Oct 21 - 27th

Re-Mix

I want to write about Lawrence Lessig's Ted Talks video about re-mix and "laws that choke creativity," for a couple reasons: first, because the I find the idea of re-mix to be a very powerful and creative way of spreading a message or of communicating a "response to something" that has not been fully explored. Secondly, because I am not a fan of copyright laws. I believe that there is a lot of potential for the idea of re-mix that is really only beginning to be explored and will continue to develop into something that will become more and more common and mainstream.  I also think that libraries may find use for this idea in children's programs that can involve creativity and literacy for both younger children and maybe young adults as well.

Before YouTube, there was (click link at your own risk, not always safe for work) Newgrounds. Newgrounds is a site primarily devoted to flash animations, many of them being created by amateur artists and many are parodies of existing cartoons, video game series, or pop-culture in general (featured at the time of writing this are at least three videos based on Pokemon, one on Zelda, and one on Monster Hunter).  The humor in the videos is often rather coarse and juvenile, and for a good reason, the audience of the website tends to be younger and the creators of the videos may be anyone, of any age.  The popularity that the site enjoys from its followers is primarily related to its videos that embrace the idea of re-mix, and this tends to be a younger crowd. Newgrounds can be seen as one of the early websites that really promoted re-mix, and allowed the idea to flourish into something far more diverse than only short Flash creations.

When I was in high school, I used to be a big fan of any video game that offered a level editor, and the more advanced and complicated the editor, then the happier I was with it.  At the time I was also really into anything involving computers, and a majority of my day at school was spent in programming classes.  When I would get home from school, I would immediately begin creating new maps for whatever game I happened to be playing at the time.  I believe that my first experience with creating new maps was with Heroes of Might and Magic, a turned based strategy game that offered a fairly rich map editor.  Gamers could use the editor to make maps unlike anything that came with the game; the maps could be large and complex enough to be their own games in-themselves with their own stories to play through.

Over the years I made maps for Quake, Unreal Tournament, Duke Nuke-em, and even an old DOS game called ZZT.  ZZT was particuralry interesting to me because of the ability to create scripts for every object in the game, allowing for virtually endless possibilities in the creation of new interactions with the "environment."  Of course, in this case it was a very old game that only involved ASCII characters that could be made to move around the screen.  But the lack of any real graphics in the game was hardly a turn-off for me, because what was captivating about the game was the creation of new content and the re-imagining of the game-concept through the creation of new maps and scripts.

Two very popular video games today that have taken the idea of user-generated content and embedded them into the very games themselves are Minecraft and Terraria. In these games, the player gets to create and destroy the world around her using different tools to destroy, and minerals to create.  The players in these games can create their own homes that can range from simple one-room structures, to elaborate castles, like this one:

Creation, and a sort of re-mix, are at the heart of many exciting trends in gaming as developers come to realize the importance of creativity in gaming.



This idea of re-mix is not restricted to only digital media or videos.  In a creative-writing class, our professor assigned a project based around an idea of "discovering" poetry.  The assignment itself was inspired by a book titled A Humument (you can see the project here, and click gallery), where an artist transformed an old book that he bought for a dime into something extraordinary.  Our assignment for the class was to go through some old books and to "re-mix" them, in a sense.  We had to create new poems discovered from the existing pages.  My art skills are have not really changed since the time that I was in preschool, but none-the-less, you can see my efforts at this blog.

This project turned out to be one of my favorite assignments from that class because of the way that it made me re-vision many of the old books sitting on any bookshelf that I came in contact with.  While sitting at the library, I would gaze at some of the dusty and out-dated science books, wondering what incredible poetry might be hidden inside their pages.  This makes me think that it could be a great project for youth programs in libraries, and it wouldn't even require the destruction of any books. In fact, it could also be used to teach kids to use standard media and art computer programs, and so serve as a tool for improving computer literacy as well as a creative arts and poetry project.  So long as the library has a scanner, kids would be able to scan pages from any of the old or new books on the shelves, preferably not already poetry books, but rather some genre not usually regarded as poetic, and then use any image-editing software to single out words and phrases in order to create new works.

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October 14 - 20

                In a poetry class that I took as an undergraduate at Slippery Rock University, a student named Abby wrote a very thought-provoking short poem about standing on the regal staircase outside of a Harvard library in the setting dusk.  In her poem, Abby extracted all of the implicit metadata that surrounded her as she stood on the ivory league campuses’ iconic building.  It filled the poem with an atmosphere of foreboding, unwelcoming, out-of-touch, and basically inaccessible to most of us.  The signs here were grey, dark, and made of stone. They were embedded in the staircase itself, in the Greek-style columns, and in the expansive Harvard skyline that seemed worlds apart from anywhere that she could locate herself.

                When people think about libraries today, I wonder how many people still have something like this Harvard vision in mind.  This is a vision where the library is something other, something a world apart, belonging to a wholly different class of people, and somewhere that the individual feels that there is nothing for her or him inside.  How many people’s visions of libraries involve technology, games, DVDs, music, social spaces, and an engaged and approachable professional staff?

                The image of a library as reflecting some Greek ideal of dusty-knowledge hidden away in ancient books might work for the members of the Harvard elite, but for everyone else this image is anything but inviting.  If libraries are to be a cornerstone of communities, with their doors wide open for all of its members, then the library’s metadata needs to communicate that message.  What is important in this idea is that there is no one image that a library should be molded to, but rather, when this happens it creates a negative stereotype of the library as either a solely academic, or even government controlled, institution that only allows membership to a select population.  In order to set itself free of these stereotypes, the image of the library is one that needs to be able to adapt to its community.

                The semester before taking that poetry class, I was fortunate enough to take a trip to San Francisco in order to tutor at an elementary school in a predominately Spanish speaking neighborhood.  What was striking about this elementary building was how welcoming it was to its students.  In order to achieve this, the school turned to local, amateur artists from its own neighborhood to make mural paintings on both the inside and outside walls.  The result was a tremendously beautifully and vibrantly colorful building that reflected the diversity in the community. This building was one that the community took part in shaping and defining.  The result was a place that welcomed all members of its community and one that students found identified with who they are and their needs without trying to reform them. It was somewhere that they belonged.

                If libraries are to be about their communities, then they could take a lesson from both Abby’s poem and the elementary school in a Spanish neighborhood in San Francisco.  We do not need to re-shape our communities.  If we try to do this, we will find that our communities will not want to support us, they will find us out-of-touch, and they will not want to use our services.  We will become some other that is stealing their tax dollars. 

Instead, advertising to our community that we want them as our patrons and that we do have services that reflect today’s needs means that our image needs to reflect this.  This does not have to be done by building a new building, as this may not always be feasible.  Instead, it can be done by community art projects, interior spaces that are comfortable and inviting, having media that is in-touch with what our patrons require us to have, and by engaging with our patrons.  Being a welcoming, community institution cannot just be left as implicit in existing as a library, but rather it needs to be made explicit the library’s image and attitude visible to the community.

#lis60001

October 7 – 13

“That withered paradigm”

                “There is something about the Web,” writes Peter Walsh (2003), “that makes the idea of the expert seem withered, even disreputable and laughable.”  Walsh’s article, appearing in the anthology of new media related essays entitled Democracy and New Media, calls into question the ‘expert paradigm’ and its relevancy on the Internet.  In the article, Walsh (2003) sets out to define the expert paradigm, identify a few key points of its origins (though not a complete history of the concept), and link its disruption with advances in communication technology starting from around the time of the printing press.

                According to Walsh (2003), the expert paradigm is one that requires a body of knowledge, and particularly an abstract knowledge that has some predictive aura surrounding it.  This sort of body of knowledge lends itself easily to religious knowledge, especially in the form of the Church in Western cultures. This sort of expert paradigm also has an “interior and exterior, an outer group of laypersons and an inner group of experts” (pp. 366). 

Maintaining this system requires the establishment of certain rules that restrict access to the group’s knowledge and regulate the amount of access that different levels of members have to that knowledge base.  But the part that I found most significant in Walsh’s (2003) defining points of the expert paradigm, was that Walsh identifies that the expert paradigm is “inherently unstable. [The expert paradigm] is constantly threatened by factions and turf battles from within and by skepticism or jealousy of its privileged status from without” (pp. 367).

The problem that the expert paradigm faces is that with the advancement and dissemination of communication technologies, those fault lines created by the competing factions from both inside and outside of the inner-circles are made all the more deeper and visible for everyone to see.  As Walsh (2003) notes, “important to the Reformation was the fact that Luther made use of a developing new technology and printed his views” (pp. 367).  The difference today, with the Internet, is that not only can everyone see these fault lines, but anyone can participate in their expansion.  The lines between expert and non-expert quickly become blurred as we lose focus of the author (if one can even be identified) and we cannot see their identifying insignia.

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007) writes about the Great Wizard of Oz assuming a great and terrifying persona in order to capture enough pathos and ethos that his subjects are likely to equate his voice with absolute truth (pp. 140).  Weinberger (2007) is also writing about “truth and authority” and how the boundaries have shifted in the digital age.  In this case, the website Wikipedia is Weiberger’s (2007) golden example of a site that “gives up on being an Oz-like authority and helps us better decide what to believe” (pp. 141). 

The way in which Wikipedia disrobes itself of being the authoritative voice of truth, according to Weinberger (2007), is that Wikipedia is up front about its many possible weaknesses in a series of notices concerning the disputable accuracy of certain articles.  The result of the expert paradigm being so usurped is that, as Weinberger (2007) claims, “deciding what to believe is now our burden” (pp. 143).  The advancement of communication technologies has resulted in a time in which the information seeker herself can participate in the production of expert-like knowledge; a kind of authority that was once reserved only for the wealthy who could afford both the leisure time and publication expenses.

One problem that could arise from this transition is whether or not we now put too much stock into our own beliefs.  Are we only replacing the external Fountainhead with our own inner-truth based on our own limited experiences and observations?  While I do not completely argue against the value of lived-experiences as a resource for certain truths and values, it is also important that we do not lose focus on the value of the expert paradigm.  An expert, after all, is believed to be a person with a wide breadth of experience, knowledge, and understanding about a certain issue or topic—something that goes deeper than merely accumulating a list of facts about a topic.

Having ‘experts’ is important for keeping arguments in check and building the structure upon which a particular discourse rests.  We learn from experts, but not necessarily exactly whatever it is the expert is preaching, but rather, we learn more about our own views and arguments.  This only works, however, when we accept a certain amount of authority from those experts.  If we do not do this then we only reinforce the belief in our own views without having the ability to critically evaluate them and without having the benefit of an expert with a high degree of knowledge in a particular field to help us from falling into obvious errors in our own solipsism.

In the end of the “Withered paradigm” article, Walsh (2003) argues that the expert paradigm is in no threat of radically disappearing.  It is undergoing changes, as it has been for hundreds of years, but it will still remain.  I think that this is evident when one considers the goals of courses in information literacy on the Internet.  The idea of these courses is to learn how again to recognize authority, this time on the Internet.  In these courses, we re-learn how to look for authority in the form of professionalism, references, well articulated arguments, organization of the website, and both logical as well as grammatical clarity.  And, again, we learn to look for the author and to do research into the expertise of the author.

If a new Oz were to catch on to this trend in training in information literacy, such a great wizard would likely take on the form of some great socially constructed website.  A website that was easily available and seemingly ubiquitous. One in which seemed to be the suggested search result for just about every search engine query. It would be one so unassuming in appearance as to visibly deflect authority back onto its reader.

Walsh, P. (2003). That withered paradigm: The Web, the expert, and the information hegemony. In

Democracy and New Media. Henry Jenkins & David Thorburn (Eds.). Cambridge,

            Mass: MIT Press. pp. 343 – 364.

Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York,

NY: Henry Holt and company. pp. 129 – 147.

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Sept 30 - Oct 6

SOLE and Makerspaces

In February of 2013, Sugata Mitra delivered a powerful TED Talks presentation on the history and future of education.  Mitra (2013) explains how the foundation of our current education model was a perfect one for the British Empire to continue to reproduce effective teachers and managers of its own machinery, but today that machine is long over however we still continue to attempt to reproduce it via our outdated education model.

Mitra tells his own story about teaching children in some of the most impoverish and uneducated areas in India using what he referred to as a "computer in a hole" (2013).  Mitra would leave these incredibly simple machines in small and remote villages in India and simply vanish for a couple of months, then he would return and ask the children what they have been using the computer for and what they have learned from it.  The children would not only have to teach themselves how to operate a computer, but they would also have to teach themselves English in order to interact with the software. Mitra's incredible experiment shows that children left alone with little more than the possibility of discovery and a resource to facilitate that discovery can learn literacy skills, technical skills, and even scientific learning as advanced as DNA replication (2013).

In a broader context, what Mitra has in mind for the future of education is the widespread adoption of Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE).  The idea of the SOLE is to inspire the innate curiosity of children to learn, ask questions, and discover answers on their own.  Mitra has reminded the world that curiosity and discovery are universal and that any child can learn if given a little encouragement and the right resources.  Not only do they not need to be led down a uniform and highly-structured educational plan, but also, this old system might be more detrimental compared to systems based on learning through the child's wonder and imagination (2013).  SOLE environments encourage participation in groups and social problem solving to come to solutions for big problems as small communities of learners that grow at their own pace.


A similar method to self organized learning is being implemented in libraries across America.  The idea of "makerspaces" has been a topic in libraries recently, and is seen by some to be a way of connecting with the core value of public libraries: namely to facilitate lifelong-learning.  Makerspaces treat libraries as social platforms where, according to the editors at American Library Magazine, patrons have opportunities to "create, build, and craft" (nd).

The American Libraries Magazine's website features a whole section dedicated to this exciting trend in American libraries, "makerspaces." At http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/article/manufacturing-makerspaces you can explore some articles that describe the current uses, future plans, and even the surprisingly long history that makerspaces have in American libraries.  According to the magazine's website, the idea of makerspaces can date back into the late 19th century, when a library in New York began hosting sewing and knitting groups for women.

Today's makerspaces are often geared towards computer media creation, offering computer stations with media centered software kits for creating websites, animations, and 3D-modeling.  Some other tools that American Libraries Magazine suggests for creating interesting makerspaces are: 3D-printers, laser cutters, vinyl cutters, and various table-top tools for intricate wood working (Good & Doctorow, nd).  What these makerspaces remind us of is that learning is really lifelong and that these Self Organized Learning Environments can turn into powerful social learning hubs for children and adults.

These education models bridge not only age gaps, but also economic gaps between the haves and the have-nots.  A well-funded library can provide the discovery tools that enable a community to come together and create, express, and learn in ways that they may not have had the opportunity to have done otherwise.  These makerspaces encourage learning advanced, highly technical skills in small groups of learners in much the same way that Mitra shows is possible in his TED Talks presentation. These are spaces that are devoted to empowering the individual to be able to do and explore in a creative way in which is far more natural and beneficial than outdated models of highly prescriptive education.  With an idea of inclusion, openness, and encouragement, these makerspaces could have the potential of showing the world that a new direction in education is desperately needed, rather than continuously trying to patch the old model.



References

Good, T. & Doctorow, C. (nd). Manufacturing makerspaces. American Libraries Magazine. Retrieved
    October 4, 2013 from http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/article/manufacturing-makerspaces.

Mitra, S. (2013). Sugata Mitra: Building a school in the clouds [Video File]. Retrieved from
    http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html