 |
 |
One thing about computers is that you need a lot of different kinds of glasses.
The `mediation' of education is now following in the footsteps of other institutions, like medicine and government. Beseiged by financial pressures, bureaucratic growth, and the explosion of new information and technology, our institutions are proactively seeking mediated solutions to their own demise. And, as we are wed to those institutions, this is happening for better or for worse. In obvious evidence, witness the exponential growth of the internet which supports both the loftiest and greediest notions of our world culture.
As less obvious evidence, consider the recent resuscitation and resurrection of art schools and art departments everywhere as they have introduced expanding digital curricula. Many schools have plucked themselves from the brink of financial collapse by starting up computer classes, first in the design areas, then expanding into other media areas like photography, printmaking, video, etc.
I personally come to this with much difficulty. While teaching experimental photography for the past 24 years, I actively began teaching computer imaging 8 years ago, and multimedia publishing 4 years ago. . . well past the stage where it would help me get or keep a teaching job. I`m now consumed by the problems and challenges of teaching multimedia to students whose livelihoods could, in fact, depend on the substance of my teaching.
My own evolving philosophy is that the content and technology of the course material should intrinsically form the nature of the teaching methods, and that in turn will form the students' experience. Teach multimedia as, and with, multimedia. This, in practice, is very different from the traditional cognitive and analytical methods I've always used to teach Photography . . . far more demanding of both student and teacher, but more appropriate to the material.
Art, like most other aspects of the culture, has become more and more about information. I know at this school at least, we spend ten-fold more time talking about it than making it. I know when I go to see an exhibition that I will spend much of the time digesting written or verbal information. Despite all the flashy new technology for extending our perceptions, `the word', so far, continues to prevail. When we say information technology, we are mostly speaking of textual applications. However, in my idealism as a `visual' artist and teacher, my own utopian world is multimediated.
No longer can I think of art as primarily the forming of singular external objects and ideas. Though, for at least a few more years, I'm relegated to accessing information through wires and disks, I'm already bathed in it. Information is not only in the ether, its fair to say it is the ether.
So, how are we to teach "information" as art? How do we present, demonstrate, and critique it? How do we enable it?
I've seen very strong evidence in my classes that skills developed playing video games are not, contrary to popular opinion, the best or only necessary background for learning difficult, sophisticated technology. More important, I've noticed, is the ability and willingness to read, to mentally focus for long periods, and to keep a receptive, organized mind with lots of active braincells that enjoy being saturated with information. You say you don't know any students who fit that description? . . . I say look around you.
We are part of a culture that dwells on disabilities. But, rather than accept the limitations of alleged learning disabilities, I encourage my students to discover and activate their learning abilities. Most of them welcome the challenge.
During the first day of my multimedia class, students, who have previously just been exposed to Photoshop, create Shockwave animations in Director and set them up in web pages with HTML they write from scratch. Every student in the class is amazed that they could learn and accomplish so much in one day. Without realizing it, they've gotten past their initial intimidation and learned a technological gestalt within which they can test out future work and ideas. The confidence they gain from this first day helps establish momentum that carries them through the more difficult, in-depth material of the course.
These are brave new students, facing with a very steep learning curve. The old image of a carefree student swinging a few books bound by a leather strap has been replaced by an image of another kind of student burdened with a rather large backpack bearing 50-60 lbs of information. What is now required to satisfy a serious university-level multimedia program is probably equivalent to the learning demands of law school.
After the first day of class, the students come early. I keep them late, and in between I take no prisoners. 4-5 years ago they were predominantly male. Today they're more likely to be young women, obsessive, intuitive, maybe more gracefully able to learn and operate in, what used to be the domain of male geeks. These women are redirecting the concerns of multimedia away from issues of navigation, targeting, and game-winning, toward less goal-defined issues of psychology and communication.
I've noticed in the mediation of education, and as schools become more corporate, that there is a strong tendency toward what I call "LCD" education. That is, a dumbing down of everything to the `lowest common denominator' of the least able or ambitious student (and faculty). Why can't there be dumbing up? Why can't the expectations and activities of courses be geared toward the level of the brightest, best motivated students?
As new media teachers, are we partners in developing a feudal structure of information with owners, makers, and consumers? Are we applying the same old political and academic models in the teaching of new media to further colonize our students and politically empower ourselves? Do we view knowledge as dangerous? Do we jealously guard it, and dole it out in stingy little portions, careful that our students don't surpass us? Do our programs offer any truly advanced level courses?
(Exhibit A:)
This is a textbook widely used for beginning photography classes. This is the material covered in my multimedia class. It probably weighs 30 lbs and costs $150. And this $4.00 CD-ROM contains all this material in electronically accessible form as well as copies of multimedia demonstrations, all the necessary plugins, a wide range of shareware webpage-building applications, and much more. It contains the full electronic version of the Director 6 Studio manuals, which, though still not nearly as clear as Macromedia could make them, is a big step forward.
I also maintain all my technical information and examples online on one of my websites, as well as course descriptions, syllabi, and links to related sites. I try to avoid using printed handouts, though the students can print their own if they want.
After making the course support information affordable, organized, lightweight, and electronically efficient, how does it get presented in the classroom? I try to teach multimedia as a developmental form of storytelling, evolving from narrative and gestural traditions, particularly those indigenous to "non-writing", aboriginal cultures such as the Native American. I attempt to teach each application as an interconnected extension of perception, gesture, and memory; to not just talk about, but show poetic reach.
To accomplish this, a data projector is essential. It allows me to gesturally enact information for the entire group at one time. This is a necessity because there is such a vast amount of information to cover that it's impossible to consider teaching it on an individual level as I'm used to teaching photography. The students must learn "how-to-learn" within a group context rather than the old, comfortable, tutorial situation. This is one instance where mediation is clearly a double-edged sword.
A data projector is at the heart of a smart-classroom, but more importantly, a smart classroom should be a desirable, stimulating, comfortable place to learn. This is especially true for distance learning, where many schools have trouble attracting enough interested students to sites that are inherently cold, impersonal rooms, often carved out of space no one wanted for anything else.
As a multimedia consultant to western museums I've had a lot of opportunities to check out different incarnations of the smart classroom idea. Probably the most successful I've seen are the 16 smart classrooms on the University of Colorado campus at Boulder. They're in almost constant use by classes from all departments.
As opposed to my own classroom experiences in rooms that are too small, airless, difficult to see or move in, and where both the hardware and software are a time-consuming adventure each class session - the rooms in Boulder are comfortable, ventilated, and tiered; the lighting, window shades, and built-in data projectors are all remote controllable, and the interactive connections between instructor and student, libraries, and internet are all reliably wired.
The instructor can concentrate on preparing and presenting the course material.
Many of us may never have the chance to work in such an idealized environment, to find out how it really affects teaching and learning. But we do have other opportunities to respond to the mediation of educational culture.
As a photographer, I'm well aware that my medium has, in fact, been used to capture the `spirits of the world', to colonize especially the new world, which we glibly appropriated from the native peoples. The use of photography as a Platonic pursuit of ideal form has gradually, but effectively, separated us from the world: mind from body, intellect from nature. Today it seems inevitably reasonable that we should have imagined and created cyberspace - our own god-world of complete disembodiment, where we now have the mediated power to project all the spirits of the world that we've captured.
And what better than to project these images/these spirits onto poly-dimensional forms; to express our intellectual separation from the world of beings, objects, and spaces, while maintaining our nostalgic yearning for it.
The predecessors of the `ideal worlds', impending in virtual reality and 3-D photographic mapping within cyberspace, stretch historically from Plato's conceit of the ideal form through the more recent use of large-scale photographic projections in environmental installations. And more insidiously, through the disembodied intrusion of 3-D holography (for instance, as the magic corporate spirit-icons on our credit cards).
Photography, it seems, has successfully made the transition from solid-state industrial object to its newly deified status as information, a perfected form for our cyberspace world. As usual, we made that transition without much thought for the consequences. While we're glorifying this cult of information technology for ourselves and our students, are we considering the long-term resonance? Who will pay the price as technology stocks shoot upward? If the plunder from colonizing the new world was land, minerals, dead animals, even human scalps, what will be the plunder of cyberspace? Could it be that we're colonizing ourselves?
As a teacher, as someone straddling the front lines of mediation, I have at least a small power, authority, and responsibility to direct this evolution toward the least destructive ends.
|
|