creativity/machine

I’ve had an exciting and astonishingly busy week. I’ve finally managed to put together a diverse lineup for the music industry panel discussion that takes the place of a final lecture in the Music Subcultures and the Media course I’m coordinating.

This week also winds up the experiment with blogs as a form of assessment I’ve incorporated into this course. It’s been exhilirating to watch an authentic peer-to-peer learning community evolve. The level of dynamic interaction in tutorials has improved since they started blogging too. Even more interestingly, offering this space to students to reflect on the issues of the course has apparently empowered them to build their own critical positions, and to develop and discuss their ideas much more extensively than the one hour tutorial slot allows. They have without exception been warm and supportive toward one another, and they haven’t forgotten to be camp, humorous, or weird, as their choice of music subculture dictates!

All this is as I had hoped. As it was important for me to be around to facilitate and support these fledgling research bloggers, the exercise has sucked quite a lot of my time and my own blog has suffered, but it’s all good. I’ll actually miss reading them, although I’m hoping they won’t all stop.

On the other hand, there have of course been access issues (both physical and in literacy terms). Note to all teachers: the “young” people are not all as “wired” as we think or fear. And there has been some resistance due to the unfamiliar nature of the weblog as an assessment task. That said, paradoxically the blog has also given some of the resistant a space to communicate and reflect on their feelings. I’m doing a student survey in class today, and will post the results for the benefit of anyone else thinking of incorporating blogs into their course design. All in all, now that i’ve seen it in action, I would hate to see it taken away again, especially in a course on music communities and the media, which is just *begging* to be given a life online.

I’m also making another Digital Story (about urban “decay” and “renewal” through the story of a vanished restaurant) in preparation for doing some training in remote communities for the Youth Internet Radio Network, which forms part of my PhD research. And hatching secret plans with some cronies to move the Digital Storytelling format off the desktop…

I’m doing some extra work as a research assistant on a university project that is planning ways of integrating wireless networking with teaching and learning strategies in a meaningful way - would love to hear from anyone interested in this field.

I’m also happily digging myself into a massive theoretical maze in which I will explore the ideas of cultural participation, citizenship, the public sphere, and literacy in relation to the history of media change. That is, for the PhD.

Sometime I have to get around to printing up the final copy of my Masters thesis and getting it bound so I can graduate.