silver in seattle

yesterday morning sarah took me to the airport, virgin america took me to sea-tac, and a taxi took me to seattle where i was part of an event called Join USF in the Pacific Northwest at the edgewater hotel. the event included puget sound-area USF alumni, parents of USF students, a recently graduated USF student, and two admitted-to-USF students.

i began with this photograph.


this generation is the media maker generation, i said while sharing stories about my students in eating san francisco and digital media production. this is the generation of students i've been waiting for for fifteen years - they make media, they share media, they collaborate with media. at the same time, i shared my profound nervousness about the always-logged-on-ness of this generation. they are crazy creative but they are always on and always connected and some seem to have lost the ability to simply be with themselves and their thoughts. healthy attention spans seem to be at stake.

then i shared my teaching philosophy - log off before you blog off. i explained that i require my students to have offline, physical experiences and then use digital media to create and share stories about these experiences. to explain what i meant by this, i shared two student projects - eating san francisco student ali winston's North Beach Storybook 1 and recent USF media studies graduate lulu mcallister's How to Make a Delicious Omelet Using Wild Foods.


then i excitedly described USF's organic garden.

media studies professor melinda stone, art + architecture professor seth wachtel, and two year's worth of USF's garden project living learning community students have created a food-making, sustainable, beautiful, inspiring, and totally delicious organic garden on campus. USF architecture students designed and built a tool shed for the garden and various media studies classes have blogged, reported, and documented the garden and the gardeners. USF's organic garden offers different opportunities for different students in different courses taught by different professors from different disciplines. in two short years, the garden has become a working garden, a place for contemplation, a classroom, a community garden, a green lab.




time was getting tight so i raced through a past assignment for my intro to media studies students: edit USF's wikipedia page. returning to log off before you blog off, i explained that my students were required to work in groups to find books and other bound materials in gleeson library and to find relevant online resources to back up their wikipedia edits and additions. i mentioned that this semester my digital media production students will return to this assignment.

i ended with a map of san francisco filled with pins that link to blog posts and flickr sets created by last year's digital journalism students. i explained how my students began with campus, stretched to nearby golden gate park, and eventually took on the city as their beat. i then asked what would the map look like if it were generated by multiple students in multiple classes from multiple disciplines from multiple universities?


and then i said virgin america planes look like ipods, said something about me media and we media, and thanked them for inviting me to seattle.



(sorry for photographing only one side of the room!)

blog assignment

blog assignment for digital media production

1. attend at least two films at USF's 7th annual human rights film festival. while there, watch, listen, learn, grab any relevant materials, and take interesting photographs.

2. organize and edit your photos into a flickr set. title the set and the photos. add descriptions when necessary.

3. if you do not already have a blog, or if you have a blog and do not want to integrate it into DMP, create a blog. you are strongly encouraged to create a free blog with wordpress.

4. for each film you watch, write and publish a blog post.

5. each blog post must contain: a) at least two or three paragraphs about the film, the filmmakers, the audience's reaction, and your reflections about the film; b) at least one relevant photograph that you took; and c) one or two links that direct your blog readers to further information about the film, filmmaker, and/or film festival.

6. before publishing your blog post, edit it again and again and again. and then, just to be safe, edit it one more time.

7. when finished, and no later than friday at 5 pm, post two thick tweets, each including a link to your blog post.

hint: be aware that this assignment requires you to create and share content using a blog, flickr, and twitter.

reminder: there is no class on thursday.

flickr assignment

flickr assignment for digital media production

1. leave campus.

2. find and photograph an interesting part of the city. take smart photos. take a lot of photos so you have a large and diverse set from which to select your favorites.

3. sign-up for a free flickr account, create a profile, and make all DMP members your contacts.

4. create a flickr set of 5-10 photos to tell a story about the city. title and write a description for your flickr set.

5. tag your photos. if you do not know what tagging your photographs means, find out using twitter or google. use as many tags as you think necessary and use at least 3 for each photo. select smart and creative tags. tag strategically.

6. in this flickr set, there must be no mentions or references to yourself. do not use words like "i," "me," and "my." discuss the photographs, not yourself.

7. once finished, post a thick tweet that includes a link to your flickr set.

8. i will demo your work on thursday.

hints: find a part of the city that speaks to you. take more photographs than you use. follow directions.

rule: if you have no work to demo, do not come to class.

a trip to copenhagen

last week was the association of internet researchers (or aoir) annual conference in copenhagen, denmark. sarah took vacation time and joined me. before the conference, we stayed in hørsholm, where sarah's old-time seattle friend, michelle, and her family live. one day, we hopped on a train to see frederiksborg castle.



copenhagen is a beautiful city and sarah and i hoofed it all over, from vesterbro through the city to christianshavn, up to the kastellet and down beautiful bredgade. we spent plenty of time admiring the black diamond and had a few long delicious dinners. one of the trip's highlights was the day michelle and her daughter mabel introduced us to christiania, the magical part of town.




over the years, aoir has been the closest thing to my academic home conference. since 2000, i've attended six aoir conferences, including the first one in lawrence, kansas, the ones in minneapolis, maastricht, toronto, and chicago, and last year's conference in vancouver. this year's conference - aoir's 9th! - was expertly organized by lisbeth klastrup (conference chair) and brian loader (program chair) and took place at IT university of copenhagen's dramatic campus.



i was part of a first-day panel titled "beyond place: using concepts and methods of practice theory to study mediated experience." edgar gomez cruz (presentation title: "from virtual communities to co-presence practices: some theoretical notes from the field") got us started, followed by annette markham ("methods for studying lived experience with technology: revisiting the past to find new paths"), and then elisenda ardevol and adolfo estalella ("constructing localities: blog events and situated practices"). my presentation was last and titled "practice theory and pedagogy: teaching internet studies."

i began by talking about dichotomies and traced the history of internet studies through three historical either/ors: a) people who use the internet vs those who don't (or what we used to call the wired generation); b) people who have access to the internet and those who don't (or the digital divide); and c) people who participate in and contribute to web 2.0 and those who don't (or what some now call digital natives). i mentioned others - books vs web; libraries vs wikipedia; the internet will produce a utopia vs a dystopia - and said that it was a sign of academic maturity that we as a field have gone beyond such limiting dualisms.

next, i offered my teaching philosophy for teaching internet studies - log off before you blog off. i tried to illustrate my methods by showing three examples: lulu mcallister's flickr set How to Make a Delicious Omelet Using Wild Foods; miles simcox's blog post USF Organic Garden Project; and my teaching reflections on the davies forum at stonelake farm. with each example, i highlighted how i require my students to log off of their computers, do something with their hands, document that something with notes and photos, and then log on and blog about it.

at some point i think i said: "it is very important to say publicly, and say publicly at conferences filled with internet researchers, that we spend, and our students spend, way too much time online and connected. we need to log off and disconnect more often."

with time running out, i concluded by arguing that a) my teaching style and students' work goes beyond dichotomies (something that was challenged by the very smart anne beaulieu and others during the Q and A session), that b) our students' inability to disconnect for significant periods of time should be a major concern of ours, and that c) green media, or the intersections between sustainable living and participatory do-it-ourselves media, merits further attention.

here's how things looked from my side.


conference highlights! watching recent USF graduate sara bassett give an excellent paper on gender and world of warcraft. catching up with friends and super smarties christian sandvig and michele white. having lunch with ken hillis and hearing about his farm in canada. having lunch with edgar gomez cruz, hearing about his dissertation about barcelona-based flickr photographers, telling him about my new course on food and media, and sharing our love for staring at oceans.

at some point, teresa senft joined edgar and me and we began talking about how things feel a bit too tame and comfortable around here. teresa asked who could best shake things up as a keynote speaker for next year's aoir conference. i answered, without hesitation, david de ugarte.

chores at stonelake farm

besides a few small chores like letting mesa, the barn dog/puppy, out in the morning and feeding her breakfast, my main assignment at stonelake farm is the lower garden.


each evening around six-thirty i water it all, except the potatoes and the squash which get watered every other day. i weed the weeds and then feed the weeds to the chickens. after watering, we plant - a new batch of carrots thursday and three new rows of potatoes friday.


my other important task is to harvest. this chore is the most delicious.

digital journalism

last year, my digital journalism students began the semester working collectively on a group blog and ended the semester working individually on blogs of their own. this year, we did the opposite. students spent the majority of the semester working individually on their own blogs (and flickr accounts) and ended the semester working collectively to create a map of our city.


we diligently followed the digital journalism syllabus for the first six weeks, but by week seven things had to change.

in early march, i attended a panel discussion in the donohue rare book room (third floor, gleeson library). the panel included sasha carrera, education coordinator for the corita art center in los angeles, and amy franceschini and stuart mckee, both USF graphic design professors. the panel was part of the opening of POWER UP: Serigraphs by Corita Kent in USF's thacher gallery. long story ridiculously short: corita kent, also known as sister corita, ran the art department at immaculate heart college in los angeles until 1968, the year she left the order and moved to boston to focus on art and social justice. her serigraphs gained gained international fame during the 1960s and 1970s, and although you may not recognize her name you might recognize this:


or, perhaps, this:


during the panel, i learned about an assignment sister corita would give to her art students. first, she would have them draw an object. next, she'd give the students two or three days to draw the same object one hundred times.

during discussion, a number of audience members identified themselves as former students of sister corita, including one who remembered well the draw-this-a-hundred-times assignment. "i began thinking i knew what i was drawing," she said. "but after four or five drawings, i realized i had no idea. after a while, maybe around seventy or eighty drawings, patterns began to emerge. by the time i reached one hundred, i had a better understanding of what it was i was trying to draw."

the following day class met and i had a proposal for my students - let's suspend the syllabus for one week, maybe two. instead, i proposed, we'll explore different parts of USF campus and blog about them consistently and creatively.

the proposal passed unanimously.

over the course of the semester, i assigned my students three beats. first, campus. next, golden gate park. third, san francisco. and like sister corita, i'd tell my students to do it and do it again and do it again. they'd come to class to share a killer blog post they wrote the night before (or that morning) and we'd use a laptop to project it on a screen on the wall and i'd read it aloud and we'd laugh and say "yeah!" for the parts we liked and gave suggestions for the parts in need of improvement and then right when my students began to feel comfortable even content with what they had created i'd say: "good, now do it again."

through my assignments (grueling!) and their interest in blogging (budding!), i kept my students busy. all i required was that they had to physically visit the places they were blogging about. log off before you blog off.

and they did, first with campus.


later, we turned our blogging and photo-snapping attentions to golden gate park, a park packed with goodies to explore and located a cool two blocks from campus.


finally, we stepped into the big leagues and gave san francisco a spin. then, the last week, fueled by pizza, we filled our map full of posts.


although corita kent may have scoffed at our mere fifty pins, i'm sure she'd acknowledge that my students - austin, brigid, emilia, jacob, laura, and miles - and i now have a better understanding of the campus and city we call home.

the davies forum at stonelake farm

as we left the barn, francis turned to us to see if we had any questions.

lulu had one: "do you ever let the goats out from their regular fields?"

"sure," replied francis, "on the field below the octagon. i let them graze for a few hours while i watch the sunset."


late last week, the davies forum on digital literacy traveled to stonelake farm, an organic, off-the-grid homestead in humboldt county. we - amber, blake, kelly, lis, lulu, sara, steven, and me - drove six hours in two cars stuffed with backpacks, blankets, sleeping bags, and good food from rainbow.

from our arrival to our departure four days later, we agreed to six strict rules:

1. all of us must work on the farm for at least one hour a day;

2. those who cook a meal do not have to wash dishes;

3. lulu can't cook every meal;

4. if anyone gets unruly, everyone has the right and responsibility to approach him or her and say, "hey, settle down";

5. we are allowed to use the internet, cell phones, and text, but use as little as possible; and

6. be mindful about as much as possible.


on friday afternoon, francis lake, one-half of the team that runs stonelake farm, shared with us the farm's history and its back-to-the-land roots (the same back-to-the-land roots, btw, that show up in fred turner's from counterculture to cyberculture). then, he led us on a guided tour of stonelake's many natural resources, animals, tools and technologies. during the tour and throughout our stay, francis offered us concrete and profound examples of sustainable living. at stonelake, nearly everything consumed is remixed back into the farm: the worms get our spent coffee grounds, the goats get our apple cores, the chickens get nearly everything, the fruit trees get our poop from the outhouse, and la luna and meza get an occasional dropped pancake or bite of french toast.


as a class, our goal was to live more intentionally for a few days. i wanted all of us to experience organic living first hand, in first life, as unmediated as possible. and while we were doing that, i wanted us to be as collaborative as possible.

i had been to stonelake farm before - twice with sarah, once alone as an artist in residence - and have always found life there to be intentional, sustainable, less mediated, and collaborative. i had to remind myself, though, that my prior visits to stonelake were during the summer and early autumn, when school's out, the sun and sunflowers are high, and everything is beautiful and bountiful. this visit was different. this visit had seven students. this visit had snow.

most of our farm work involved gathering wood for heat. we'd gather wood, chop wood, and saw wood. we gathered a few trees francis brought down and hand-sawed them into logs - logs for the campfire, logs for future octagonians, and, most importantly, logs for the wood stove that gave us heat, sweet frickin' heat, from the cold out doors.





all of our meals were collaboratively made and extremely delicious. and whenever possible, we'd eat together outside.






by saturday, melinda stone, the second-half of the stonelake team and my media studies friend and colleague, arrived to the farm. melinda brought with her seven baby ducks and one mild snow storm. because it was butt-cold outside, my students decided that saturday's dinner would be a fava beans-and-greens feast served inside, in the octagon. the meal was prepared and cooked collaboratively by the students and declared absolutely delicious by all of us.



before arriving to stonelake, i gave my students an assignment: while at the farm, digitally disconnect and reflect deeply about something important to you. before returning to the city, i gave my students a homework assignment: write your best blog post ever. log off before you blog off.

and they did:

Amber McChesney-Young's Reflections on StoneLake Farm

Blake Wilberding's Stonelake Farm

Kelly Pretzer's Stonelake Farm

Lis Bartlett's The Best Blog Post Ever

Lulu McAllister's The Digitally Literate Go Back to the Land

Sara Bassett's StoneLake Farm

Steven Barnett's coming-soon podcast thingy (i will update this link when the post goes live).

back in class on tuesday, one by one we'd read out loud our best blog posts ever. i projected individual blog posts from my laptop to the screen on the wall and the author of the post would come to the front of the room and read his or her own writing. then we took a few minutes to discuss the post and share what we thought worked and what didn't. then, individually, we'd write on paper a list of tags that we associated with the blog post - food, firewood, logging off, snow, sustainability. finally, we'd record the tags and their frequency on the white board on the wall.


as class ended, it became clear that we had covered a lot of ground in the last few days.

and then, silently and stealthily, davies student sara collected the tags and their frequencies, logged back on, and dumped them through TagCrowd. what she created was this, a pretty accurate tagcloud of what went down and an excellent way to end a blog post about the davies forum at stonelake farm.