yet to apprehend, but that is the exciting part and we hope you will join us in exploring them.

Our development of the online incarnation of the course, from its origins as a series of recorded lectures to a more vibrant and collaborative course has been heavily informed by the work already done by FemTechNet, and we are therefore delighted that After New Media has now been added as one of the DOCC nodes. After New Media launched on November 10th and you can join us now by subscribing via the iTunes app and by contributing your own material to the liquid reader.

 

 

Featured Video Dialogues Week of  11/17/2014

This week there are two featured video dialogues, both dealing with Systems. Systems: Games is a discussion with Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray, moderated by Anne Balsamo. The other, Systems 2: Infrastructures is a conversation with Lucy Suchman and Katherine Gibson, moderated by Anne Balsamo.

 

L to R: Lucy Suchman, Katherine Gibson, and Anne Balsamo, October 1, 2013, New York City

L to R: Lucy Suchman, Katherine Gibson, and Anne Balsamo, October 1, 2013, New York City

The Systems: Games video dialogue occurred in September 2013 at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU). Systems 2 was held at The New School in New York City in October 2013.

For transcripts and captioned versions of the FemTechNet videos, please visit
ats-streaming.cites.illinois.edu/digitalmedia/download/femtechnet/embeds.html

 

EduTech Horizons Singapore

by Alex Juhasz, Pitzer College
November 17, 2014

My friend and colleague, Laura Wexler and I had the opportunity to present the DOCC at the EduTech Horizons workshop held  at the National University of Singapore (NUS) for members of the International Association of Research Universities (IARU) of which Laura’s school, Yale University, is a member. We were in friendly, interesting, and interested territory even as we presented the project to technologists who weren’t necessarily feminists, and to a truly international crowd with representatives from a significant number of continents and disciplines. Given that internationalization and feminist education are both core values of FemTechNet, it was gratifying to see the enthusiasm in this diverse audience.

banner for IARU Edtech Horizons workshop Singapore

I knew we were at home when in his opening address, Professor Lakshminarayanan Samavedham from NUS’ Centre for Teaching and Learning reminded us to think beyond efficiency towards effectiveness in digitally-enhanced education, explaining that by this he meant experiences that were built to be engaging, personalized and authentic, just like the DOCC … (Professor John Traxler, from England’s University of Wolverhampton, a specialist on mobile computing and education, suggested we all stop using the term “technologically-enhanced” and instead dub those efforts not up to speed on technology as “technologically-deficient learning.”) Given this start, Laura and I felt fully supported to share the passionate, active, distributed, techno-feminist, co-production of knowledge at the heart and daily practice of the DOCC.

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Critical Paths for Theorizing the Digital in Higher Ed

by Alex Juhasz, Pitzer College

November 5, 2014

I’ve just returned from a day-long Symposium, Theorising Technology in Digital Higher Education. Sponsored by the Society for Research into Higher Education in the UK, and organized by faculty from the Education Schools of the Universities of Stirling and Edinburgh, the event demonstrated several critical paths for those who embrace and also are committed to understanding and improving digitally-enhanced education.

Rather than a day of boosterism, we enjoyed a well-orchestrated series of long talks where the two other featured speakers exhibited how FemTechNet‘s critiques of technology linked with our feminist theories of pedagogy can sit productively with other schools, methods, and projects of critical Internet analysis and teaching. It was great to discuss the Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) in a room full of Education scholars: a conversation we should be having as frequently as possible.

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Place: Featured Video Dialogue 11/9/14

Getting ready to discuss the keyword PLACE: L to R: Sharon Irish, Radhika Gajjala, Alex Juhasz

Getting ready to discuss the keyword PLACE: L to R: Sharon Irish, Radhika Gajjala, Alex Juhasz

The Video Dialogue Place with Radhika Gajjala and Sharon Irish, moderated by Alex Juhasz, is featured this week, November 10-14, 2014. There is an abridged (35-minute) version of the video available as well. Alex Juhasz, professor of media studies and director of the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry at Pitzer College, conducted this dialogue in November of 2013 in Claremont, California. Radhika Gajjala is a professor of media and communication at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Sharon Irish is an art and architectural historian and project coordinator in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

For transcripts and captioned versions of the FemTechNet videos, please visit
ats-streaming.cites.illinois.edu/digitalmedia/download/femtechnet/embeds.html

Difference: Featured Video Dialogue 11/3/14

Sara Diamond in center, with Kim Sawchuk (L) and Shu Lea Cheang (R)

Sara Diamond in center, with Kim Sawchuk (L) and Shu Lea Cheang (R)

The Video Dialogue Difference with Shu Lea Cheang and Kim Sawchuk, moderated by Sara Diamond, is featured this week, November 3-7, 2014. Sara Diamond, president and vice-chancellor of the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, conducted this roundtable in September of 2013. Shu Lea Cheang is an internationally-recognized new media artist. Kim Sawchuk is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.