Spring 2011 Projects Well Underway...

Our students are working feverishly to produce final video essays that reflect growing knowledge of digital composition skills - but also ones that reflect cultural circumspection. In other words, you will NOT see anything like this:

Fresh Eyes for New Cultures

A friend of mine went to Dominican Republic for a visit. When asked upon his return what he thought of the country, he said, "It was a beautiful country, but there were a lot of foreigners there." It made me wanna say,  "Uh. Yeah. YOU were one of the foreigners, dude."

An immature and uninformed person may dismiss the meaning-making practices of other cultures as "strange," without bothering to examine them as clues to understanding that culture. What a loss of learning opportunities. View the TED Talk by Derek Sivers: "Weird, or just different?" and contemplate your own cross-cultural experience. Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different? | Video on TED.com


What practices or customs have you encountered that seemed "weird" to you? What did these practices reveal to you about the culture? Feel free to post your insights throughout the term.

Brave New (Digital) World

There were some excellent reflections in the blogs regarding the week's readings from Nicolas Carr and Kevin Kelly. You really oughta read them if you haven't already. Many good comments about how technology shapes our literacy practices - and our thinking! The famous 20th-century American scholar Walter Ong, writing about the shift from orality to literacy, said, "Writing restructures consciousness." Many of our bloggers picked up on the ways new media are changing the way we think.


A Facebook friend of mine posted an update that is so revelatory of this shift. With her permission, I use it here:

 

Here is an example of digital social networking restructuring our expressions of emotion... Profound!

Boy Was My Face Rojo...

"The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother." - Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

If you have not yet reached the status Mr. Twain describes above, then you will - or you aren't really trying. I'd be interested to hear your humorous anecdote of a harmless faux pas, misstep, or slip-up that reveals the need for continual growth in our cultural understanding.

Why not just post your story below as a comment to this blog post? Feel free to link to your blog for more info, photos, etc. Sure, we may laugh at you, but in a most sympathetic way, because we've been there, are there, or will be there soon.

The Ethnographic Rubber Meets the Cross-Cultural Road

Members of our 2011 CLAM contingent are either now on the field across the globe, or are soon to depart for their fields of study. The student blogs will begin to be even more rich in critical cultural insights in teh coming weeks. The blogs to be posted in the next week will be an introspective self-portrait of the students' own cultural landscapes - as seen by outsiders. An informed and critical investigation of another culture requires a "de-familiarization" of one's own cultural identity in order to see new cultures apart from a limiting "terministic screen" of assumptions and biases.

I recommend here a video from Adaptive Path's 2010 UX Week. This talk by Anthropologist and Kansas State professor Michael Wesch is valuable for several reasons: his personal recounting of cultural immersion, his attention to the way the practice of writing (techne) shaped the culture of a pre-literate society, and his illustration of the dynamic nature of culture. You can learn a lot - for no extra charge - from this supplemental video!

Highlights for Childre... er, CLAMmers

From Morguefile.com

Your colleagues blogs form a network of rich resources to help you as you work toward refining your digital and cultural literacies this term. The links to the right ---> will take you to the blogs of the other members of your community of scholars. Visit them. Check out their posts. Post comments. Ask questions. Share ideas.

Here are a few examples of your classmates work from which you might draw instruction or inspiration:

• Your Colleague Karen (http://cuinbelgium.blogspot.com/http://cuinbelgium.blogspot.com/) has already taken lots of photos, without waiting for specific instructions on "what" to shoot. This will come in handy for her later. So, follow her lead - take lots of digital snaps and lots of b-roll video. You can always get rid of footage you have, but you can't add footage you don't.
• CLAM Alum Keith McGregor remembered to have someone help him shoot, so he could be in some of his pics. (http://abrilliantexpedition.blogspot.com/2009/04/day-of-elderlyand-some.html) I always forget to do that!
• CLAM Alum Zach Cerny took some unusual photos that later added some unique flavor to his projects: http://zachcerny-clamchowder.blogspot.com/2009/07/spring-break-pics.html
• Your Colleague Elizabeth posted a really cool video about the rise of social media at her cleverly named entry, "A Facebook in the Crowd": http://elizabethbarcus.blogspot.com/2011/01/face-book-in-crowd.html
• Your Colleagues Ellen & Robert have good examples of the photo editing exercise in conventional format; Patty & Leigh both have horrendously messy huge photos (OK I exaggerate a bit here, for effect) that illustrate just how many pixels lives are saved by responsible photo editing.
• CLAM Alum Jennifer McAmis used Picasa as a way to keep and organize her pics - and to keep handy for posting and project building: http://jennmcamis-clam.blogspot.com/2010/04/pictures-while-you-wait.html. Others have used similar photo sites like Flickr, etc.

Blog 3 - "Rightsizing" Images for the Blog

Students, you will be posting digital photos often to your blog, so this first digital editing exercise is one you will put to use early and often. Don't post more picture than you need! A size of 800 x 600 with a resolution of 72 dpi is plenty! (OK - 96 dpi if you got a Mac.) Let Tommy's Joynt help explain...
I've posted two pics below of a cool restaurant I visited in San Francisco. Do you notice any difference?

The first one is untouched exactly as it was downloaded from my iPhone. Go ahead, click it. HUGE Picture! Over a 1.2 MEG!*

The second one is the same photo - but reduced to 800x600 in size with a resolution of 72 dpi. perfect size for web viewing and only a fraction of the size - only 140k! (and a fraction of the upload/download time!)

Of course, I saved the smaller pic under a new name so I could keep the higher res photo for later use. This tip will save you lots of time in posting, so practice it early and often. (Dr. Howard's videos will provide much more material for you to continue to deveop your image editing skills, but this skill you will use many times!) You can do this in any photo editing program. I use PhotoShop on my lab computer, PaintShopPro on my home computer and GIMP on my laptop.

Don't have a digital image editing software? GIMP is free! Get a copy here now: http://www.gimp.org/


*(1.2M uploaded - conerted to 285k by blogger - still twice as long to download, and ten times as long to upload.)

ROFL about my Blog Lingo

What kind of writing is appropriate for blogging? When faced with new and evolving new media practices, it is good to observe convention as a clue to the language of that medium. Every medium has literacy practices that are unique to that medium. For example:

• Delivering a live speech is not the same as writing an essay. (Orality has demands writing knows not of... such as tone, pace, etc.)
• Phone conversations are not text messages. (If you actually SAY "LOL" in a conversation, then there's a problem.) 
• Text messages are not tweets. (A lion's share of business communication is now done via email, and 140 characters is just enough message to guarantee misunderstanding and inefficiency.)
• And blogs are not articles for publication, but neither are they live chats.
• Technorati published a list of the top blogs. A survey of these blogs reveals that the writing is grammatically correct, thoughtful and vigorous. The tone, length and pace may vary from blog to blog, but certain conventions of "good writing" carry across all of these.

Check Out Some Top Blogs

So, what am I saying? Write well. even in your blogs. even in short blogs. Even in blogs where other media predominantly carry your message. Because, come on, you don't ever want someone to say, "I liked your blog, but TMZ and Perez Hilton have much better grammar and writing that you have."

coz, like OMG that would be so lame, IMHO. k?

Here We Go Again...

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."    Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Pretty soon, a new crew of Clemson University Students scatters across the globe on adventures to be chronicled in these blogs. This group of CLAMmers, our biggest yet, will share their cultural engagements in stories, anecdotes and reflections, as well as through photos, video and interviews. 

Yep, pretty soon, the links to the right will be populated with many new links to the blogs of many new students exploring new cultures. So, buckle up and stand by as we prepare to kick-off CLAM Spring 2011!