Transforming the Teaching of Literature from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I decided to do my Computers and Writing presentation this year as a Sophie book. Sophie worked well at bringing together a number of videos and images and also at allowing me to weave in snippets of text. Having the ability to use timelines to sequence the pieces was also very helpful. The Sophie book is currently over 100mb, so I'm not linking it here. Instead, I have just done a screen recording of the project. In addition to this one from vimeo, there is a 30.8 megabyte QuickTime file.

6:10 minutes (5.65 MB)

Our notions of what counts as literary shift constantly, a theme woven throughout much of the work that has happened in courses I've taught this semester. Sometimes as these shifts play out, it can be difficult to recognize the emerging forms among an evolving landscape formed around stalwarts like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austin, Morrison. We need podcasts like this to help us make such identifications.

I'm starting to think about the upcoming Computers and Writing presentation. The last time around I wrote prose, which was a nice change of pace from the show and tell routine I've been doing at conferences for the last few years. I'm thinking some combination of reading prose and showing stuff, but haven't arrived at a decision yet. I might just do a video ala 2006 (below)

From the teaching files, an extension of the idea of using found images to create videos, this project rips YouTube videos and compiles them into something new.

Here is a draft of my bit for the panel Jenny Edbuaer Rice, John Biewen, and I will be putting on in New Orleans. The panel is on sound in composition, so it's a bit ironic that the audio quality of this is somewhat dicey, but you do what you can.

Musical Pieces: Readymade Audio Projects and Creativity from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

From the Washington Post comes this piece about corporations playing fast and loose with images found online. The article is of interest to writing teachers working with new media for its illumination of fair use principles. If one of the four lenses through which we might view fair use is the potentially commercial nature of the use, it's tempting to look at the "photonapping" of images by corporations and argue for more flexibility when applying the profit criteria to use decisions. This, however, might not be true to the phenomenon reported in the piece. It's not that the uses by the corporations are fair. The article quotes Lawrence Lessig, who points out, "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur." For educators, these legal dimensions might be discussed as part of a broader conversation about how to make decisions about using materials in projects. I put a screen shot of the Post article above to serve as the link to the article, which I've attributed and which I'm discussing in terms of educational uses of media. Is it fair? These questions are sometimes complex.

Lessig's quote and the rest of the article, more interestingly, get at what is behind much of the trend of companies wanting to appropriate amateur materials from the Web:

"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."

It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."

If nothing else the trend asks us to continue thinking about the power of citizen media as reflected in the desires of corporations to be like Mike, or Allison, or Tracey.

This piece in the NY Times offers a nice counterpoint to some of the recent complaints about the stultifying state of most non-digital education. I pulled down some of the lecture video and added a few questions. The are other questions to poke at as well: what does it mean for the haves like MIT to hire such teachers and create such content while others get to may only be able to consume it on the Web? How is it that teaching like this get valued? Must it become public, superstar fare? Mostly, though, it's just nice to think about how teaching can take place outside of the digital box sometimes.

As part of the end-of-semester reflection on the teaching that has gone under the bridge during the last few months, I offer this screencast. This is not an adjudication, arbitration, or investigation. Just pushing.

The real sticky example in the video is the last one, in which an entire song is translated into a video expression. It might be that using the song in the original video bumps into or spills over the limits of fair use. I'd be curious to hear what people think. After you chew on that one, you might ruminate about using the entire song in this video.

You'll need a good Internet connection and about twelve minutes.

Let's be Fair: Intellectual Property and New Media Composition from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

If you've got an extra twelve minutes and a decent Interent connection, feel free to take a look at a screencast for an upcoming NCTE presentation. The sound is not quite right, but the root of the problem is I recorded it too hot in the original Camtasia files and I'm not going back and have had enough tweaking.

47.5 mb movie

I've posted a video reflection of a recent annotation assignment. The Flash video is about 35mb, so click the image or use the link below only if you have a decent Internet connection. For the assignment, we used a CommentPress text set up by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Lot's of good things happened. I pretty much stepped out of the way (my favorite teaching style) while students worked with one another to pick apart the text. We wove in video clips from the film version of the story, so we got to think about media and narrative and a hybrid interpretation of the story. Great interaction among commentators. You can check out the online edition of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge we created or watch my video reflection on Student-Centered Literary Studies on the Web.