MU Talk

Vanessa 05:01 on 09/11/2013 Permalink Reply
Tags: Free Culture ( 2 ), New Media ( 5 )   

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  Ciara 12:56 on 09/11/2013 Permalink | Reply

  Hi Vanessa,

  As a performance artist in a MOOC 🙂 I think your questions are hugely important! I’ve been wondering myself why questions about the nature of being performers in a virtual classroom have not surfaced in the PBR forums and, pointedly, I’ve wondered why I haven’t had the courage to raise them there myself….

  1. Don’t put links on their MOOC profiles?
     I think one reason might be a cultural/generational/gender thing: I’m a 38 year-old Irish woman. Irish people of a certain age, in general, would rather eat their own shoes than publicize their stats and achievements to a group of strangers. I struggled to choke out my two sentence’s worth when pressed! But the key point here is that I believe that my generation has issues with how information is perceived online because our real-world analogue is so strong.

  2. Prefer email over comm on open web?
     Again, I’m going to suggest that within the 35+ age group the Real-to-Virtual World mapping is very strong. We import behaviours and codes of social interaction from the real into the virtual, forge associations and connections that resemble those with which we are familiar in the Real World. For today’s children, this mapping will be much weaker. They will have grown-up comfortably in both worlds and will struggle less with disparities between the two. It is within this context that, for me, email tends to hold primary appeal over more open modes of communication. For me, the privacy it affords makes it feel most appropriate for personal disclosures. As an artist, I wrestle with insecurities about my work, about my life, so couching expression in the comparatively safe space of email feels best:-) I think this can sometimes come across as a caginess, an unwillingness to share. However, it is not a case of not wanting to share – rather it is partly a case of selecting the environment for what one wants to say (and I have a sense that not everything fits a more public platform) and partly being ignorant of the multiple alternatives to email out there.

  But it is more than this. We’ve been having really great, vibrant, searching conversations with by email 🙂 and you are right: there is content there that we should “out” 😉 but the confidence you inspire in the course of those email exchanges are what will catalyze my content “outing”. So, for me, those emails are very valuable conversations.

  1. Want to “protect” their IP rather than share?
     Er…I have to confess that I don’t fully understand this question. Do folk actively try to hide their IP? Golly, I don’t think I’d know how to, even if I wanted to…
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  Owen Parry 13:32 on 09/11/2013 Permalink | Reply

  Interesting questions concerning the public/private… if in reference to our communication, i think the reason email (or 1 platform) works better is because since our online meeting we have moved across 3 “platforms”… this can get confusing, not to mentions time consuming, important conversations can get lost across the different threads. While these confusions can be politically interesting in a work of art… the communication in order to make a work. requires some clarity and coherence (i think… but up for discussing that :)) I am happy to continue our discussions on this public thread, and if you can offer a tutorial in relation to point 1 and point 3 it’d be most welcome! 🙂

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    Ciara 16:53 on 10/11/2013 Permalink | Reply

    Interesting comment, Owen. I hadn’t thought about the benefits of email from a simple filing/archiving perspective.

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  Vanessa 17:15 on 10/11/2013 Permalink | Reply

  Thanks Ciara ‘n Owen! That comment BTW, may have sounded like, but in fact was not, directed at either of you. It was just a general rant (I rant a lot)(if you ever see me in my “DQ” leotard, it’s the “Dairy Queen” logo, but I wear it because I might have been called a “Drama Queen” once or twice)

  Anyway, it was just a general rant that I feel like we have such powerful & productive communication tools today, and when you hang out with New Media types, they are often all over them, but it’s so disappointing to find how many “Artist-Scholars” in our Practice Based Research in the Arts course barely use them.

  #1 about links in MOOC Profiles was just a frustration / rant that I’ve come to believe that meeting colleagues, building artist networks, and collaborating is far more valuable in this or perhaps any MOOC than the “lectures” themselves. Therefore I’ve put in a lot of time trolling thru classmate profiles and I wish they had links to awesome websites, or at least a flippin facebook page, but most classmates don’t list any kind of link at all and it just frustrates me to see ARTISTS, you know, COMMUNICATORS, not use the power of our age.

  A person in the developing world who makes less than a dollar a day and has a smartphone has MORE ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE than the president of the united states did 20 years ago. As artists I wish we were seizing this power more.

  As long as I’m ranting, it drives me crazy that 90% of forum comments are either technical comments / complaints, or arcane “do you think that lecture 4 point 3 could actually be considered another way of framing lecture 3 point 4?” That stuff should be 10%. The 90% should be “Here’s what I created last week, here’s what I’m working on this week, here’s the website for my upcoming work — can I get your feedback?”

  #3 about IP – hahaha, I didn’t mean Internet Protocol Address, I meant Intellectual Property. As in “let’s waste forum time grilling Ryan about the TOS / TOU of Studio West instead of just freaking posting something worth thinking about.”

  haha — anybody want a “DQ” leotard of their very own? /EndOfRant.