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:

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!

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!)

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?)

The Death and Rebirth of the RickRoll

CLAMmers and cultural new-media-meme-interested readers:
You may have heard that YouTube removed the RickRoll'd video. You may have been concerned that I, your ever tech-hip and culture-savvy instructor may have included an illustration that now appears dated. You may have wondered if I was somehow "behind the times" and if this was a sign of the end of the world.

Fear not. Only the naive and less sophisticated novices of pop culture jumped to the conclusion that Rick Rolling was over.

NEWS: The Death and Rebirth of the RickRoll


As always, CLAM students are just a little ahead of the rest of the world in many things. Critical appreciation and understanding of the cultural meme of Rick-Rolling is one of these things. YouTube has replaced the video back to its proper place. (They do not SPECIFICALLY mention the CLAM course as the reasoning behind the move, but c'mon, who are we kidding?)

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.)

CLAM Soup for the People!

The work of students in the pilot course version of CLAM (CAAH 201) is being proliferated to the world via a couple more digital avenues I’d like you to see:

• YouTube – via the ClemsonOIA channel. (http://www.youtube.com/user/ClemsonOIA)
• Facebook – via the Clemson University Study Abroad group (http://www.facebook.com/facebook?ref=pf#/group.php?gid=120226240703&ref=ts)

 Check out theses sites. Post comments. Ask questions. Enjoy!

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!