I’m still getting used to Wordpad’s ins and outs. So I appologize that there’s a bit of lag in your comments getting up. That should be fixed now.
I will be discussing Meme theory as well. Which reminds me that I really need to read Richard Dawkins
research and writings at the crossroads of journalism, cultural anthropology, technology, and reading.
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As part of my Data Driven Print class, I want to present some models of how ideas spread through communities. One of the ones I wish to address is Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point
I seem to remember that around 2000/2001, as the book was beginning to gain popularity, a business magazine published an article, possibly by Gladwell, that encapsulated the core concepts of the book. This is an article that I’d really like to use. The problem is I have no idea where it appeared. It might have been in Fast Company. But I’m not sure.
So, I turn to you, gentle blog reader. If anyone out there has any ideas where it might have appeared can you let me know. Just drop me a comment. I’ll be your adoring fan for ever!
RIT’s winter quarter is almost over. I’m shooting to get my application packet in this Friday. After that it will be all about writing syllabi and rereading the course materials. Hopefully the indecision I’ve been suffering from will pass as well.
Teaching statement has become synonymous in my mind with the term, or perhaps the feeling of, pulling teeth. I???m trying to finish this so I can submit my application. So far I???ve been burning cycles rewriting the initial paragraph. Its not that I don???t know what I want to say.
That I have.
It???s a question of how do I say it.
This is what I want to say: If I have learned anything in my thirty-and-a-bit years on the planet, it???s this: the world is made up of complex, interrelated systems, and all of them will change. If you want to have a successful life, let alone a successful career, you need to acknowledge this and be capable of adapting to the changes that occur around you. More so, you need to be able to find opportunities for success within the challenges of change. Confining your knowledge to what???s expected of you today isn???t going to help you tomorrow. Tactical knowledge can only get you so far. Learning ???X??? isn???t enough. One must learn how to learn.
Accepting all of this, I see my challenge as a teacher to push my students beyond surface facts and tools. Instead they must be able to recognize the structure and rules from which those facts and tools proceed. And I must do this is such a way that students are capable of internalizing these lessons.
Benjamin Franklin presented a framework for this methodology when he wrote:
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
Involvement, or rather engagement is key. Whether in the classroom, the field, or in the workplace, students must actively engage with (observing, interrogating, and analyzing) the information they receive through encounters with coworkers, media, software, and countless other interactions with their environment. And this is where the techniques of social analysis can used to assist someone in understanding and adapting to the world about them.
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That’s it. Or rather the start of it. Now, we’ll see where I can take it. And how I polish it.
Last night, I attended my first lab class. It marked my return to a pressroom floor, though admittedly a very different type of one than those I knew in the past. The class was held in the Digital Print Lab at RIT’s Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies (CIMS).
This is the Kodak NexPress, a digital press that can be used for variable data printing. Variable data printing is a term used to refer to print jobs where each impression (printed page) is unique. No two pages printed by the NexPress need necessarily be the same (though the NexPress is more than capable of accurately printing the same page over and over again).
One variable data application for the NexPress is printing custom, personalized mailers. And that was the focus of this particular lab. Students were printing out personalized postcards addressed to customers of a fictitious camera supply store. Next quarter I’ll be teaching this lab as part of a course on Variable Data Printing.
Side notes
- The above lab is currently being taught by the man known to some of this blog’s readers as MoFo. Again, it’s a small, small, world.
- The pictures from the last two days were taken with my new cell phone, the Motorola e815. I have yet to blog about it, but I cannot sing the praises of this phone highly enough. While not as drop dead sexy as the Razrs, it is pound for pound and buck for buck one of the best phones out there (and far better than the currently available Razrs, too).