I hope you’re all well, I’m looking forward to the weekend, a little rest and recovery, our last U11 soccer/footy game of the season (currently W4 L2 D1) and I’m craving a Sunday morning, a proper newspaper with lots of sections, read slowly with a cup of tea and honey smothered toast.
It was nice last weekend on the trail, whizzing through the leaves. They make a satisfying crunch that sounds like rice-crispies under your wheels. The light too is beautiful, peeking through the trees in long clear shards. The countryside is spectacular, love these colors.
The rest of the week has been a bit rough and the last few days I’ve been feverish and achy from the booster shot I got on Wednesday. I struggled through my classes yesterday, caught the bus home, and pretty much fell over as I got through the door. Lying in bed with bones freezing and beads of sweat on my brow, I had strange and frightening dreams.
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
I’m feeling much better today although I’m grateful for my standing desk and being at home. Have to say, relieved I got the jab, but the last 24 hours haven’t been much fun.
Anyway, other things happened this week, meeting brilliant people, thinking about design thinking and getting some writing out into the world.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
Very proud that after a long lead time and lots of encouragement and support from the staff and wonderful editors of the Digital Library Pedagogy Working Group, my lesson Learning in Virtual Spaces has been published in the DLF Toolkit Vol. 2: Lesson Plans on Immersive Pedagogy. This is a guide for teachers who might be interested in running similar sessions in using virtual reality spaces.
The toolkit is a wonderful resource and I’m thrilled to be included alongside fascinating sessions including Teaching Environmental Influences on Quality of Life with 360 Video by Ajima Olaghere which looks at how students can use 360 videos to support analysis of socio-structural decisions such as urban planning, segregation, gentrification, which have an institutional effect on quality of life issues in urban places. Not only do students conduct fieldwork through VR, they also respond by making their own 360 videos.
I would encourage you to take a look, this is the sort of breakout work that immersive technology has been promising for some time and it is refreshing and reassuring to see people exploring it in this way. This isn’t only about the potential of VR as a technology of tomorrow, but one that is being used now in interesting and innovative ways.
I also wanted to talk about the first-rate workshop that my colleague Jill Chisnell provided for our Everyday Learning class. Jill brought along the Zine-Cart so that students could make their own publications and take a look at her amazing collection of artists’ books, zines, and comix. This is only the second time that we’ve run this session, and doing it in person changed everything, it’s so good to see messy tables. Jill has a seemingly endless archive of papers, magazines, photos, books and so many stickers, stamps, and letters that the students spent so much time leafing through.
I’ve added a few photos to a Flickr album (yes, I’d forgotten I had an account too). It was awesome, thank you, Jill.
Life Lessons
I misheard someone saying usability study as instability study and in a foolish moment started searching for this phrase online. I slapped my forehead when I found nothing and realized my ears had let me down. However, I’m intrigued with what an instability study might be, perhaps it’s like those wobble tests that architects use on models to see how buildings might withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes.
There are many ways that we test in a design process, but instability might speak to the uncertainty and precariousness of the environment, how external forces might topple or unbalance our project. This is hard, we can’t always see these things coming, but drawing the project as a tower, we might look at what might cause cosmetic damage, broken windows as it were, or more seriously, threaten the very foundations that the project is built on.
This got me thinking about towers, which Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (affiliate link) sees as a receptacle of the unconscious, rooted in chaos. The towers that we imagine always seem so sturdy and precarious at the same time, there is an assuming instability in them all.
Lost and Found
The How Well? Anthology is a compilation of illustrated short stories centered around ideas of community and mutual caretaking as antidotes to the corporately-driven, dominant notion of “Wellness” prevalent in the Western world today. Among the editors are my colleagues in Modern Languages, Candace Skibba and Gabi Meyer, along with games designer and artist Heather Kelley who have been working on a series of projects which this book supports through sales. I’ve ordered a copy through Radiator Comics, and can’t wait to read it.
Just a few more things for you that caught my attention…
There are quite a few writing helpers out there and I can’t quite fathom Hemingway but it has introduced a web-based version that you can paste text into. I don’t doubt that everything that gets pasted into these pages, just like any word counter or spell checker gets saved and stored, but wonder really how useful it is without the IP or an email address. It is unnerving though just how much of what you write is web-based, this very newsletter for instance and I do wonder about someone pulling the plug one day…
Loved this short article on the dystopian urbanism of Pixar… I tend to think that Carl Fredericksen would have attached balloons to the house even if the city wasn’t closing in on him, or that the prospect of Shady Oaks Retirement Home finally inspired him to escape, up.
Thank you
Apologies for a slightly disjointed newsletter, my mind is still slightly addled by feverish sleep. It may take a few days for my mind to leave this distinct state of wooliness.
I haven’t forgotten about the trailcam footage that I promised a few weeks ago, when I reviewed it I found that a stray branch was triggering it and there wasn’t really much to report, it seemed to have completely missed that deer that rested a foot from the lens and that we all watched for ages through the window.
Next week will be better, we have a school trip, a few meetings for prospective projects, and two more writing deadlines to hit, albeit nice and friendly ones that won’t mind a little lateness if it comes to it.
Take care, get some rest if you can.
Definitely going to start thinking about running an instability study soon.... Reminds me of Keat's _negative capability_.
I love the messy work stamp!!