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Have you read everything under the assignments TAB carefully? Please do so for class! We will be brainstorming projects! Please bring your kit to use for thinking about projects! Please read everything with an eye to projects!
PROJECTS PROJECTS PROJECTS! Our mantram for now!
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NOTE THAT on website the AT A GLANCE PIC (scroll down) you can see now that it says "all materials, structure class, thoughts on projects" >>>
This means that you should try to find out as much as possible about all our books, transmedia, and materials as you can for the next class. Read intros and conclusions and first and last sentences of chapters, be able to explain to others in the class what each item is about. LOOK THINGS UP ON THE WEB! be a detective about these items!
Show off your discovery skills!
And of course, read the stuff everyone was supposed to have read for last week: Lothian for example. (see below for what else you should have explored too.)
It's a lot to read and think about and be able to tell others about for sure! Do as much as you can! kk
We will talk more about how the class will be structured and ALSO COME IN WITH IDEAS ABOUT PROJECTS! And the second version of your KIT if you have decided it could be even more useful for making projects and posters for workshops.
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From the assignments TAB, think carefully about this stuff: read and re-read!
First of all, FUN MATTERS! Let’s work together to make sure that happens, no matter what!
All during the semester you will be working on a senior project. At four points in the semester you will be either
• prototyping what is coming,
• sharing your process,
• showing off what you've done, or
• reflecting on what happened.
Each part will be 1/4th of your grade, so just doing the project will not get you a full grade, and sharing your process carefully will.
Two times during the semester we will be creating class workshops together.
[graphic from this website:
http://www.wordsinspace.net/urban-media-archaeology/2013-fall/?p=483 ]
=For the first workshop you will do a paper that details your project justifications and current status, accompanied by a handout, all to flesh out the prototype you will already have begun.
=For the second workshop you will do a poster that accompanies your project itself. The poster will visually detail your research questions, methods, outcome, and conclusions. It will explain the project you are sharing at that time too.
You cannot get full credit for any assignment until
after you also present in the workshop sessions, and participate in follow-ups.
In other words, just the written paper or the poster or the project does not in itself complete the assignment.
If an emergency or illness kept you from participation in the workshop that week, to get full credit you will have to 1) meet in a mini-workshop with two other students from our class that you make happen, contacting and preparing for, to share your work and their work outside class together, and 2) write up the experience and what you learned from it to complete the participation portion of that grade.
DO NOT MAKE OTHER PLANS FOR DUE DATES: BUILD THEM CAREFULLY INTO YOUR SCHEDULE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE TERM! Put them into your logbook from the beginning so that attending them will always be at the forefront of your term plans. This is especially true of the final day of class, when you discuss your learning analysis with everyone else. Full credit FOR THE COURSE requires attendance and participation on that last day.
Summary of assignments:
• Project Prototype & LB1: 1/4 grade
>> 22 February
• Event 1: Status paper & handout & workshop attendance & LB2: 1/4 grade
>> 9 March
• Event 2: Project & poster & pics & workshop attendance & LB3: 1/4 grade
>> 13 April
• Final Learning Analysis & Process Review & attendance last day & FINAL LB4: 1/4 grade
>> LAST DAY OF CLASS: 11 May
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All assignments are intended to give you familiarity with some important, sometimes professional, styles of creating and sharing activist-scholarly research.
Please notice how much of our work together will be collective. This means that your individual ability to meet deadlines will collectively affect everyone in the class. So make attention to this a top priority, and if you find yourself needing help organizing yourself and planning for these kinds of things, please come to Katie asap to discuss and get help. If for any reason you find yourself falling behind (any reason, good or bad!) please try to be mindful as this begins to happen and come to Katie immediately.
Working collectively is complex, but it can be supportive, and FUN too!
To create our own community of thinkers, makers, doers, of scholars and activists, we want to all get to know each other and work with each other. Ours here is an active and ambitious learning community visioning and revisioning together. I want to get to know each of you personally! I want to know how the class is working for you, what touches and excites you, how your projects are going.
Let me know in office hours or after class when you need help, or any special accommodations, the sooner the better. Folks with disabilities or who need time from class to observe religious holidays, please contact Katie ASAP to make any arrangements necessary. If you are experiencing difficulties in keeping up with the academic demands of this or any other course, you can also contact the Learning Assistance Service, 2202 Shoemaker Building, 301-314-7693. They have educational counselors who can help with time management, reading, math learning skills, note-taking and exam preparation skills. All their services are free to UMD students.
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OUTLINE FOR TODAY'S CLASS:
Thursday 9 February, Emergence:
• INVESTIGATE all materials, that is find out as much as you can about them! Be able to say how you did this, and share your process here.
• BRING IN thoughts on projects, projects! Our mantram for now!
• CONSIDER everything under the assignments TAB carefully
• KIT ITERATION: bring your kit to use for thinking about projects!
• CATCH UP ON ANYTHING YOU DID NOT DO LAST WEEK!
=WEB ASSIGNMENTS: Brené Brown podcast, TENSION video
=READ: Lothian 2016.
• MAKING IN CLASS: 2 min. Attendance Portraits (Barry. 2014. Syllabus. Drawn & Quarterly. p. 56.) https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/syllabus
BEFORE BREAK:
1) Attendance Portraits & next Kit iteration
2) DISCUSS LOTHIAN READING FROM LAST CLASS! Includes discussion of • our gut reactions, second reactions, reactivities, triggers, care-abouts using reading as jump off point. Can refer to Tension video as well.
3) Think projects: how? Think class structure: note transmedia & emergence
4) Next class: read Octavia's Brood, ½ book, rationale and practice to share
AFTER BREAK:
1) groups to give presentations on materials to entire class, point to ways to inspire projects or to model or illustrate project-work
2) Noting meditation?
3) construction paper play as prototyping
FOR NEXT CLASS:
=choose stories to be about half of the book. Be able to say how you chose the ones you did: have a rationale and practice to share.
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[Image from: feminist groups disrupting bro-tech culture:
http://dazedimg.dazedgroup.netdna-cdn.com/786/azure/dazed-prod/1160/6/1166319.jpeg ]
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WHERE ARE WE IN THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CLASS?
SO WHAT IS TRANSMEDIA? what did we say, refer to, put up as a picture last class post?
>>TODAY CONSIDER EMERGENCE and how it is a property of direct action and activism
(Emergence is the title of today's class!!)
From the Wikipedia,
Emergence > emergent properties and processes: [emphasis mine]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
"An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment,
forming more complex behaviors as a collective.
...The processes from which emergent properties result may occur in
either the observed or observing system, and can commonly be identified
by their patterns of
accumulating change, most generally called 'growth'. Emergent behaviours can occur because of intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as
interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and
represent a new level of the system's evolution.
The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single
such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour
in the lower-level entities, and might in fact be irreducible to such
behavior.
The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds [3] or school of fish are good examples of emergent properties.
"One
reason why emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of
interactions between components of a system increases exponentially with
the number of components, thus potentially allowing for many new and
subtle types of behaviour to emerge. Emergence is often a product of
particular patterns of interaction. Negative feedback introduces
constraints that serve to fix structures or behaviours. In contrast, positive feedback promotes
change,
allowing local variations to grow into global patterns. Another way in
which interactions leads to emergent properties is dual-phase evolution.
This occurs where interactions are applied intermittently, leading to
two phases: one in which patterns form or grow, the other in which they
are refined or removed.
"On the other hand,
merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to guarantee emergent behaviour;
many of the interactions may be negligible or irrelevant, or may cancel
each other out. In some cases, a large number of interactions can in
fact work against the emergence of interesting behaviour, by creating a
lot of "noise" to drown out any emerging "signal"; the emergent
behaviour may need to be temporarily isolated from other interactions
before it reaches enough critical mass to be
self-supporting.
Thus it is not just the sheer number of connections between components
which encourages emergence; it is also how these connections are
organised.
A hierarchical organisation is one example that can generate emergent
behaviour (a bureaucracy may behave in a way quite different from that
of the individual humans in that bureaucracy); but perhaps more
interestingly,
emergent behaviour can also arise from more decentralized organisational structures, such as a marketplace. [or social protest
]
In some cases, the system has to reach a combined threshold of
diversity, organisation, and connectivity before emergent behaviour
appears.
"
Unintended consequences and side effects
are closely related to emergent properties. ...In other words, the
global or macroscopic functionality of a system with "emergent
functionality" is the sum of all "side effects", of all emergent
properties and functionalities.
"Systems with emergent
properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles
and the second law of thermodynamics,
because they form and increase
order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible
because open systems can extract information and order out of the
environment."
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Among the feminist
reasons we all need to grow boundary objects and to learn the languages
and knowledges of complex systems and the properties of emergence today, take a moment to consider
Naomi Klein’s article in
New Statesman, 29 Oct 2013:
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/science-says-revolt
Klein
describes: “Brad Werner…the geophysicist from the University of
California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer
model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system
boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a
whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us
uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the
bottom line was clear
enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid,
convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming
dangerously unstable in response…. Serious scientific gatherings
don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less
direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly
calling for those things.
He was merely observing that mass uprisings
of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights
movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of
“friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of
control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous
influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out.
So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the
earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment,
we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem."
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