Poetics alienation? Am i the only one?

The Laurel reading puts me in a quandary and on a soapbox.   I can't help but be sure that she is right in her thinking and I SO don't like it.  It is backward, it seems to me, and a case of the medium being the message and manipulating us malevolently (say that 5x fast).  What don't I like?  I am deeply uncomfortable with the way that the games suture the player into the narrative/drama.  I teach  this drama portion of the poetics in almost every semester precisely so that I can emancipate my students from it, after all the 20th century, in addition to birthing the concept of gaming, also gave us/me Brecht's Epic Theater and the Alienation Effect.    So it is all well and good that video games are organic with patterns, spectacle and of human origin but that is to be pitied, not admired. I am being facetious, yes, because I have my vices in narrative too, but is it a good thing that the narrative stream is so strong that we want to watch it or join it even as it washes us away?  Emotional manipulation without reflection on how we are being "played".  I admit that I'm in a mood about this...it's a puzzlement. I would like to be convinced that we know/think about what is happening to our brains as we play.  Peace.

Life without editing is just not that interesting...

This may be my favorite reading so far; it has mapped not only onto my own life, but also onto teaching in German Studies.  Plus, who doesn't love a good porcupine story...
My life:  the 80s, the rise of video culture especially music videos as the encapsulating of bigger things/feelings/moments is where my interest and interaction in film, media, "cultural products".

My German Studies connection is the study of Alltag "the everyday" in life, a movement that came out of socialist realism and was both the savior and the bane of "culture" in the 1970s and 1980s in Germany.  Everyone started talking about what was going on in the everyday, what was in the grocery story, who wrote what letters to the newspapers, when did work begin/end, what chapters were assigned to be read by school children. Some of these were frightfully boring accounts, obviously, until you had heard/read/watched 20 hours of it when all of a sudden you realized how hooked you were; but more than that, the idea that daily life was worthy of study and revealed things that we needed and wanted to know...creative juices flowed into VERY extended projects and detail-oriented interviews and journals and, and, and...it captured the popular "imagination" in a way that turns out to be much more valuable than just knowing the dates of the last great ruler of ancient Egypt.  (This is absolutely anathema for Germans--we Americans might get it much faster). And, finally getting to my point, quoting Viola: "Discoveries are made which reveal that more and more things are related, connected (466)".  And I add--harder to pass judgment on/dismiss (and therefore easier to learn from).

Just do it!

I really enjoyed Kathleen's post and the NYT article she points us to, but especially the discourse on fluency in "poetry language" having been pushed to the brink by the emergence of the novel (the apocalyptical language is mine:).  I couldn't help but think of my mother being loathe to read anything on the internet--I think she is as uncomfortable with what she finds there as any of my students are when I put poetry (modern or not) in front of them.  And I tell her, without meaning to be patronizing, just do it!  Just as I tell my students that they will learn to read poetry (and maybe to like it, although that isn't as essential to me as they think it is) by giving themselves permission to read poetry.

Ellen Filgo was featured for her per-twitter-formance with Gardner's class last semester--in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  A great experience for the students to have a research librarian at their fingertips, even reading their virtual minds via their conversations in the class. Magic, they say!

Imitation counterpoint

"Considering children as the users radiates a compelling excitement...children really can write programs that do serious things...the kids love it!  The interactive nature of the dialogue, the fact that they are in control, the feeling that they are doing real things rather than playing with toys or working out "assigned" problems, the pictorial and auditory nature of their results, all contribute to a tremendous sense of accomplishment to their experience." (394)

When do we do our best work?  Maybe when we are "in control" and "doing real things"?  Obviously.  For me this returns us to Nelson problem with what is missing from education (and our CAI motivation).  Standardized testing is the epitome of not being in control and doing unreal (even surreal) things, so--no sense of accomplishment--and this goes beyond the student to the teacher and the principal and the district too. For a teacher's personal lament, a blog post I read called I don't want to be a teacher anymore but I digress.

Back to Dynamic Media the filing system reminds me of Zotero which Ellen Filgo introduced to me and my students yesterday, choosing the format and personal ways to crossfile everything from the obvious article or book to youtube videos, webpages, and anything (I gather) that can be indicated by your computer pointer.   But for me the really interesting part of this article was the music aspect which seems so much more intuitive than when I was learning to write counterpoint (poorly) in my music theory and composing classes.  That was back in the 90s, so I am guessing that there are programs that are like the one described here although I can't point to them. My favorite aspect is that "capturing" of the score which is surely magical to behold, and the idea that you can stretch, shift, repeat, and alter it without a "do-over".