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Comments on the Book
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CommentPress, Social Reading, and Pedagogy (4 comments)
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virginia,
my comment about the IML was based on my experience there in the years 2003-2004, long before the Sophie project began and long before you and Holly Willis began working there. I was wrong not to make that clear, especially since I think the world of your work and am confident that the pedagogical principles of the IML today are nothing like i’ve described here.
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Trebor Scholz at The New School has just offered up the chapters in his new book, Learning through Digital Media for a period of open peer review. There is a very interesting chapter by Sol Gaitan, a teacher at The Dalton School about her use of Sophie and CommentPress over the past five seven years. Toward the end of the chapter there are testimonials from her students about their experience with and pedagogical value of the tools.
short read . . . . highly recommended
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I’ve been teaching a course that kind of “mashes up” the history of the novel and an introduction to new media, and we just read Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller.” The notion of “social reading” via emergent interactive technologies is fascinating in light of Benjamin’s argument that (as of the 1930s) the novel represents a kind of twilight for the sociality found in traditional storytelling. For Benjamin the striking thing about the novel genre is its isolation both at the point of production and consumption. “Social reading” allows us to think about a future in which the trajectory Benjamin traces circles back (though of course with differences!) to some of the qualities of traditional narratives whose loss he laments.
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The iPad and the Future of the App (2 comments)
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I like this differentiation between user-driven and producer-driven. It’s interesting to see the flip-side of the coin in saying that media is becoming more book-like as opposed to book becoming more media-like.
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Who Built America? and TK3 (2 comments)
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I appreciate this link to my review of TK3 in Academic Commons (though it is not cited) and, here is the link to TK3 downloads (which are being housed on IML servers): http://iml.usc.edu/index.php/tk3-downloads/
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Apologies for the missing reference, Virginia — I’ve added it to the list at the end of the interview. And thanks for the link to the TK3 download page.
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Comments on the Blog
This is NOT the IML approach and while many years ago a history class might be taught at the IML and might use Flash, it was used as a means of constructing a container that could be put online (and Sophie was not available then) or assigned as a component to problematize linking structures. In other words, “content” was not sacrificed to learning some complex software.
That said, the “IML approach” has matured drastically over the last several years and our classes are digital studies classes, rather than being housed elsewhere. Moreover, all software choices–and we integrate many–are context specific, used for a particular pedagogical purpose, and are framed as being ideologically imbued. In the case of the senior thesis projects (one of the first of which was done in Sopie in 2008) students choose. So while we do use Flash (or actually now Catalyst) in the foundational IML class, it is only after image editing, information architechure, remix and camera work.