Thoughts from Rick

I wanted to write something quick before I forgot, and I'm stuck waiting in the Center for Kin, while my room mate is in some lecture about Buddhism.

First- to expand on my first thought about corporate sponsorship in education.:

I need to read up more on group growth vs individual growth. Rick said a whole lot of terms that are relatively new to me- as I live in my performance art world vs. teaching world. But I think technology is great when it, as he says, "helps [teachers] facilitate education to meet how the students are learning" though I don't think it's realistic to say that they will replace teachers. As the discussion went on- I thought more about how technology impacts the content. Specifically sponsorship/involvement from corporations.

So some folks totes quoted M. Mcluhan "the medium is the message" and I'm gonna twist that a bit and say, "What happens when the brand of the medium is the message?" My example was... a thousand years ago when I was in highschool- Rogers TV offered to put flat screen TV's into every classroom and boost our media "program" to allow us to show tv broadcasts of our morning student news and announcements, but in return we had to watch some Rogers stuff everyday.... and of course- see Rogers branding- every-bloody-where. I don't think many schools jumped at this, we certainly didn't- though I will say that I think we turned it down more from the fear of technology than the... social/brainwashing implications of it.

I went to uWaterloo... kind of the home of engineering and mathies... to a lot of people. Our alumni created Blackberry (formerly RIM) blah blah blah, and continually Google, Microsoft, EA, Blackberry, Lucas Films come to school and throw jobs at people. I'm not bragging, I'm not actually proud of this- but I'm happy for our grads who get it.

But what it made me think about is access and outcomes. A few people on our thread talked about measuring outcomes, and a big part of that comes down to what our students expect to do with their education, and the realities of what they will do with the education.  For uWaterloo grads, a lot of our hard science & tech students aim to move to Seattle, Silicon, San Francisco, etc. And the tech they use/develop/learn are directly in line with their trajectory.

On the other side of this.... I recently got to travel to some more... remote towns in Saskatchewan- and found these schools where they were BLINGED OUT (even more than some buildings on campus) with smart boards and wifi, etc. Unfortunately- half of the faculty didn't know how to use this tech, and there was one or two lone (often young) teachers who were charged with being the "tech" teachers who knew how to run this stuff.

In an attempt to keep up and be state of the art... I think they missed the mark on staying present with how and what the students learned. I think there is something to be said about staying present with your students vs. staying current with tech... to be hip if nothing else- or to take advantage of what funding you can get from whoever funds you.

And somewhere in between these two, or perhaps on another side iof its own, Dr. Charity Marsh from UofR taught some guest lectures in some of the Creative Technology classes that I was TAing. She discussed going to Nunavut, and how remote schools from remote "fly in only" cities used youtube and social media to connect to each other and share information.

Ugh- I  feel like I'm dribbling into some mass stream of consciousness- I guess this is my 'flow' but I'm continually unconvinced by this notion of balancing and using technology or assuming that anyone is an authourity or an expert. I feel like if we're actually going to adapt to the learning styles of the students, we need to actually continually talk to our specific students and negotiate how they learn.

I predominantly teach performing arts and fitness- theatre, movement, music, dance, yoga, etc. And it's definitely been impacted by technology- not only in reassessing the patterns/habits of how students connect to each other, but also in how they consume the content that we teach. I'm totes not bragging, I'm just saying it's tough because I have to be transparent when I talk to them and not pretend to know their pup culture references or latest hashtags or assume I'm still cool. LOL, not saying that's what anyone else is doing, but I think I'm saying that- THEY can tell when we struggle, and somewhere in that struggle we still have to be Experts.

Ahhhh, I'm an extrovert- thanks for reading- I need to type it out to realize what I'ms saying, and I'm saying- we need to trust the experts and set outcomes that match how they learn.- even if it's sad.

I was teaching a lit class in Canadian Theatre and none of these students read the plays or tried to critically look at the content... correction... very few of them did. In an honest (unfrustrated way) I asked, "what do you think you'll be doing when you graduate? don't you think you'll be the future of Canadian Theatre?" to my devastation- the answer was almost a resounding "No." Yay liberal arts classes where you have to foster and recognize why they learn something to create realistic standards while not compromising the quantity of information that they leave retaining.

So leading to my second thought- I'm saying that the students are, in fact, the experts to their own individualistic learning, so how do we prepare and offer content for them to learn and exist somewhere between edutainment and education on demand?

For many years, the performing arts- specifically acting, recognizes that we can NOT separate ourselves as artists and our own histories from the characters we approach and put on. (Check out Heddon on Autobiographical Performance). One thing I am excited about is that like the Brooks Ted Talk, and some of the other folks Rick mentioned- we need to recognize that we bring an emotional, historical self to our experiential learning too.

Shit that was long- I hope that counts for two blog posts. Maybe I'll just split them..... ha....

OK so fun video for this weeks blog- actually inspired by Brooks and this lecture it's.. less funny, but a video that really influenced my journey through tis MFA. The video is by Renny Gleeson and the proliferation of mobile devices and our "obligation to engage"> Check it out!!!

Our reality is less interesting than the story I will tell & multi-dimensional engagement

Renny Gleeson is a the Global Digital Strategies Director for Wieden+Kennedy. In 2009, he presented a 3 minute lecture for Ted Talks, the video is uploaded above. Though a bit more of a stretch in terms of performance. I came across the video and was taken aback by some key terms that he touches on. I am going to try and expand on them, and more importantly- connect them to my work and the how they fit into socially engaged performance/art.

The beginning of his talk titled, Renny Gleeson on antisocial phone tricks broke down some common social strategies that people use to interact with their personal mobile devices (at the expense of realtime interaction with the physically present people sharing their space). Some of these include the discreet "lean" or "stretch" to the brazen use of devices while driving or the the midst of engaging in personal interactions such as holding hands and kissing.

Gleeson's main argument and hope is that as a society that continually develops and evolves devices to match growing consumer demand, we should ensure that the devices we create work to connect us as opposed to disengage us further.

Key terms that he discusses: culture of availability, multi-dimensional engagement, and internal/external narratives.

As far as a culture of availability goes- it is the expectation of interaction and response and response time. As devices become more intuitive and available, the expectation for response rate dramatically increases among users. This has dramatically impacted the way we communicate today. I often hear of anecdotes from colleagues and professors who observe the absurdity of being expected to respond to student emails at 2-3:00 am on a weekend, and receiving complaints when they don't get responses until Monday. Until the recent decade, theories and research on emotional intelligence (EQ) proposes that as a culture, our youth are losing the ability to empathize and connect with each other. These theories have changed to recognize that we have been conditioned to better read into text messages and brief online messages to form our relationships.

Continuing on the discussion of interaction and perceived relationships, and tying this to everyday performance- multi-dimensional engagement is the act of being connected and engaging in multiple interactions at the same time. So being present in a room and engaging with the people in front of you, while having a different dialogue with various people on your mobile device, and also posting images on Instagram, while managing relationships on Facebook would be an example of this.

And deepening that observation to thinking about how our current and real interactions can be reframed and posted online as an external narrative that we control when we are the authors of our own content, and then managing the same content when it is appropriated by others and public narratives about us are posted without our control.

In all of my recent work- mobile devices have been an integrated/integral part to the performance. My mobile device (an iPhone 4) is used to document my journey, and represents my connection to the world around me, and my communities that I prescribe to, but am removed from.  My iPhone 4 also provides my music and media that underscores my experience and archives my memories in song and performances that are heard by myself and my audiences.

For Alien Soiled, Rice, Spitting Too Close my iPad and iPhone 4 were used to create sound/music/media that was incorporated into the show. As a symbol and device I did not want to separate these tools that become part of our identity. My actors used them in Spitting Too Close throughout the piece- partially because of a need to prompting for their lines, but also because they felt significant in our hands.

Through these glowing conduits we connected to the women and men in our lives, indicating the invisible but present scene partners in our stories.  I think the "glow" of mobile devices also provide recognizable images to the audience of our experiences and our need to connect, and the act of disconnection when the lights go out.

During rehearsal and in discussion with my actors, the idea that we constantly checked our devices for messages from potential partners and the manifestation of these partners in the rehearsal hall changed the context in which we performed. It created an incredibly strong barrier from being completely present- so as a director and an ensemble, we had to negotiate how we can become present. Do we turn off the phones? Did we have time to practice and train ourselves not to wait with anticipation for the next call or text? Or perhaps we work within it, and with the devices. Though I asked for ringers to be turned off- we established that we wouldn't turn off the devices during performance. It provided an interesting risk and reflected how instrusive these devices are.

I want to explore and articulate this further in my work, and am interest in how I can work with these devices more. I'm still not entirely sure what these can mean or how to best use them in performance.

One question I continually ask is- just because I use personal mobile devices... does that make my work interdisciplinary or intermedia? Which is sometimes often branded and associated with work that does use these. An important question that I have yet to answer from Rice is how we actors interacted with the video or rice pouring on naked bodies on film in front of us during the performance. For me, it represented the people in our minds pouring in and out, intruding on our experience. But this did not read. A future incarnation of this will be to have the videos playing off of mobile devices and projecting them via mini projectors attached to the actors, so that the films will be screened onto other bodies and audiences and screens which I think will build a more engaging interaction and possible read more clearly.

I am not sure I am commenting on how this affects social engagement, as much as I am concerned with recognizing how these devices are in fact a part of who we are and who we build ourselves to be.

Gleeson, Renny. "Renny Gleeson on antisocial phone tricks" Ted Talks. February 2009. Last accessed: April 12, 2013. http://www.ted.com/talks/renny_gleeson_on_antisocial_phone_tricks.html