reBlog
New Orleans Biennial , 2008, acrylic on diverse materials, by Katharina…
Originally from: VVORK.
New Orleans Biennial , 2008, acrylic on diverse materials, by Katharina…:
New Orleans Biennial, 2008, acrylic on diverse materials, by Katharina Grosse.
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Originally from: MediaShift.
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive:
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student’s empty vessel.
There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada’s Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto.
Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.
From a lecture to a conversation
Live-blogging and lecturing might sound like an odd combination, but I recently brought the two together in a new undergraduate foundation concentration in New Media and Society at the University of British Columbia.
As I teach the journalism component of the concentration, it seemed only right to bring some of the ideas from new media into the classroom. And the right time seemed to be the week when we were looking at the concept of participatory journalism, with guest speaker Michael Tippett, one of the founders of citizen journalism site NowPublic.com, based in Vancouver.
For the experiment, I set up a class discussion page using CoveritLive. The page was projected onto a screen in the lecture hall so that students could see the conversation unfold. Tippett’s presentation was projected on a second screen.
As he addressed the students, they were able to submit comments and ask questions via CoveritLive — these comments then appeared on screen. I did some comment moderation, but I tried to give students as much freedom as possible to ask or say anything. Although we asked students to use their names in the comments, some still preferred the anonymity of the “guest” handle.
The result was a mix of the insightful, the impish and the inane — from “who has the right to call himself a journalist?” to “this almost feels like telepathy! lol” to “stop blowing ur nose it’s annoying.”
The very first question was completely unrelated to anything about the class or the even course. Instead a student asked Tippett if he had ever been in the Mondo Spider, a walking mechanical spider partly created by his brother Jonathan.
Mindcasting in the classroom
The class turned into a living example of what happens when we use new forms of media. Whenever we start using new tools of communication, such as the cell phone or Twitter, we spend much of our time working out how we should be using them. This is exactly what happened during the lecture.
Many of the initial exchanges on CoveritLive discussed whether an online chat during a lecture was more distracting or less disruptive than asking verbal questions. In a sense, the students were negotiating the social practices around this type of participatory lesson.
“It’s like being on Facebook chat and writing a paper at the same time. We’re good at multi-tasking,” commented one student, while another noted that “people that don’t normally talk in class are talking here…wow.”
But for some, it was “very distracting.” One student found that “it is kind of difficult to split my attention like this, but I imagine I could get used to it pretty easily. New media is changing how we think.”
There is no doubt, however, that the CoveritLive format was somewhat distracting for the speaker, with Tippett trying to talk while at the same time keep track of the chatter going on about his words.
The classroom experiment opened up the lesson in a unique way, providing a live insight into what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls mindcasting. Rosen used the term to describe how Twitter offers a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of people. In a sense, this is what our use of CoveritLive did, although in a much more limited way.
I only tried out this experiment once over the course of the semester but am looking forward to trying it again. It won’t work for every topic or with every speaker, but it seemed to work in a class about participatory journalism and in the wider context of a course on how new media is changing the way we study, work and play.
The lesson offered a new media twist on the notion of community-centered education, where students are expected to participate as they take responsibility for their own learning. Rather than simply being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, the students had collaborated on distilling and creating the knowledge.
Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.
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Argentinean professor charged criminally for promoting access to knowledge
Originally from: NEWSgrist – where spin is art.
Argentinean professor charged criminally for promoting access to knowledge:
via <nettime>:
- To: nettime-l {AT} kein.org
- Subject: <nettime> CopySouth Report on Horacio Potel
- From: Geert Lovink <geert {AT} xs4all.nl>
- Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 11:05:38 +0200
Dear friends,
Please circulate widely this story about how a philosophy professor in
Argentina is being persecuted for making available on his Web site
Spanish translations of Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who died
in 2004.
Thanks and greetings to all,
Roberto Verzola
______________________________________________________
Argentinean professor charged criminally for promoting access to
knowledge
By the CopySouth Research Group
A philosophy professor in Argentina, Horacio Potel, is facing criminal charges
for maintaining a website devoted to translations of works by French philosopher
Jacques Derrida. His alleged crime: copyright infringement. Here is Professor
Potel’s sad story.
“I was fascinated at the unlimited possibilities offered by the internet
for knowledge exchange”, explains Horacio Potel, a Professor of Philosophy
at the Universidad Nacional
de Lanu´s in Buenos Aires. In 1999, he set
up a personal website to collect essays and other works of some well-known
philosophers, starting with the German Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
Potel’s websites – Nietzsche
in Spanish, Heidegger in Spanish and
Derrida in Spanish – eventually developed into growing online libraries
of freely downloadable philosophical texts. Nietzsche
in Spanish alone has
already received more than four million visitors.
One of Potel’s best known websites, www.jacquesderrida.com.ar focused
on his favourite French philosopher, Algerian-born Jacques
Derrida (1930-2004),
who was the founder of “deconstruction”. On this website Potel
posted many of the philosopher’s works, translated into Spanish, as well
as discussion forums, research results, biographies, images and the usual pieces
of information typical of this type of online resource. "I wanted to share
my love for philosophy with other people. The idea was disseminating the texts
and giving them some sort of arrangement" declares Potel.
To Potel, what he was doing was what professors have done for centuries:
helping students to get access to knowledge. “It is not possible to find
the same comprehensive collection of works that was available at Derrida’s
and Heidegger’s websites either in libraries or in bookstores in Argentina”,
says Potel. In fact, only two bookstores in Argentina’s largest city,
Buenos Aires, carry some books by Derrida and many of his works are seldom
available to readers. Potel spent decades visiting libraries and bookstores
to collect the material he posted on his online library. “Many of those
texts are already out of print”, he says. Books that are out of print
cannot be purchased, but they are often still protected by copyright laws.
Furthermore, Potel finds the prices charged by foreign publishers, such as
the Mexican companies Porrua and Cal
y Arena, “prohibitive” by
Argentinean standards. He gives as an example the price of a recently published
booklet of a conference given by Derrida. Printed in large typeface, the booklet
has about eighty pages, although the text would certainly fit in twelve. It
was being sold for 162 Argentinean pesos, around 42 US dollars at current exchange
rates. Even at that steep price copies were very hard to find within two weeks
after they arrived in Argentina. Potel relates how he had to walk around Buenos
Aires for an entire afternoon in order to find a single copy of the booklet.
But the price of foreign books is not the only concern in this case. For
Derrida’s works to be accessible to the Spanish-speaking world they have
to be translated. While the Spanish versions of the texts available on the
website were not done by him, Potel made corrections to a few of them, since
some of Derrida’s Spanish language books have been quite poorly translated.
To make the texts easier to understand for readers, Potel also linked each
translation to the original text, as well as to other works cited by Derrida.
Eventually, Potel’s popular website caught the attention of a publisher.
A criminal case against Potel was initiated on December 31, 2008 after a complaint
was lodged by a French company, the publishing house Les Éditions de
Minuit. They have published only one of Derrida’s books and it was in
French. Minuit’s complaint was passed on to the French Embassy in Argentina
and it became the basis of the Argentina
Book Chamber’s legal action
against Potel.
The Argentina Book Chamber boasts of its doubtful precedents of having been
responsible for a police raid at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University
of Buenos Aires and for having managed to condemn some professors for encouraging
the students to photocopy books and articles. “The view of the police
entering the Puán building is remembered with astonishment by many members
of the academic community” says a report. The next possible effects of
the legal action against Potel are the wiretapping of his phone line, the interception
of his email accounts and an incursion into his house to “determine the
actual place where the illegal act occurred”.
Potel has already removed all the content from his website, a decision which
he regards as a tragedy. “These websites are my best work. They are the
result of many hours of work and have been entirely funded by me”, he
says. Those who access www.jacquesderrida.com.ar today find a warning: “This
website has been taken down due to a legal action initiated by the Argentina
Book Chamber”. Potel insists that he “never intended to make a
profit” out of Derrida’s works. Yet he faces a possible criminal
sentence of one month up to six years in prison for violation of Argentina’s
intellectual property laws, according to a February
28, 2009 story by the online
version of Argentina's largest newspaper, Clarín.
If Derrida was alive, he would probably be thanking Potel for bringing translations
of his texts to millions of Spanish-speaking readers, who otherwise would never
have had the opportunity to read the works of the French philosopher. Here’s
what the founder of deconstruction said about freedom within the university:
| “And yet I maintain that the idea of this space of the academic type has to be symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity, as if its interior were inviolable; I believe (this is like a profession of faith which I address to you and submit to your judgment) that this is an idea that we must reaffirm, declare, and profess endlessly. [...] This freedom of immunity of the university and par excellence of its Humanities is something to which we must lay claim, while committing ourselves to it with all our might. Not only in a verbal and declaratory fashion, but in work, in act and in what we make happen with events.”
|
 |
| Prof. Horacio Potel's website Jacques Derrida in Spanish. |
Those who profess to “protect” Derrida’s “intellectual
property rights” are now persecuting a professor who is simply following
the French philosopher’s teachings and popularising them in the Spanish-speaking
world.
The CopySouth Research Group calls on the Argentina
Book Chamber and the
government of Argentina to drop these criminal charges immediately and to respect
and protect professor Potel’s academic freedom in providing popular access
to philosophical works. In any conflict between intellectual property and the
right to education and to access knowledge, we choose education and we urge
those who share the same concerns to spread the word widely and rapidly.
You can send letters to Les Éditions de Minuit (7 Rue Bernard Palissy,
75006 Paris 06, France, email: contact@leseditionsdeminuit.fr), the Argentina
Book Chamber (Av. Belgrano 1580, Piso 4, C1093AAQ Buenos Aires, Argentina,
email: cal@editores.org.ar) and the Argentina
Federal Council of Education (Pizzurno 935, P.B. of. 5, C1020ACA Buenos Aires, Argentina, email: cfce@me.gov.ar).
30 March 2009
The CopySouth Research Group
contact@copysouth.org
The CopySouth Research Group (CSRG) was established in 2005. The CSRG is composed
of researchers and activists in more than 15 countries and conducts research
on a range of copyright and related issues in the global South. Copies of the
210-page CopySouth Dossier are available as a free download (in English and
Spanish) on its website (www.copysouth.org).
_________________
Note: This report is based on information collected from Horacio Potel and
from several other sources, including the article on the online version of
the Argentinean newspaper Clarín, a blog
post by Patricio Lorente
translated by Carolina
Botero and a Wikipedia entry on Horacio
Potel.
The Lost Airfields of Greater Los Angeles
Originally from: BLDGBLOG.
The Lost Airfields of Greater Los Angeles: 
[Image: An airplane flies above Los Angeles, a landscape of now-forgotten airports].
Buried beneath the streets of Los Angeles are lost airfields, airports whose runways have long since disappeared, sealed beneath roads and residential housing blocks, landscaped into non-existence and forgotten. Under the building you’re now sitting in, somewhere in greater L.A., airplanes might once have taken flight.
[Image: The now-lost runways of L.A.'s Cecil B. De Mille Airfield; photo courtesy of UCLA's Re-Mapping Hollywood archive].
The Cecil B. De Mille Airfield, for instance, described by the Re-Mapping Hollywood archive at UCLA as having once stood “on the northwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Crescent Avenue (now Fairfax),” would, today, be opposite The Grove; on the southwest corner of the same intersection was Charlie Chaplin Airfield. As their names would indicate, these private (and, by modern standards, extremely small) airports were used by movie studios both for transportation and filming sky scenes. They were aerial back-lots.
Other examples include Burdett Airport, located at the intersection of 94th Street and Western Avenue in what is now Inglewood; the fascinating history of Hughes Airport in Culver City; the evocatively named, and now erased, Puente Hills “Skyranch“; and at least a dozen others, all documented by Paul Freeman’s aero-archaeology site, Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields (four pages alone are dedicated to lost L.A. airfields).
[Image: Charlie Chaplin Airfield in 1920s Los Angeles; photo courtesy of UCLA's Re-Mapping Hollywood archive].
In a way, though, these airports are like the Nazca Lines of Los Angeles – or perhaps they are even more like Ley lines beneath the city. Laminated beneath 20th century city growth, their forgotten geometries once diagrammed an anthropological experience of the sky, spatial evidence of human contact with the middle atmosphere. Perhaps we should build aerial cathedralry there, to mark these places where human beings once ascended. A winged Calvary.
The cast of minor characters who once crossed paths with those airfields is, itself, fascinating. A minor history of L.A. aviators would include men like Moye W. Stephens. Stephens’s charismatic globe-trotting adventures, flying over Mt. Everest in the early 1930s, visiting Timbuktu by air, and buzzing above the Taj Mahal, would not be out of place in a novel by Roberto Bolaño or an unpublished memoir by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And that’s before we really discuss Howard Hughes.
[Image: The Cecil B. De Mille Airfield, renamed Rogers Airport (or, possibly, Rogers Airport, which later became the Cecil B. De Mille Airfield); image via Paul Freeman's Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields].
Of course, many of these aeroglyphs are now gone, but perhaps their remnants are still detectable – in obscure property law documents at City Hall, otherwise inexplicable detours taken by underground utility cables, or even in jurisdictional disputes at the L.A. fire department.
And they could even yet be excavated.
A new archaeology of airfields could be inaugurated at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, where a group of students from UCLA will brush aside modern concrete and gravel to find fading marks of airplanes that touched down 90 years ago, over-loaded with film equipment, in what was then a rural desert.
With trowels and Leica site-scanning equipment in hand, they look for the earthbound traces of aerial events, a kingdom of the sky that once existed here, anchored down at these and other points throughout the L.A. basin, cutting down into the earth to deduce what once might have happened high above.
.blindness.: LAST NIGHT’S DREAM
Originally from: Icewhistle feeds.
.blindness.: LAST NIGHT’S DREAM:
icewhistle.com: The Human Garden
Originally from: Icewhistle feeds.
icewhistle.com: The Human Garden:
The technophilic drive towards man-machine synthesis has a counterpoint – the merging of human and plant. It is the hippie alternative to the Terminator-dream, neither accident nor crime against nature.
The Human Garden is portrayed above by Ripley, as usual without citations. and the name Ramdas Bodhano is absent from the reach of Google. We can only speculate as to what motivated this Gujurati to plant a seed in his hand – pure scientific experiment? A spiritual communion of corporeality and the plant kingdom, perhaps a mystical Jain rite? Did he regularly water his hand? Did he use any sort of fertiliser? Could the resulting sweet basil plant pass USDA Organic Certification?
Believe It Or Not, I have never tried this, nor have I known any nature-inclined people who have attempted such insanity. The only precedents I’ve encountered come from the literature of the 4th grade. First, in The Best Christmas Pageant ever, a book and film heartily endorsed by my Catholic school for it’s 
pro-Jesus sentimentality. Young Imogene Herdman, if I remember correctly, planted a seed in another child’s ear and eventually something sprouted out. The second would come from Top Secret, a ’boy’ book about a kid who experiments with photosynthesis and slowly turns into a plant.
I wasn’t able to dig up full texts of either (not that I looked particularly hard) but I do remember one particular passage from Top Secret. As the protagonist is beginning to change, he walks outside, I think barefoot, on a hot sunny day. He begins to slow down and feels his feet start to sink into the ground, struggling like roots for something to hold on to. The warmth of the sun feels great as he is beginning to trigger photosynthetic reactions in his own cells (eventually turning him green) and he feels this immense satisfaction of making this connection with light. That’s actually all I remember from this book but in my youth (which was about as far from a hippie upbringing as you could get while still having Democratic-voting parents) I really responded to this idea – that we could have this encompassing, satisfying communion with the sun.
Of course this alternative post-humanity surely has its scientific limitations. I don’t remember a whole lot from high school biology but plants have cell walls and we don’t, and that is certainly significant. I’ll choose to Believe in Bodhano’s plant-in-hand but I doubt that the roots of that sweet basil plant truly merged with his epidermis. We can ’become’ plants but only through through the experiential realm; a dream, perhaps manufactured or at least inflated by the ol’ Idea of Natural, of lying in benevolent green pastures under blue skies away from the steady B-flat electrical hum that pervades our every existence.
But a genuine merging of the animal and plant kingdoms must be self-contradictory. It is a more Ballardian proposition than it initially seems. As the basic structures of biology oppose such a merging, any success can only come through technology, even if it is the most eco-friendly biotechnology possible. Treebeards can not just happen, at least in our world – they must be manufactured, and what commercial potential is there for this?
So we’re left with the Ramdas Bodhanos, the Imogene Herdmans – satisfied to bind flesh to root at a small-scale, local level. It’s too bad that Bodhano is ALMOST an anagram for ”hand n00b”, for his plant hand was surely completely unused during the growth period. This is a concession that can’t fit into our busy lives (have you tried updating your Twitter status with only one hand? ) and this means the closest we can come to plant-body integration is probably just dressing up as Gary Young’s ’Plantman’ for Halloween.
This is the first in a series of posts inspired by panels from a giant Ripley’s – Believe it Or Not! book that my aunt gave to me for Christmas in 1988.
Town Crier
Originally from: virtualpolitik.
Yesterday President Obama held a live “Town Hall” style meeting in which the nation’s Chief Executive answered questions submitted by supposedly typical Americans on the Internet. 103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes on which issues should be highlighted. The event was streamed live on the web, where over sixty-four thousand people watched it, and also broadcast on television. Although the event opened with a traditional introduction and presidential speech, attention then shifted to interaction with the content on two large flat-screen computer monitors, which included both text and webcam queries.
In response to a question about outsourcing jobs, which came from the disembodied and distorted head of one webcam citizen, Obama referenced the importance of ubiquitous computing, which he described as represented by “all the gizmos that you guys are carrying . . . all the phones, the Blackberries, the this and the that, plugging in all kinds of stuff in your house.” He argued that a future “smart grid” to monitor and optimize energy consumption would be analogous to the construction of the Continental Railroad in its scope, although it would also function at the level of domestic economies that are visible on “smart meters” in the home. Around minute sixty-six, Obama also described a conversation from “yesterday” with “Bill Gates” about educational uses for technology in which he they discussed how good teachers could be videorecorded while interacting with their students and how those digital files could be used in mentoring other teachers “like a coach might be talking to his players” with play-by-play footage.
In this rare case, coverage of the town hall in the usually media illiterate Los Angeles Times was actually better than that of its New York counterpart, particularly when it came to providing Internet journalism with historical context and a critical lens. In “Obama connects from on high, online,” the Los Angeles Times compared the event to an “infomercial” and pointed out that this kind of event actually had a history that went back to Carter fielding a hundred phone calls or Clinton answering sixteen questions online. Most significantly perhaps, this article also noted that the Open for Questions site at Whitehouse.gov used Google Moderator to tally votes about which questions Obama should answer. Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything, might argue that this is yet another example of what he calls “The Googlization of Government,” even if Whitehouse.gov is now using platforms other than YouTube in response to complaints from privacy advocates and public sphere critics about the company’s more questionable policies.
In contrast, the New York Times reported in “Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat” the more obvious fact that groups dedicated to legalizing marijuana nudged pot-related questions to the top of the queue. Although the White House was careful to repeat during the webcast that questions online were not “pre-screened” and were ranked based on up and down Digg or Reddit style voting, around minute 33 Obama did “interrupt” the proceedings to acknowledge that such questions were popular and that one that “ranked fairly high” was about “whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation.” To this, he got a laugh with following punchline answer: “I don’t know what this says about the online audience.” He continued to say, “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy,” although the Times actually misquotes his line.
Note also that around minute forty-four, Barack Obama almost finishes naming a well-known fast food chain before realizing that their brand name might be sullied by being associated with low-wage labor and subversion of young people’s goals for higher education.
“We’ll be here for another hour…”
Originally from: Defense Tech.
“We’ll be here for another hour…”:
A friendly Friday post to take the edge off, courtesy of the USMC (and an old Jarhead college pal who sent it my way). Mild content warning for naughty language, they are Marines after all.
Austerity Nostalgia Watch
Originally from: sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy.
(photo taken in Nottingham by the inestimable Mr Anderson)
