Subject: Re: Happy New Year
From: Joleen Kochly (b074918c@bc.seflin.org)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 21:32:10 CST
Hi all!
Waiting until the very last minute to complete my assignment as always.
Just finished The War of Desire and Technology at the close of the
mechanical age. I really enjoyed it tremendously. I even read the end
notes I canÕt remember the last time I read the notes. I had not
actually realized that I lived so close to Cyber space and Cyber thought
until now.
The very quality of Stone's "seemingly haphazard and rambling style" well
makes me anxious to respond, to "exchange information on a professional
level." My mind, however, is flying around in search of points to make.
I'm finding myself stuck in the old convention that I must choose.
Choose one point to make. Make it concisely and linearly. That makes it
seem like I'm not getting the point doesn't it?
I work for a small private fine arts college. We just installed our
third Silicon Graphics Lab, we have three Mac labs an NT lab media 100
lab and an Avid Lab. Not a tremendous sounding inventory until I mention
that we have just shy of 1000 students. On an ideal day every machine
has Internet access. My job is essentially the interface position
between the emerging future, the as yet un named shift, and the regional
accreditation body. I stand between the "geeks" and the "suits" and
somehow I must make them understand and respect each other. I live the
emerging interface between " scholarly reportage and the performance
gesture." Here are several of the issues addressed in the last academic
year. In December of 1998 we started the process to apply for the right
to offer the Master of Fine Arts in Computer Animation, as of the filing
of the report we were only the sixth institution in the country to have a
Master Level program specifically in this discipline. In filing the
application to elevate the program one of the necessary things required
was a full plan of how we intended to increase our library holdings to
reflect our graduate level status. So now here's our problem, as Stone
states, "we no longer live in a world in which information concerns
itself primarily in textual objects called books." What we might add
here though is that this is particularly true in certain disciplines.
Electronically based media tend to have electronically based
information. By the time our librarian can order a book, acquisition it
and place it on the shelves it's a history book. In a field where
practitioners spend 20 hours in the computer lab it makes so much more
sense that they render their animations on one computer while they catch
up their journal reading on another. The faculty committee argued for
hours before finally settling on five current books they felt were
applicable to the program. This I knew, for sure, would not work. Here
though is where the interface part comes in, you see, the actual problem
was that I couldnÕt convince my faculty that the materials in the library
did not have to what we were specifically teaching as hands-on . You
see, this faculty is the next wave . Young, none is over thirty, active
practitioners. They really spend up to 18 hours in the lab, because they
can. One of the "perks" of their job is unlimited lab time. Amusingly
enough, we solved the problem by down loading the a ÒComputer AnimationÓ
search from Amazon.com to show how many fairly current books there were
on the subject..Some sort of cosmic double negative? WeÕll show you
canÕt be totally web dependent by downloading the evidence from the web?
The mixed blessing is that the academy is results driven these days. We
must obsessively assess to determine how to improve what we do. Now
here's the catch. If the student's aren't responding we must change. It
doesn't matter if it's the accepted thing to do it matters if the current
generation can find some way to learn from what is done. So it's almost
inevitable that the changes Stone refers to will happen. My friend's kids
were playing Sim City before they could cross the street by themselves.
They are likely not developing the same thought processes as previous
generations. I am very glad to "hear" that Tani reads. My generation
has been told that we might actually have a life expectancy of 120, baby
boomers are going to be here awhile, so logically, those people of the
next generation who will thrive, are not necessarily, the techno tots,
but the kids who can communicate with both worlds, the kids who can read.
The other issue that affects us dramatically is the issue of
credentialling. The institution must align the instructor's credentials
to the courses they teach. Assuming a minimal standard of a master's
degree with 18 credit hours in the discipline you must additionally align
specific courses in the instructor's transcript with the courses they are
teaching now. We already know that our technology moves faster, much
faster, than our Institutions. It's virtually impossible to find certain
qualifications because the programs that need to be taught this semester
are so new we are are teaching them in the class room at the same time
they are being "rolled out" to the industry. How do we then show a
graduate transcript aligned to the courses taught? I am encouraged by
the idea proposed, I believe, on the Actlab web sight, that we must find
new data to measure new media. I am looking forward to being a creative
pioneer in this search!
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