Project Log: J. Argyle

This is me and my older daughter on our first day of school this year:

Here is a summary of my posts and research and such. It seems nobody reads my posts, perhaps because they are a little long, but I will solicit comments on my most recent posts, please:

Animating Our Idea

Animated video is now widely used to convey your message in an attractive way.

Hybrid Pedagogy Research

I was assigned to go through the articles posted on the website Hybrid Pedagogy, a place where Dr. Burton is considering submitting our final class product at the end of the semester. I started my research with the first articles submitted to this open-access, peer reviewed journal. Here are some articles I feel can be useful in our research and approach to our class project:

The Twitter Essay - What would you do if your English professor gave you an assignment called The Twitter Essay? You have 140 characters to express your point. Would you consider this assignment a literary act? What about a text message? The form of these two mediums force us to condense our words, almost like a poem. Communication through these mediums creates a new culture, a new civilization where students know they are bending grammatical rules but revel in it.

Cartoons vs. Real Life Footage

Hey class! Brother Burton invited me to watch a column of 1-2 minute videos on the Kindea Labs website, and overall I enjoyed watching how they depicted their various ideas. Yet, the question that kept coming back to mind was, "Is the lack of footage with real human interaction helping their point get across?" I felt at times the cartooning of the videos was a great way to help me understand their view point, but I would've loved to have seen some real life results from all of their research. Along with that, here are some other more detailed things I liked/disliked about the Kindea Labs videos I watched:

Our Message [version 1]

This concept card epitomizes our message

Communication is critical to civilization. It underpins it. It makes possible law, education, cooperation -- the very possibilities of consensus and collaboration.

A corollary to this is that as communication changes, so does civilization. New modes of communication do not merely continue our civilization; they alter and disrupt it, for better and worse. And for this reason, we need the perspectives of history to be equipped to manage the critical task of communication in the 21st century.

Things are not the same. However, the problem of change is not new. And so we turn a lens upon the past in order to understand the present as threshold moment in civilization's evolution.

Do you agree? What is the potential to improving civilization made possible by changing communications in the 21st century? What is at risk? What moments from history best illuminate the problems and changes of our current time? What is next?

Our Project: Format and Principles

My students and I are working together to create a short, video-based, historically-informed, collaborative argument around a central theme of contemporary relevance that connects communication and civilization. For more on this theme, see my post, "Our Message [version 1]." In this post, I explain our project format and the principles it is built upon.

We are experimenting with a centralized / decentralized
hybrid text-video project

An innovative format
Arguments on contemporary topics may appear in text or video form, but are typically authored by individuals or by organizations. We are innovating by combining text and video (so that each format carries the message independently, though they are complementary); and by using a hub-and-spoke model by which our central argument (a video + blog post overseen by me, the instructor) refers to and draws upon topics which individual students develop in greater detail and from their own personal angles within their own video + blog post.  We are seeking a balance between centralized and distributed development of an argument, an argument with a clear center but with logical extensions more owned, developed and branded by individuals.