Monthly Archives: November 2010

Baylor_nmfs_f10, New Media

“The Myth of Mindless Addiction”

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This semester I continue to reflect on my paper on the Death of the Introduction to The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This semester it seems clearer to me that a profoundly new, that is new media approach is required for the pedagogy of the introduction. The project of writing a new type of introduction to Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament that embraces the move from Gutenberg’s print to a interactive e-book will requires a new media literacy.

This seminar has also been an introduction to an interesting network of scholars. Sherry Turkle is an academic profiled by the N.Y. Times in a Home & Garden piece “Really Thing About Things.” She has been teaching at MIT since 1976. She is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Sherry Turkle provides an apt follow up to the rubrics created by Brenda Laurel. Rob reminds us in his post Lost in Space the shift from philosophical reflection to a more narrative reflection that there are differences in the tone and texture of the readings.   When Turkle observes “the games as a window onto the culture of computation” she makes a new contribution to the previous readings. What Turkle does so effectively is attend to the way that the culture of computation acts as an environment with its own sort of gravity.

The now defunct television network TechTV created a documentary (in three segments eight, six and eight minute long  segments on Sherry Turkle in their series Big Thinkers.” It is now available through YouTube.com. The first video she discusses  objects and the self. Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 1 The second segment has her describe the computer as a  “mind machine”and virtual reality.  Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 2. The concluding segment  one of the interesting ideas she explores here is the way that nurutring prompts intimacy, even with objects such as a doll Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 3

Sherry Turkle and the post Teach His/Her Own reminds us that video games or running are all expressions of identity and the formation of our selves. So some of what is in play in our various posts is the questions of how our identity choices are shaped in a new media world. James Kendrick in What We Talk About When We Talk explores with Turkle how the discussion of video games in some ways a meta-conversation on other topics. He challenges us that it may be a fear of a technological shift that marks the level of anxiety. He implies that the technological shift intimates a political that is power shift. The resistance may have more to do with the political/power status quo more than the technology itself. He and Turkle point to the possible advantages this technology may hold for intellectual development.

When Engelbart and Nelson talk about books embedded in the Memex or Dynabook they do not seem to understand the profound change that the computational culture will make on the very nature of this new type of book. The book is an object. Sherry Turkle has spent a caeer examining our relationships with objects and the formation of the self.  Her work challenges writers to build in a network context an object that forms a self. What if this new appliance/book would work like a video game. “The emotional power of video games draws heavily on the computer power within that supports a simulated world and a meditative environment, the David called a place of for “recentering.”” (NMR 511)

A major limitation of the print introduction is the fact that it ends like the pinball game that Turkle describes. The reader comes to the end of the page and must wait until the next edition. The new introduction functions in a new digital world. “As a computational object, the video game holds out two promises. The first is a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops. … The games hold out a related promise, also tied to the computer’s presence within them. This is the promise of perfection.” (NMR 511) The challenge for the writer of the digital author is to provide an experience that can be relived and deepened with recurring traffic. This may not be the perfection that Turkle holds out but it is the incremental improvement and the move to excellence for the learner.

It would be interesting to return to Turkle after a session of Second Life or playing Halo.

Baylor_nmfs_f10

From Hammerhandz to the Brain Augmenting Electronic Books: Adventures in teaching

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Before I can go on to comment on Viola or Laurel I need to think through something about McLuhan. Several weeks ago as the New Media Faculty Seminar at Baylor met to discuss Marshall McLuhan’s articles in The New Media Reader Gardner Campbell told us about a class session that helped students understand McLuhan’s contention that medium is the message. He told the class what happens in out typical language game when I say “pick up a hammer”? Go ahead now think of a hammer in your hand. Now that you have visualized this now describe for me what you have. The student said immediately you have a hammer being grasped by a person. You have a hammer in your hand. Gardner said an emphatic no to this. “What you really have is a hammerhand! The tools becomes an extension of the person in this case the hand!” My words cannot capture Gardner’s verve and enthusiasm.

The appliance as the extension of the person a la Doug Engelbart and McLuhan’s the medium is the massage/message brings us back to a new appreciation of the “appliance.” Sherry notes the dangers of anthropomorphism of our devices. These devices were also mentioned in The 2010 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium and the Educause learning Initiative. The key trends include 1) the proliferation of resources and relationship due to the internet. 2) The idea of on demand has hit the television and bleeds into other aspects of life including technology. 3) End users seem to be warming up to the cloud services such as Google Docs and the around the corner Windows Live. 4) Students treat their education as increasingly a collaborative fashion contrary to the earlier era.

The Horizon Report list includes critical challenges 1) the changing role of the academy including 2) new and emerging scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and research lags behind the technology. 3) Digital media literacy continues to find new importance in every field. Finally 4) a contracting economy has given rise to more focus on key goals often absent advancing new media research.

The Horizon 2010 reports the technologies to watch. The report names two near term technologies, that is to say, within the next twelve months, mobile computing and open content. Baylor has worked to position itself well in terms of mobile computing. Baylor is a Microsoft campus. Therefore open source software cannot get a substantial hold here. There is an open standards conference here every year.

The second adoption horizon, that is to say two to three years out that the Horizon Reports mentions are electronic books and simple augmented reality. I want to use Brenda Laurel to explore the electronic book. The Baylor library has started a collection of electronic books. However there has been no substantial rethinking of the concept of the e-books. What if we take Laurel’s reading of Aristotle (Poetics).

When so many of the writers we have read this semester have imagined the books would reside in the Memex machine and the Dynabook but they did not speculate on how that shift of books from artifacts of the Guttenberg era to an entity out of the movie Tron. The introductions to Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and as a course and as a books continue to be written with a Guttenberg model. However, Brenda Laurel in her article “Six Elements and Causal Relations Among Them.” Brenda Laurel brings and interesting reading of Aristotle’s Poetics to a new media aesthetics.  These six elements can provide a helpful dashboard or rubric to assess what a new and fundamentally different introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

The next blog post will review in more detail Brenda Laurel’s treatment Six Elements.