Sad but true. Hard to muster, yes. But I can’t fairly complain; it’s not really decent.
Boo hoo. I must return to work after 8 months on sabbatical.
I’ll be teaching two digital/media classes starting next week. Learning from YouTube, again, but not so strangely. This time we’ll have actual books to read! (Critical Cyber-Culture Studies, Silver, ed.; Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins; Serious Leisure, Robert Stebbins; Mining the Home Movie, Ishizuka, ed.; and Common Culture, Paul Willis), and pre-determined themes to follow (using my six tours, discussed in length here). Here’s the syllabus. I’m building on the contributions of last year’s class, using my work and my students’ as original research. Artificially constrained within its pages, we learned last year what YouTube can’t do and won’t let its users do, the question this time around is whether we can delve more deeply into what it is and how it relates to other media practices and histories (see books above). I’ll be sure to blog on the proceedings here, and do follow along as we build a semester’s content on our new class YouTube page. Here’s an interview with me on thismediamoment where Elia Powers catches up with me a year after his first interview with me for Chronicle of HIgher Education.
I’ve also created (with talented designer, Michael Wilson) an on-line version (or preliminary “publication”) of my Media Praxis class/site: a course that studies the history and ethics of political media through the films and theoretical writings of committed mediamakers. The site and class are based upon the idea of what I’ve named “integrations“: that media theory, practice and politics are holistically linked and can be informative across time, place, and practice. The students will be building the site’s archives, but you all are invited to do so as well. It’s currently a shell awaiting participation…
My students will also be building a blog for Claremont’s Teen Green group (their ethical media praxis), a youth group with a variety of green projects that is sponsored by Uncommon Good. I’ll provide the link to that blog as soon as we make it.
Next week’s post will be from the land of the gainfully employed and usefully (I hope) laboring. Alas.