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.

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.

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! 

CLAM Gets Noticed by The Chronicle of Higher Education!

Dr. Constancio Nakuma

The July 22 Issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a story on Study Abroad experiences, and highlighted the work of the students and faculty involved in our own beloved CLAM! The article features interviews from the instructor, Randy Nichols,  from students Meg Sparkman and Jennifer McAmis, and from Dr. Tharon Howard and Dr. Constancio Nakuma, who were instrumental in facilitating the development of the course.

You can find the article here: http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Help-Students-to/123653/

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow...

Our CLAMmers are wrapping up their Spring Term, but our CLAMmers will not really leave. You can click the links to the right to see some of their projects already posted in their own blogs. As soon as evaluations are done, and Clemson OIA's YouTube channel is updated, we will let you know and provide links. Congratulations, CLAMmers - you lived to tell the tale! (in multimodal fashion, no less!)

Anticipation!

CLAMmers recently received some next-to-last-minute instructions and are putting together their projects. Some of the earlier blog posts hint at some very interesting projects in the works. These video projects will allow our students to share their newly gained cultural literacies with the greater Clemson University community at large.

Do we have grand expectations for these projects? Sure. But then again, we think we have some pretty grand students working on these projects. Watch here for announcements of their project postings on the Clemson OIA YouTube channel. These students are examples of how Clemson University is navigating the ever-changing  global and dynamic cultural climate in which business, education, and life will be lived in the future.

Oh, yeah. The future is already here. Welcome to it.
(CLAMmers might enjoy looking for indicators of culture in the video below.)

The End of the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?)

This week, CLAMmers will post more rhetorical analyses of media artifacts from within their cultures of focus. These should be interesting! But as they prepare to dig into preparations for their final projects, I offer a last resource for more last-minute video helps.

This link takes you to Media College's short, "basic video editing" tutorial. You may already know these things, but a refresher never hurt anyone. Maybe thi swill be useful as you dig into making the masterpiecesthat will be your final projects.

Again, those helps are here: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/editing/tutorial/

Expecting some great critical analysis from each CLAM students this week!

Interview Challenge #9: Flop Sweat

How to deal with "flop sweat" - or stage fright, speaker anxiety, etc. Don't panic; take deep breaths. Put yourself and your guest at ease. Express genuine interest. Try to make the interview a "real" conversation. And whatever you do, don't come off like this:




And, to sum it up: Have fun; Enjoy the Interview; Do Great Work!

Inerview with a Vampire (or a Plumber or a Teacher or Tiger Woods)

The biggest news story of the week - the long-fought remarkable Health Care vote? or... the 5-minute Tiger Woods interview?

One element of the CLAMmers final project is the interview. This seemingly simple format (ask a question, get an answer, repeat) is a useful tool for journalists, ethnographers, students, and a plethora of other people who want to learn things.

I'm attaching a few links below to a site called Media College. This free site offers instructions on a variety of media concerns, but I refer you to the section on shooting interviews. Try the site here: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/interviews/

You will find helpful info on a variety of topics related to your video interviews, such as

• framing
• composition
• vox pop interviews
• editing
• lighting

So, get busy shooting more photos, more video, more interviews - your final projects should really start taking shape. Get busy with the new material, post your photos and vids, and do great work!

And Now, For Something Completely Different....

A two-minute reminder to see your culture of study with fresh eyes! (Should ring a bell with your previous course materials - recognize a map in there?)

Looking Forward to New Literacies - and Backward to the "Other" in Comics

This week, CLAM students will be reading (yes, gasp! - reading!) two important contemporary articles: Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (from the Atlantic) and Kevin Kelly's "Becoming Screen Literate" (from the New York Times.)

When we say "multimodal" we do not mean to exclude reading and composing in printed texts - but only to add other modalities to the compositional mix. Print is still cool! (And while I admit that you will most likely read these articles from a digital source - I must say that I read Carr's article in an actual print magazine that was delivered to my home. It was so cool - like someone went to all the trouble to download and print out all the articles and photos on neat glossy paper for me!) At any rate - in the upcoming week the blogs linked in the column to your right will lead to to provocative and insightful blogs on new media and new literacies.

The last week's blogs contained  a number of students' comments on the concept of "Othering." A few months ago I visited a museum display about comics. Specifically, about Southerners in Comics. I will post a few snapshots to illustrate some things that caught my attention. Perhaps you will want to add comments or questions. Perhaps you will see similar "Othering" of sub-groups in your own cultural investigations. What are the ramifications of such "visual marginalizations" of specific groups? How do they influence public perception? How do they influence the group's own self-identity?

 

How Do I Digitally Connect with Thee? Let Me Count The Ways...

Our CLAM bloggers are entering the course with a wide range of experiences in "Composing for New Media Sites" - ranging from the greenest rookies to the most savvy social networking veterans. And the choices for engaging new digital media are many, as well - ranging from the blogosphere (like this one) to Facebook to Twitter to Skype and more. The "thing" that we call "New Social Media" is not a single entity, but rather a growing network of multiplied connections. I'd say that New Social Media is less like a Tulip - and more like a lawn - made not of a single plant, but of a interwoven network of strands, roots, and runners. (CLAMmers, beware! You will hear this metaphor again!)

This is a picture of me with that most marvelous of inventions, the Paige Typesetter! Never heard of it? Not surprised. It failed magnificently and spelled financial ruin for its main backer, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain.) Twain was ahead of his time. Way ahead of his time.That is not always a good thing. The technology of the day simply couldn't support the creativity of his vision.

Many educators have looked for ways students could share work across great distances with their classmates and instructors. They looked for ways whereby students could share not only writing, bu visual, video and audio with the greater academic community. Some of these efforts may have faced difficulty because technology hadn't caught up with the creativity of the vision. But now, technology is available to carry our most visionary ideas of composition and communication. Today's technology doesn't punish visionary creativity in composition. (It does, however, put to shame small, unimaginative, shallow or boring approaches and makes them seem all the more impoverished. So, dare to dream big in your projects!)

Kudos on all the CLAMmers for braving the frontier of New Media, and for experimenting with photos, video, links, prose, and other elements of New Media Composition! Keep "learning by doing" both in your cultural engagement, and in creative use of these new sites for composition.



(Photo taken during the Summer 2007 NEH Landmark Study at The Mark Twain House in Hartford Connecticut.)

Out of the Blocks - and Out of the Box...

Congrats on your first posts, CLAMmers! You have gotten off to a good start - and some of our bloggers  are discovering an entirely new way to communicate, compose, and connect.

Check the links in the navigation bar to the right to see the new blogs of our Spring 2010 CLAMmers. CLAMmers should add a similar "My Blogs" gadget to link to this (CLAM Soup) and to the blogs of fellow CLAMmers.

Some good photos posted already - I'm looking forward to seeing more photos along with your posts. I do remind you of that great photo-posting tip in the last blog - some of you missed it! (http://clammysoup.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-kids-in-soup.html)

So, add those links, get into the new material, keep taking photos, shooting video, and spend time learning about your software and hardware - the pens and pencils of digital composition!

Looking out My Back Door - Sunrise in Pickens County  (R. Nichols)

New Kids in the Soup!

Welcome to our new CAAH 201 (CLAM) students -  - Spring 2010 is here! Soon, new blogs will be listed in the column at the right and a new crop of bloggers will become part of a growing network of Clemson students who are critically engaging cultures in interesting, inspiring and provocative ways!

I will be posting some general comments here each week - answering questions, sharing tips, and highlighting some of the work from our CLAM students' blogs. Check back often, and, as the new blogs appear in the column at teh right, explore some of the work our CLAMmers are doing across the globe. (For now, you can still enjoy the ground-breaking work from our pilot CLAMmers.)

So... FIRST TIP! Students, you will be posting digital photos often to your blog, so this first tip 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 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. (Deeper teaching on this subject will come later in the course - but this tip you need now!) 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/

Welcome to the blogosphere, new CLAMmers! I'm looking forward to seeing your work on these blogs.


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

Around the World in 80 jpgs, mpgs, avis, etc.

Most students from the pilot program of Cultural Literacies Across Media have posted their final digital projects (or links to them) on their blogs. (Check out the links to students' blogs at the right of this frame.) The remaining projects will be available soon, as well.

CLAM students will display their work via "Digital Posters" at the Study Abroad Welcoome Back Reception on September 22 in the Flour Daniel Atrium on the campus of Clemson University. (See invitation here.) Several students will be on-hand to talk about their photography, videography, digital editing and other aspects of their cultural engagement.

Students are also joining the Facebook Group "Clemson University Study Abroad" to discuss their experiences. Plans are in the works for a related YouTube Channel as well. I encourage you to view the students' projects in some of these media (blogs, YouTube, Facebook, at the Study Abroad Reception, etc.) and learn more about their experience in the Study Abroad Program and in Cultural Literacies Across Media.

(image courtesy of AarinFreePhoto.com)

Whirlwind!

The term is ending and I am amazed at the richness of the experiences shared by our Clemson CLAM students! My blog has been silent for some long periods as I worked on our home campus with other studies, but the blogs of our students has been constantly buzzing and humming with evidence of their cultural engagements.
If it has been a while since you checked their blogs, you should do so again to catch up on the experiences. Students are completing their comprehensive digital projects for the course and will be sharing them with our academic community. On this blog, I will announce where these projects will be displayed and provide links to the multimedia work of our students.

Bootcamp Ends!

Congratulations to all our CLAM students for successfully completing the intensive pre-trip classes. Each student showed amazing progress toward integrating cultural awareness and compositional ideas with new media technologies. And now... the real learning begins!

The blog links in the right column will reveal the ongoing engagement of our students in the cultures of their host programs. Across the next few months, and around the world, these blogs will describe CLAM student's understanding, discovery and integration of new cultural awareness.

So, students... go ahead, blog your experiences with photos, video, diary entries, interviews, news clips and other artifacts. We will be watching!