CCCC 2010 Preview Notes

1. http://iamdananderson.net/screencasts/cccc2010
   
   

   "I'm a Map I'm a Green Tree" from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.
   

   Daniel Anderson's presentation for the 2010 CCCCs conference.
   

   At the conference, he strips the voiceover out of the video and delivers it live. Using the "I'm a Mac I'm a PC" commercial clips against the "I'm a Map I'm a Green Treet," he shows the confluences (word?) of the word and technology.

   What I find interesting in this video is how he accessed information in the video, using:
   

• flickr
  
• google/google books
  
• Wikpedias
  
• scans of a book
  
• Scan of a scholarly journal
  
• Macmail/email
  
• Pandora radio site
  
• Photoshop and sound mixer
  

LILAC questions: So, are WE (scholars) using these tools to locate and access information (are we? I do!). If so, what are we (or should we be) teaching our students?

2. http://stevendkrause.com/scholarship/cccc-2010/

Steven D. Krause, "RIP-ping, Mixing, Burning: A Remix Manifesto as Research Writing" CCCC 2010 presentation.

Presentation shared pre-conference as a blog using flickr photos (which he created as slides of course in iMac), movie trailers (video from YouTube about patents, books, and music…. Sampling, remixing, scholarly journals, data—research and then remix to make something new—transformative uses?) Krause's point seems to be that students might be "chicken" to reach beyond the 5-paragraph essay, for a variety of reasons:

"First, despite the notion that incorporating new media/popular culture like movies, music, and more into our classes is a good idea because it is what the "kids today" are into and this is the "digital native" world they know, I once again found in my students a surprising amount of ignorance and apathy. And I found this especially among my "true freshman" students, as opposed to the sophomores, juniors and seniors who found their way into first year composition for various reasons. I'm not entirely sure what the cause of this ignorance and apathy about what should be their contemporary culture is all about, but it certainly seemed to be there."

"Second, and perhaps this is one of the causes of their ignorance and apathy, there is the problem of the assumptions and inevitable compartments about "school" versus "life." SImply put, I think a lot of students have in mind stuff we do in school and stuff we do in life, and there is a bright and uncrossable line between these two realms. This is one of the problems I've seen about incorporating things like Facebook into my teaching, and I think it extends to an extent here. I think students' default positions are often to see things like remix culture– all the stuff that GirlTalk was doing and most of the things discussed in RiP– as being distinctly in the "life" realm and they are uneasy about that crossing the border into "school."

"Finally, and this is where the chickens thing comes from, I think that students are often very leery of leaving the confines of the cages of convention that they have been raised in. As I understand it, even when so-called "free-range" chickens are raised in humane conditions (and they often are not, of course), they are reluctant to leave their cages and certainly not their source of easily obtained food. They are, after all, domesticated animals. I think that a lot of students are in this sense "chicken:" too scared and too dependent on an educational system designed to domesticate them to think outside of "the box" even when the assignment explicitly asks them to do so. In fact, after going through all of the cage-breaking tricks I tried throw at them with these exercises, a disappointing number of them retreated to the old and stale school genre they are most familiar with."

Does this relate to LILAC? The video certainly relates to IP class!