Now the part that really gets my heart pumping … the practical application.

Thus far in this assignment, I have utilized the following media:

1.       storytelling and an overall conversational style

2.       a distracting visual device as metaphor for inconvenience

3.       larger, more engaging font faces

4.       color

5.       descriptive images which define specific relationships

6.       a subtle photograph to visually evoke a sense of intensity, surprise, and even annoyance that often accompanies the arrival of change

7.       some cute clip art, so I can make a point about one of my pet peeves:  the inappropriate inclusion of cute clip art, or a variety of media when it is done just for the sake of using a variety of media or being cute

8.       internet content to extend the argument via simple hyperlink (to an audio file, nonetheless,) and a hyperlinked image to induce the same reader response

9.       internal document linking to provide the reader with an optional non-linear reading experience.

My coup de grâce is the video clip from 60 minutes, included immediately above, which is an interesting and slightly frightening introduction to properly framing the use of new media in my current work.

Each day in my profession, I observe how the efficacious use of media is being driven by other forces that are hard at work.  Again, que market economics for a cameo … in every scene.  In aⁿ recession economic downturn, with supply and demand in office, my job, and more substantially, continuation of funding for most institutions of higher education rely substantially on some oversimplified bottom-line metrics.  Research, however, confirms that the process of generating the highest caliber of academic excellence is not exactly comparable to the process required to generate your standard 18-25 year-old widget with a Millenial complex.  How will we be successful?  Engagement.  Call it what you want, but effective (as it is being measured) education will require better communication with the technosavvy clientele that we have created.  It has been said that, in every advising appointment, students are really asking three questions:

1.        Do they know?  (Accurate Information)

2.       Are they there? (Accessibility)

3.       Do they give a damn? (Care and Esteem)

As an educator, I represent the institution’s best effort to ask another set of equally important questions:

1.       Who are you? (Self-Awareness)

2.       Where are you headed? (Goal-Setting and Self-Direction)

3.       What do you need and who can help you? (Self-Inventory, Requirements Inventory, and Resource Identification)

Answering these questions and arriving at the positive outcome we desire (while besting the required bottom line measures), will require new ways of doing business.  The desired outcomes necessitate the use (and reuse) of remediated tools, practices, and methods, modularized and highly variable content that is specific to the individual, and content and venues that have been transcoded into the new media realms that are so appealing and widely utilized by the typical incoming student.  Scarcity of resources will require us to utilize the tools at hand to effectively communicate with students, strategically prompt student learning at every opportunity, and then reinforce, redirect and celebrate with students, respectively.

So there it is … my entire treatise on why “new” media is really just today’s version media.  Reflectively I’m thinking that the Peitho has simply found a few new tools for her cosmetics case, but that underneath, she’s still the same old temptress she always was.  She’s only expanded her market share to engage and engulf the masses, and blogging under the pseudonym of rhetor247urwy.  Not that this diminishes her power in any way … only that it makes it all the more important to observe her at work, chuckle at her missteps, learn from her mistakes, and capitalize on her successes.  Capitalization is happening … so why not us? [See image above.]

When traveling on any highway, it is important to recognize that principles the principles of traffic are also generally applicable when one grows and moves to a golf cart , bumper cars, or dune buggy (if so fortunate), and the collective principles learned at this level also carry forward as some of the foundational knowledge used to provide the needed skill for operating a full-sized automobile.  And so the progression continues as one operates a gas-guzzling SUV, a trailer-hauling truck, and even a forward moving aircraft. 

As a metaphor, this progression is roughly applicable to the principle of transcoding in media.  When communicators take a principle, rule, or standard process of communication and apply it or build upon it in a new environment, they can be understood to have successfully transcoded it.  This has been happening for ages, as described in the introduction of this paper, but as advances in media build upon advances in media, we are far more aware of successful transcoding and become more likely to experience, value, and attempt it ourselves.  Bearing a variety of aliases in other realms and disciplines, e.g., best practices, aspirational models, et al, but these are all really januvian faces of observation and learning as they occur in varying phases of maturity. 

Variability, Manovich’s fifth principle of new media, also finds its role in our allegorical mass transit system as an innumerable list of potential destinations, routes, speeds, lane changes, and a myriad of other options like style, make, model, and color of vehicle, windows up or down, radio or not, etc., etc., ad nauseum.  But is this a new development in communication, language, and media?  As we use varying approaches in styles, voices, and writing we express the variability that is available to the communicator.  While it is true that certain forms and specifics may prove more effective, or may be legislated to be correct, the reality is that they are merely effective because they fulfill expectations.  As popular transportational convenience leads to the blazing of new cow-paths in a grassy meadow, so too do conventions of communication meander with the needs and desires of the audiences who seekallusion to utilize them.  No longer must the lover and business executive both labor in the bulk of their communications, convention and instantaneous feedback provide for quick clarification upon misunderstanding and the expansion upon request where proven necessary.  The language, style, and structure that is correct is that which proves most effective.  Any practitioner of communication  … everyone … can attest to this.  What makes variability so much more pervasive in the world today is, again the economic value of customization.  If you can afford the tab, you can purchase your steak and require the chef to prepare it to taste.  Thankfully for the common man like me, what was once reserved for an elite few has now been popularized by Burger King (“Have it your way.”).  Variability seems to be ultimately personified in in the standardized practice of audience analysis and its younger sibling, usability.  And so it is that the common man like me can also produce a highly customized publication like this in place of a standard paper produced to the highest of APA standards.  Moreover, I didn’t have to procure an entire printing press, design team, and technical staff to get it done.  End product: my reflective content delivered in a way that communicates more about me, and hopefully, about the learning that has taken place through the course experience.  If this desired end isn’t readily achieved, with the media chosen, then, as the lover scorned and executive who hears his Trump-esque boss say with panache, “You’re fired,” I will mourn my poor mark with the standard 15-second-in-car-drive-off-interview and a lot of pouting.  J/K.  LOL. :)

Letters are, themselves, a symbolic representation of an intangible concept that is used to aid in passing communication from one person to another.  From movable type and Gutenberg’s printing press in the early to mid second millennium, I would argue that the increase in widespread modularity of content, method, and mechanism serve as standardized pavers and combustible fuel for the rapid increase in traffic on the information superhighway. 

Automation, in the metaphor I am building here, can be represented by an automobile.  As computers have become more reliable in their counting, the electronic automation of complex processes has allowed for quick reuse of content.  As the vehicle is powerless without its fuel, so the rapid and valuable mechanized manipulation of modular letters, sentences, paragraphs, pages, images, and moving images relies on the combination of modularization and automation.

As Pheidippides, the greek runner of old, made his way uphill from the battle of Marathon to Athens, there must have been some point where he imagined the future of Nike (running shoes) and Caterpillar (highway construction equipment). Years later, as the Romans constructed a network of roads to facilitate commerce, did Pliny, Archimedes, or Apollodorus of Damascus ever imagine the reach and speed of information superhighway that would eventually follow them? Unlikely. And yet, maybe not. Manovich’s discussion of numerical representation and mathematical manipulation is the current equivalent to the efforts undertaken years ago by the Roman empire. They developed a well-constructed message, hired, trained and supported resilient and efficient couriers, and retained talented translators.
While counting is as old as fingers and toes, humankind has been busy with other pursuits, generally because we can. Computers, on the other “hand,” can not. They can only count, but they do it very, very well. With their amazing counting ability comes the capability of creating specific symbolic representations for everything. Thus, numerical representation allows for systematic modification, modulation, automation, manipulation, and reuse of content and processes. Numerical representation is germane to the information superhighway as was the invention of the wheel in the pedestrian age.

New Media Defined [Generally]

Ah, the big question, “What is it, really?” Honestly, I continue to wrestle with that very question. To use a new media asset to assist in answering the question, I’ll refer to the commercial shown in class, where the 1800’s era business consultants are looking for better ways to do things, and one comes up with a novel solution, only to be chased down by the mob who is yelling, “Witch!”

I’m not bringing up the commercial to take up space, rather, to provide the opportunity to discuss the first image I have included in this document. Provided by Th!nkMap™, the Visual Thesaurus, these two images demonstrate well the one new media tool that assists the user to visualize complex semantic relationships between words, much as creative connections are done in the neural space. You will notice that the first image begins with word “medium,” not actually the word “media” as one might anticipate. As the image illustrates, the medium is closely related to the spiritualist, long valued for the ability to transport and translate important messages. Working around the image in a circular fashion, the word is also connected to states of being, hence the difficulty of describing a specific point in the metamorphosis of communications across time. Because humans are temporal, tangible things, the medium must necessarily deal with and utilize real matter, emotion, or the more convenient metaphor or symbol to effectively get the point across.

So, historically speaking, communication has generally been best when it happens face to face, between those who have worked out a complex system of understanding. Working such a thing out requires a substantial investment of time and trust, and there it is … market economics. Just as you probably didn’t appreciate having to read across the “BAM” gap up above, the scarcity of resources and transfer of wealth rears its ugly head to encourage improvement in communication. Who was it that said, “Necessity is the mother of invention?” Basically, all of humanity shares a general distaste (and in some cases a full-fledged loathing) for running. we value and appreciate “better” aka new mediums. Again, because we are temporal beings, we invented the written word to save our thoughts and adventures for all of posterity to enjoy. Similar need for improved trust and proofs of veracity brought about new tools to take the place of physical proximity, e.g., the royal seal, personal signature, courier, and postal employee. Today this may not seem very sophisticated, but if we are honest and humble, we must acknowledge that society is still doing the same thing, just improving the method and, er, the media. Tablets became scrolls, stories became books, hand-written became machine printed, stories and books became graphic novels, movies, and syndicated sit-coms, village gossips became newspapers, and the courier finally gave way to email.

And our pocketbooks and bellies have felt the effect. Improved media gave way to better communication within peoples, between groups, and eventually across all varieties of cultural divides. Again, the transfer of wealth, like mosquitos in tall grass, thrives as improved media greases the wheels of commerce.

The understanding of new media is, in my opinion, best understood when gazing carefully through the lens of philosophy, while feeling around with one hand to find the best available tool for the job. Strangely, it often feels like the right tool is just beyond reach for the current situation.

Because the philosophical thought of the current era is widely characterized as being progressive, aka “postmodern,” it seems unlikely that the we may fully understand new/current/modern media without understanding more deliberately that media which is of the past. Manovich, in The Language of New Media, offers a seemingly ironic maxim. He holds that, to actually understand what new media is, we must fully engage in understanding what it is not.

Strangely, however, I did not find his text to generally lead this reader very far in discoursing the negative space of new media. Rather, he invested much energy in examining five general elements that frequently characterize new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.

As personified by our first in-class discussion when we addressed each of these five items, new media can not be definitively expressed or constrained by these. Our collective post-modernity has taken root and progressed into full bloom; we, myself included, reject the authoritative position in favor of the more generally palatable relativism of inclusion.

Lanham, in a four-word title, The Economics of Attention, confirms my earlier assertions about the effect of market economics on media. As we have moved from agrarian to urban, agricultural to industrial, then into service and now a knowledge economy, the courier of old becomes the negotiator, mediator, and knowledge broker with his own stake in the transaction of communicating. How does he do it? Let’s look back at Manovich’s five elements.

In lieu of waiting for the technology to be completely set up, which generally takes a little time, we went ahead today and built the database structure in Microsoft Access, as that structure can easily be ported over into the full Microsoft SQL Server.  I especially thought that Dr. Kemp's presentation was thought-provoking with regard to the use of New Media in improving student retention through increased engagement, multiple styles of learning, and context-specific, individualized instruction and reteaching.  I'm curious about other similar applications where the iPod can be used to improve the communication of important course content to students at their point of need.

Dr. Kemp articulated the research question as, "How do conceptual differences affect people's connection with instructional content?"  He then simplified the question to answer his typical colleagues' question, "So, why all this technology?"  His specific answers included:

1. First year composition students are from the most vulnerable population of university students.
2. 75% of teachers are doing a good job => technology can assist in the improvements of this.
3. The student profile is always changing, and this group of students is not made up of the same type of student as we've seen in years past.  Specifically:
1. Technology appeals to these folks, generally speaking.
2. Anything appealing increases the engagement factor
3. These students are often the least acclimated to the university learning expectations and university environment.
4. Many of these students are the least academically prepared, and they really need a quality learning experience to boost them forward toward academic success.
4. There are certain ecological qualities that can be improved in the student/teacher content encounter (note: it's not necessarily going to happen in the classroom).
5. Learning is enhanced through repetition.

Dr. Kemp uses Skype and AudioHijackPro ($28) plus iTunes plus Fission to do his interviews for the podcasts they use in the composition courses.

The future of the projects we viewed include:

1. Peer to peer assistance, advice, etc.
2. Library of files to become open source to encourage widespread instructor input and expansion of content covered.

Great progress on our project ... great teamwork in dividing and conquering!  It was amazing to see the sheer number of tasks completed by our group overnight from the previous class period.  I had the pleasure of working with Cynthia on mapping the data for construction of the database to be used in the system, and for someone who had never done that kind of work before, she certainly caught on quickly.  It was good to have the intro to Photoshop, but I'm still wondering when I'm going to find the time to dive into the intermediate and advanced feautres that I'm really interested in using.

Aspirational Models

1. http://polisci.la.psu.edu/graduate/directory.html - Basic list of Grad Students (many of which are TAs) with optional links to websites as they have them available.
2. http://www.econ.yale.edu/graduate/student.html - Just a quick list with email addresses, but a good feature in the sorting of students by year.
3. http://www.gse.harvard.edu/academics/doctorate/usp/students/index.html - Demonstrates marketing purposes and grouping of cohorts.
4. http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Doctoral.aspx - Database driven profiles with pics ... nothing too special here.
5. http://www.depts.ttu.edu/advising/staff.php - Nothing too special here either, however, I happen to know the back-end of this application because I inherited it.  Worth looking at because it can be the bones of a much more robust application, written in PHP, running on a MySQL database.

& More ...

 

A concise list of my Technical Communication strengths:

• Application Design
• Requirements Gathering
• Features/Functionality
• User Interface
• Project Management
• Brainstorming/Creative Thinking
• Concept Transplantation
• Knowledge Management/Knowledge Transfer
• Thinking Strategically while Acting Practically
• Moving Ahead Quickly

So as usual, I had trouble sleeping early this morning, and woke up remembering Basecamp.  This is one of my favorite Web 2.0 applications that is designed to easily facilitate collaboration between members of a project team.  So I set up a Basecamp site for the ENGL 5365 class to see if it would be helpful in collaborating on our final class project.

I'll be curious to see if they agree that it is a useful tool, or if they have a different take on the matter.

 Anyhow, here's the handy link for me to remember how to log in: http://5365.grouphub.com

-jrb.

This posting is to introduce and explain a whole set of forthcoming postings on New Media and Technical Communications, which until recently, were not an official part of the Barron Family Adventures.

This week, however, I began a course (ENGL 5365) with Dr. Rich Rice and 7 other students in the Ph.D. program in Technical Communication at Texas Tech University [ENGL 5365].  Part of the course requirements include posting to my blog about things that we're working on, things that I'm reading, and things that we're discussing in class.  So, as you view these postings, keep all this in mind.  I have not suddenly decided that it is important that my children learn more about new media ... but that I am suddenly immersed officially in the things I've been learning about through experience for a number of years.

-jrb.