Alternative blog account

Because I opened this blog account for the class I taught in Fall 2006, I haven't blogged much here. My actual blog is here. Check it out, mainly academic stuff, but sometimes I talk about whatever hits my fancy...

Closing to an end

Well my class ended three months ago and I still haven't wrote any concluding thoughts on how it went. After having read the evaluations I can happily say that the class was challenging, entertaining, and more importantly, interesting. Students were saying that they found the readings hard, but the class discussions were explanatory. And most felt that they actually learned something about digital media. What more can I ask for? They also said that this should have been a semester, not eight weeks. It was initially designed as a semester long, but the logistic difficulties made it impossible to offer it as a full semester class.
How do I feel about it? Well, pretty good actually. Most had their firsts in using some of the tools in my class, they were baffled at first, then were able to adjust and learn. The Wiki was useful I think and I was successful in implementing it. Also I successfully adjusted the schedule to fit the students' level, which wasn't what was promised to me. Coming in I thought I was teaching an honors class only to find out all of my students actually dropped out of their first class and decided to take the next best thing and most weren't even interested in the topic. But most struggled through it, liked it, and learned a lot from it.

Casino Royale

As a long-time James Bond fan, I was quite curious to see how the new Bond character was going to play out. I went to see the new one on the second day and tried to keep an open mind about it. I don't like to reject something just because it doesn't conform to the routine. This last one was definitely an anomaly in the Bond tradition. As far as I've seen in the trailers, I absolutely didn't like the new Bond (Daniel Craig), I figured it was going to be another Timothy Dalton who will never get the play the role again. Plus I was too much in love with Pierce Brosnan whom I think just as hot and appropriate for the role as Sean Connery had been in his day.

To my surprise I liked it. Granted it could have been shorter. Towards the end there were many false endings and I was afraid we were going to watch another movie. But this was one of the rare instances where you saw Bond as a human being and not a super hero with magical powers! It also played with a lot of Bond traditions too. Some are:

• M's real identity was almost revealed when Bond broke into her apartment. To which M replied "One more syllable, and I'll have you..."
  
• M was shown at one point in her bed with her husband waking up to a phone call?!!! Never knew she was married...
  
• Bond lost all his money in the poker game and the woman who represented the treasury (and who was pretending to be his lover for appearances) refused to give him more money to Bond so he can try again. Has any woman ever said "no" to Bond? Another poker player gave him the money...
  
• When Bond asked for a martini at the casino, the bartender asked "Shaken, not stirred?" To which he replied "I don't care." WHAT??? Are you out of your mind? OK, that was outrageous.
• Bond fell in love with the treasurer of the bank (good choice, I might add). There was one instance in previous movies where Bond fell in love and got MARRIED. But the woman was killed shortly after by the dark side. So my assumption was that they were going to kill her off at the hands of the enemy. Well that did not happen, but what happened was that she stole all the money Bond won and gave it to some other party. During the last chase, she got stuck in an elevator in an old building located in one of the canals in Venice, as the building came down, she drowned. So ultimately she died (no big surprise about that).
• Shortly after he fell in love with this woman, there were a series of tacky love scenes, to which my reaction was, god let this be over soon, I think I am going to puke! In one of these moments, as he and his lover were approaching to Venice in a boat. And he was in his laptop e-mailing his letter of RESIGNATION to M. Ok, nevermind the absurdity of the act, how in the world are you going to get wireless in the middle of the sea??? A lot of movies omit this little detail. I assume they rely on the audience's suspension of disbelief. Well it sticks out.
• The torture scene was particularly hilarious. What better way to hurt Bond than hurting his masculinity. He was strip naked while the villain kept hitting his you-know-where with a rope-ball. His response? Apart from painful screams, he said that everyone will know that he (the villain) scratched his (Bond's) you-know-where... That was a moment of comic relief that you normally don't see in a Bond movies.

But I liked it, isn't that interesting? It should definitely be shortened and tightened a bit though. I mean, there are some parts of the plot that I didn't quite understand how to relate to the rest of the movie.

The story project

Funny, I am reading through the forums and I constantly come across interesting posts. We have a story project that we are writing as a group. I figured, let them experience digital culture in its full potential, with all its glory and frustrations. Let them bless it and curse at it at the same time. So I guess somebody deleted another student's chunk of the story. Boy was s/he ever upset. Nevermind the fact that I can compare versions and see what changes have been made as an administrator, the post was too funny.

It read "Ok, whats the point of having a story where everybody contributes when people are just going to erase what you wrote anyways? Just cause you may not like it doesn't mean you can erase it! Thanks to the jerk who did that to me. I hope your grade drops!!"

Wrar, cat fight!!! The "jerk" would have been considered a "griefer" in Second Life and he would have been temporarily banned from the game. This student decided to play the story game a little bit differently than others. He just had a bit of a sense of humor, is all. Of course, in real life, where users from all over the world are collaborating in a project like this, an incident like this happens all the time. And you get really frustrated, and you get deleted, and you re-add your stuff again, and then get deleted again, and so on and so forth. I think this was a telling experience for both students. All I can say, it was interesting to see it play out.

Reconfiguring narrative

Well that was a surprise... We were discussing Landow's Hypertext 3.0 in class last Wednesday. We actually read the introduction couple of weeks ago, but our assignment was Reconfiguring Narrative chapter. As I explained to them the wildly popular debate between narratologists and ludologists and asked them whether they thought narrative existed in videogames, everyone said yes and looked at me as if I just came from the moon. I would have expected more of a reaction, or even resistence. So many gamers have refused it stubbornly. My class actually made some insightful comments on the topic. Who knew??? Either as a culture we are moving beyond certain dichotomies or our class was an anamoly. Either way, I didn't even feel the necessity to convince them. They were there (before I was).

Great class

Well, I worked really hard in designing this course and it is challenging for my students to take a course like this, I am getting to like it by the day. The students are participating in class discussions more and more, the blogs are getting under way, the forums are slow and coming, but that's OK... I really feel like I am rewiring their brains for a different way of learning, most importantly, a different way of thinking. As an instructor, you normally get feedback on and off, but having the class online and teaching it face-to-face, allows you to get feedback instantly. This is pretty wild. And I trust they get the same instant feedback from me.

Reading through the student blogs, I get an insight to my student's lives that I normally don't get when I just have them in class. The mother of one of my students commented on her blog, greatly appreciating the fact that she restarted her blogging so the family is able to get news of her. So touching, really. And another claims that he is really getting into the topics that we are talking about. And he is quick to add, "No, really, I am getting very interested." I know it sounds way too idealistic for me, but if I can change how three of my students think, I think I have accomplished a lot. But of course I am shooting for higher goals...

Battlestar Galactica

I had made myself a promise to blog only about the class in this blog, but I am about to break my promise. Oh well, I can't be perfect.
I just got done watching another great episode of Battlestar Galactica and I am still amazed at the differences between the original series and this one. I still remember 25 some years ago, when I was about 7, me and my dad would cancel everything in our lives and watch Battlestar Galactica, in black and white. Those were the days... It was still a great show despite all the technical limitations. I remember Starbuck was a man and I was totally in love with him. So seeing him reincarnated as a woman always takes me by surprise watching the new series. But it is kind of interesting to see that they are using hand-held camera techniques to shoot the battleship scenes. I don't think I ever watched a sci-fi that uses that technique ever. And the Saylons (not sure if I spelled this correctly) are definitely new and improved in this new series. As a matter of fact, there are no close up shots of the Saylons in the new series, but there were in the old one. And Saylons that took the shape of humans were unheard of, forget about them being self-generating! When you killed one of those suckers, they died, period.
It is kind of scary being old enough to compare the old version of the series to the new one, LOL.

Forums

I began talking to my students about what is expected of them at the forums. This week was basically the honeymoon with the technology, meaning I let them use is any way they wanted it, so they got used to the idea of having a virtual classroom. Last class i gave them a bit more guidance in that i asked them to post stuff that are related to our readings. I also told them that forums aren't chatrooms, they serve a different purpose.
I am also planning on posting a grading rubric for the forums as I will be paying more attention to what kind of interaction goes on in the forums and i will treat it as class participation.

First reaction to technology

I asked my students what their first reactions were to the technology they were using for the class, you know, how the wiki worked out and how it didn't work, how blogger.com worked and how it didn't work, stuff like that. I want them to notice all the glitches, overcome the challenges of using technology to write so they can fully appreciate the impact. I literally want them to suffer all the negative sides of technology and be able to evaluate its full potential after having taken my class this semester. But I also want them to realize its benefits too. Faster communication within the group/community, being able to publish anything and everything for everyone to see, its flexibility so that mistakes are easily corrected and so on. It is probably most amazing that you don't have to be McGann, Spielberg, or Oprah to publish something that everyone would read. You don't need money, you don't need to find a publisher, you don't need to advertise or anything. Any mistakes you make are noticed by the community immediately and corrected. If you have a question about something, you can get an answer from someone who is also interested in the same topic but lives on the other side of the planet. You might not ever met this person, but he is willing and able to help you out. That's the beauty part about reading and writing on the digital platform. But of course, it comes with a price. Technology can be a pain in the neck at times. You might feel like throwing your laptop out the window at times, servers might be down (as some of my students already experienced in blogger.com), it might take a while to figure out how something works. Technology is a wonderful thing that allows us to do millions of things, but I also want my students to experience fully the negative sides of it too.
While some of my students are struggling with what to write on their blogs, some are treating it as if they blogged all their lives. Some are already manipulating the ready made templates, posting URLs, pictures and such. Others need a bit more assistance. But they are learning skills that will last them a lifetime. One of my students writes that although at first she wasn't exactly sure about this blogging, she feels that it is becoming quite addictive. It is very true. This is why I currently have three blogs.