From reflection

November 16, 2014

Creating distinctions

So Ryan taught me this week that ‘it is super important to have a contrast of between what you like and what you don’t like when selecting content’. Michael taught me that I need to learn to ‘form an opinion about how choices are made. This is you identifying your tastes.’ Actually they have both been talking about this since the start of this course. I remember Michael saying that even when we choose to reblog something on Tumblr we are making an artistic choice and that we need to learn to understand the criteria for making a decision.

I panicked this week when I realised that this means making public and accountable choices about what we like, what we do not, and more importantly, why?

A lovely conversation with Ryan on Twitter led to the start of a note where I started collecting what I love and what I hate. I felt a little like Sheldon and Leonard above sorting comic books and could not resist a little remixing. I realise that there is the emotional dimension of being pulled towards something or away from it. Yet, there is also a third option – there is the stuff I want! I want it enough to have on my wall, to keep in my Pocket, to keep in my favourites and that I enjoy enough to view over and over again. This complicates the task significantly.

Ryan talked this week about how he is guided by his embodied experience to select content to work with:

“I notice how I feel not just on an aesthetic level. How does my body react. I am more present. I am propelled into immediate action without distraction. Fully engaged.”

It reminded me of something a gif artist I read said about her craft:

“Great GIFs you can watch forever without getting annoyed. There is no formula of how to do it — it’s a kind of magic. I play with mine until they reach the certain “groove” where I could watch them forever, then I know it’s right.”

I am fascinated by the distinction between ‘what inspires you?’ and ‘what inspires you about that person or character?’ that Ryan made on the hangout this week. From a psychological perspective the reason people find it easier to answer the second question is dissociation. It is safer to detach and talk about somebody else rather than myself. As I listened to this conversation, I realised why I have a character to sign and create my animated gifs. I have a pen name for my art. One step removed, so I can call it gif art!

If I get clearer on why I hate something it will illuminate why I like something. This is the hypothesis we are testing. I guess it starts to build a vocabulary for our art. What I find interesting is that this whole process can be seen as developing one’s emotional intelligence as well as one’s aesthetic sense. I even had Ryan say to me I should embrace my Jungian shadow when I realised that I hate stuff many people love. This felt a vulnerable place to be in. Of course, my likes and dislike say a lot about me and very little about the art I evaluate. Art psychotherapy via the animated gif! I knew it was the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

I started an art critique project on my regular DS106 blog. It has been challenging. I am trying to learn theory and apply it to DS106 art critique. It means spending time with a composition to be able to go beyond like it/hate it and learn a vocabulary to express why. If we are going to make meaningful commentary we must allow ourselves to be seen in our words.

My note on Evernote will be my creative procrastination for a while. I hate Constable, I love Mantegna. I love Hopper, I hate Klimt. I love surrealism, I hate pre-raphaelite painters. I can watch Blade Runner over and over. When a university boyfriend made me sit through Sergei Eisenstein’s films, I nearly left him. I love Bluegrass music, I hate One Direction. I love poetry, I hate fiction. But not all fiction, science fiction I love. The point I think Michael and Ryan are making is that in this selection process we can find our artistic voice. This feels both terrifying and exhilarating. It certainly feels like a long term project for me. I am starting to see a pattern and I am also starting to see a potential ‘why’ to my liking for the animated gif as a medium.

And then, just when I did not know where to go next, I found Jeanette Winterson,

We hear a lot about the arrogance of the artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience, who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and livelihood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making, who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up, flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant.

I think I have a guide. I have bought the book and will be reading with great attention. Already she has given me a metaphor to learn the language of art – it is like visiting a foreign city. I know how to do that. I have spent a lifetime learning new cultures and navigating foreign cities. And there is a method to learn how to do this well. It involves attending, humility, looking beyond the obvious, assuming that it all makes sense and taking time to find out how it makes sense to locals…may be art can be as transformative as learning about new cultures?

Jeanette says: ‘The obvious direct emotional response is never simple, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the “yes” or “no” has nothing at all to do with the picture in its own right.’ I see this clearly. My reactions say more about me than they do the external stimulus. As I learn to create distinctions by selecting content I am enthusiastic about, I may be finding that elusive artistic voice.

Here is one tentative rule: I am drawn to elegant solutions. I can fall in love with a sentence that expresses something with no redundant words, a line of code that has no extraneous components, a painting that tells a complex story with just one scene, I love Bach because his music has a perfect pattern…I can make sense of a lot of my likes from this heuristic, but also of many of my hates. Flowery fiction that takes 100 pages to get to the point drives me crazy, unless it is painting a picture of a fantasy world in which case it is creating something new. On the other hand, I could read this sentence forever,

“I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on.”

A little sentence that expresses elegantly with no redundancy all that I have been trying to express in this long post. I recognise that moment. It is rare. I experience it online with some animated gifs.

I guess there is more than one rule to our artist within. Kicker to come.

October 30, 2014

To publish or not to publish?

“When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?” Mann and Twiss (1910) image source: Wikimedia commons

On the latest episode of our DS106 Good Spell we talked about ways to navigate our personal struggles when making choices to publish and share our work. We wanted to go beyond platitude and acknowledge that pit in the stomach that most of us feel when we hit publish.

It occurred to me that these ideas may be of use to CT101 as it is my understanding that some students are only just considering their strategy to working in the open web and not everyone is sure if this way of being is for them.

We started the show with a summary bullet from one of my old posts reflecting on my learning in DS106 a year ago,

“Doing DS106 is like becoming an actor, amazing when the crowd claps and ruthless when nobody notices your performance”

When it works well and there is a learning community around the students there is a magical quality to publishing your work. Strangers come to visit your blog, take time to read and comment on what you have produced. In DS106 my experience has mostly been a positive one. But not always. This is Jonathan Worth talking about his #Phonar (Photography and Narrative) course,

“When I talk about things like this to my students I describe them making a transition from being an edu-customer to a supplier – no one is contractually obligated to engage with their “work” – though I know they find it frustrating that no peers are throwing their weight in – its not an easy one.”

In DS106 we have the Inspire web site as a way of us recognising the work of fellow students that inspire us. My sad confession is that I have rarely used it. Current UMW students are ‘having’ to use it as it is part of their credits to submit 3 items that have inspired them to the site. The site was designed by past students and it is lovely to find your work there. In my case, much later than when it was submitted, as I do not often visit the site. Yet it is open to all of us to use.

DS106 seems to have a set of social norms that normalise failure as part of the creative process: we talk about ‘futzing’ on the radio as things go wrong technically whilst we learn to broadcast, we talk about #big fail, laugh when stuff does not go our way and publish anyway asking for advise on how to make ‘it’ work.

I have recently created an Art Critique project to force me to attend to my fellow DS106ers work. I am calling it DS106 art on the Couch and hoping others will jump in and learn art critique with me. It turns out that art critique is a domain of its own and that there is much to learn to do this well beyond just telling people we like/dislike their work. I am learning a great deal about art by paying undivided attention to one piece of art and writing about what I notice beyond an initial emotional response towards or away from it. I hope it will also teach me to speak to other people’s work beyond the rushed   that seems to be so much of our online interactions.

Yet when it dos not work, that is when you publish and nobody is there to hold a learning space, it is ruthless. It is like the actor finishing what they perceive as the performance of a lifetime and nobody clapping.

My early experience of this was really tough. Whilst I can see the huge potential of a global virtual community, I do remember how it felt the first time I threw my party and nobody came. I also remember how grateful I was to the few people who did turn up. I make an effort to keep up with what people publish but there is so much more than I can spend time with.

One strategy human beings use to cope with that pit in the stomach feeling is rationalisation. We say to anyone who will listen “I really am only publishing for myself and I am okay if nobody comments” or some version of that. We believe our words consciously and as a psychologist I know well that ‘The Nile is not just a river in Egypt’ as the meme goes.

Animated gif remixed by Gifadog Source: Tumblr

We say that we create for an audience or, failing that, the potential of an audience and that this offers a different kind of learning potential than sitting in a classroom or writing on my hard disk. I can speak a lot to the wisdom of that generalisation, but for now let me just say that there is a big difference to our psyche between writing on a private journal and writing publicly with the potential of an audience large, small, or non-existent. It is not trivial to learn resilience vis a vis all three of those options.

We formulate our ideas more clearly when we think of an audience, we shape our ideas as we speak on the radio and it is a performance. All this feels true and useful.

Yet, we do not say as much about the vulnerability this exposes us all to. The ‘Zero Comment’ dynamic Lovink discusses so eloquently. In the case of my first radio programme last year, it was the ‘Zero Listeners’ dynamic compounded with Zero guests. I was very grateful that 2 members of our community took time to listen and offer feedback.

Given that feeling that we get when nobody turns up. Is it surprising that we will go to any length to get attention? Unlike its proponents, Lovink sees blogging as just another form of vanity publishing,

“Blogs have become more of a rat race for maximum attention, measured in links and friends.”

Here are some others expressing the angst of zero comments, not just within DS106 but web wide,

“So I put out a tweet asking if anyone in the course was from a scientific, math, or engineering discipline rather than a humanities, arts, or even social sciences discipline. I got zero response.” Bill Benzon

“I know exactly the empty pit feeling you describe, and it has been the course of my career littered with dormant discussion forums, ghost town wikis, unedited open docs. And I will try to say to let go of the disappointment, and in doing so will be a hypocrite, knowing what it does to my motivation to do a hangout where no one shows up or a live #ds106radio show where no one listens” Alan Levine

And there are others who seem to believe they do not have a need for external validation. They just publish for themselves, yet admit to being grateful when seen by others,

“When I throw out a tweet or a blog, it’s more for me to sort through the ideas than for anyone else to take them up. I’m always grateful when someone responds and pushes my thinking, but I see the act itself as pushing myself to get clearer about something…get the idea out of my head.” Kim Jaxon

Others seek explanation for why sometimes our work goes unnoticed,

“Stuff gets lost, or submerged, or just put to one side because many of the folks involved are already doing many other such experiences. I’ve been trying to bring newbies into the fold by having periodic meetups at my school, but only a handful are engaging with blogs, and even fewer with tweets.” Gardner Campbell

Gardner also recognises what a tough thing it is to feel excluded and like nobody wants to come to your party. Yet he says that should never be used as an excuse to be a snark,

“Feeling excluded is a nasty feeling. Being a Snark is another matter. I don’t think it’s ever helpful, except as a conversation stopper” Gardner Campbell

Then there is what happens when we are noticed but the attention we receive is not wanted. I wrote about that in a previous post on this blog when I tried show that often troll or friend is a matter of perspective.

In that post I talked about how shocked I had been by stories like that of Kathy Sierra. The idea that has stuck with me in reading her work is her idea of the ‘Koolaid point’. She identifies this as the point when unwanted attention escalates. The point at which followers ‘are thought to have drunk the Koolaid’ is when a person starts to actually have an audience. Those who oppose their perspective feel the attention is not deserved and then start trolling more,

“From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.” Kathy Sierra

So when you are about to hit the publish button you think about the options. Lovely people engaging with your ideas, nobody engaging with your ideas and people who dislike you (or who you dislike) engaging with your ideas.

When I started using the open web to learn and publish I learnt a huge amount about expectations. Here is what I wrote in my blog after that failed radio programme,

“What was brought home to me was that I had expectations about how others would behave and these were not met. This led me to reflect on what is the psychological contract we have in hashtag classrooms. It is not clear and it can be tough to navigate the uncertainty and lack of guidelines.”

It is like my quote from Jonathan Worth earlier, nobody is obligated to engage with your work. Once you learn the resilience needed to work with this no obligation contract, learn that being a snark helps nobody, or a victim begging for attention, or that humans will avoid toxic people online as well as offline, then you are ready to join the global village and welcome the freedom it offers. But this literacy is not self evident and some people never find it.

Developing in this way requires a level of honesty about our own behaviour, a willingness to look at the ill will we feel when our expectations are not met. I do not find much written online about this. One great exception is Pernille Ripp in a post aimed at open educators she talks about how it is just not all ‘cupcakes and rainbows’. I highly recommend reading it as a way in to the darker side of our human motivation: ill-will, jealousy, perfectionism, arrogance and more.

The point I do not want to lose here is that I have made a choice to engage with the open web even as I am aware of its darker side…. for now. I think it matters that we do not Pollyanna-like gloss over the difficulties. Particularly when we hope to educate new people to join this open web learning world. It is not all rainbow and cupcakes, yet is it still the most inspirational learning environment I have ever been in.

What helped me is to have great mentors and down to earth advise. I feel I owe that same thing to others who may be considering this option.

And the best advise for me has always come from DS106.

Here is Alan Levine offering kind advise recently,

“I don’t accept a lack of response as an invalidation of the effort. Quite often people come to an understanding or appreciation on a different time scale than you are moving. A lot more people look at the stuff than respond or participate, and often you have the impact you hope to have but you never see it. So f******** the low numbers of responses or lack of comments. That is not a measure of anything but a desire for some validation.”

My wish for anyone coming to learn on the open web is that they work with themselves in such a way that they can see the wisdom of the words above, instead of feeling they have to pander to a majority or find ever more sensationalist post titles to get somebody, anybody, to click on their post and comment. And that is all of us on a bad day not just ‘them’.

October 17, 2014

Open to ourselves?

VoiceBase – Gardner Campbell on levels of open

I ended my last blog post on Gardner’s personal cyberinfrastructure ideas on Tumblr with this reflection on the idea of level of openness:

“I will keep reflecting on how taking steps to build a cyberinfrastructure challenges the way we teach in non-digitally aware institutions. Our faculty may be up for being open to the world and they may consider opening up to each other. Could they be persuaded to open up to themselves, to critically reflect on habits of mind to increase self-awareness? And to share this vulnerable space with their students? Funes, 2013 (edited today, because I wrote it)”

I was curious about the source of these reflections. So I went back original video in You Tube to listen.

I then went to You Tube Chop and chopped my nugget,

One of the things I learnt through DS106 in the past is that in using multiple media one can access depth of understanding. It becomes a kind of slow reading across the senses with experiential learning thrown in as you explore the tools and use them. So I wondered about just listening to the audio. I used Listen to You Tube for that.

I have a liking for kinetic typography as I see it helps us relish and attend to words. I did not have a lot of time so I wondered about just using an online generator. My favourite generator is a simple student project I have used many times and love. It offers a quick way to see moving text but no options. It is also quite fast and has a watermark.

I have been learning how to use ScreenFlow for animated gifs so it occurred to me I could screen cast the piece and then play with it. I played. I wanted to add the soundtrack of my clip to the moving text. It did not work. To get it working I would have had to go to iMovie or GarageBand to synch the track. No time.

Of course, I missed a step. How to get text out of video or audio quickly. Transcription has been a most annoying companion throughout my career. Last I looked I could not find a service that was free and good enough to allow quick transcription. Well, that changed as of writing this post. Click on the link at the start of this post and it will take you to VoiceBase. Awesomeness. It offers a decent machine transcript for free, a human service for a reasonable fee, and is easy to use. I could not get embed code there, so I also discovered Embed.ly. My HTML is sucky and I figured others might have had the same issue. There must be a way to generate embed code easily? There is.

I had my video with no sound track. I had set a constraint to do it fast – I wondered about those colleagues who do not know how to produce stuff from scratch and who may (just) be willing to go from one automated service to another. I never use You Tube video editor but I remember it offers audio. Tried that after slowing down my moving text on ScreeFlow. Heck, I got lost in the engine and forgot to look at the car!

For CT101 digital story telling assignment we were asked to,

“Choose a quote that is meaningful to you and present it in a blog post. Tell us in words and a GIF (that you create) why this quote is meaningful to you.”

After getting lost behind the scenes in the internet show for an afternoon playing with tools, I came back to the why.

I made this gif for a conference presentation a while back. In reviewing Gardner Campbell’s original ideas I realise that it was in part through the words this post engages with that my focus on the psychology of open education started. He describes here how non-trivial and frightening it is to face ourselves and slay our inner monsters. Yes, it is. As a psychologist I know just how hard. Making a choice to be open to ourselves with others as witness is one of the scariest monsters we are asked to tackle as we grow and develop. A lifetime practice I have found and easy to use our busy lives to ignore the need to look to our mental patterns.

Edited by DS106Shrink from creative commons licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by dylanroscover: http://flickr.com/photos/dylanroscover/3450505729

I found a creative commons image to add my quote to. I wanted something to express how busy we often tell ourselves we are to take the time to be open to ourselves. Open in Photoshop. Use colour sampler to select colour text. Google name of fonts to give feel of a computer terminal. Selected font in Photoshop. Played with colours and positioning until satisfied. Dig the fact that glasses are at forefront of image only noticed that whilst I was playing with the aesthetics…what do I know about aesthetics?

I used a final little tool to attribute original image correctly. Cogdog’s Flickr attribution helper. I linked to his post as there you can find several attribution tools to choose from.