I’m behind. I committed to a dozen animated Hitchcock movie posters and I’ve been stuck at four for a month. I need to stare at the noose.
I’ve got to get this done. I love this idea and need to find a way to stay on track. I’m hoping this dozen will help, a renewed bootcamp.
Eric Metcalf and I have been working on a photography blog about CUNY hosted on the CUNY Academic Commons for a few months now. The original idea was to surface what we thought were interesting CC licensed photos that relate to CUNY and present a new one every day. I spent many hours searching Flickr for images and discovered some really great stuff. These are a few of my favorites surfaced early on:
Roller Derby – I love the pairing of ‘Hunter College Athletics’ with this less than conventional intercollegiate sport.
Save CUNY – This is one of many powerful images from the protest of tuition hikes at Baruch College on November 11, 2011 which turned ugly. Boing-Boing puts together a number of pieces of media (including this same photo which I just discovered).
Brooklyn College 1982 ID Card And this artifact is such a great piece of personal history (I identify with this one), also it’s visually emblematic of the times – smoke lens prescription glasses and the old school lamanation process.
We also tried to solicit the submission of photos using jotform and dropbox accounts and I wrote about Pictures of CUNY for the Commons but the effort to encourage individuals to contribute their personal archives needs to be reworked. We started to run out of good photos for the blog…
Eric thought it would be interesting to rummage through the York College archives, so we headed into the basement with my digital camera and a librarian. And we discovered some great stuff, starting with this image:
Registration Day September 1968 This was a contact sheet image and I loved how it showcased ID production in the 60s – they wrote your name and title on a chalkboard which you held for the photo – brilliant!
And my favorite photo was, The Philosophy Club. Not just for the fact that there’s an empty bottle of Hennessy at a student club meeting, but the young man shrinking in the corner turned out to be one of the oldest members of York College’s faculty, Howard Ruttenberg. That’s 1970 and he’s still teaching philosophy 42 years later.
Maura Smale, a Brooklyn City Tech Librarian, learned about our project and turned us onto the archives hosted on a DSpace install – used sporadically by a number of the CUNY campuses. We mostly discovered scans of documents which were part of the administrative history of different campuses, but there were gems to be found like this:
President Franklin Roosevelt Speaking at Brooklyn College Cornerstone Laying, 1936
Here’s where my love for the history of CUNY began to move to a different level. I’m a huge fan of FDR’s WPA projects, and his fireside chat quote ‘Make It Work’ is one I wear on a t-shirt. So it interesting to learn that funding for the first outer-borough CUNY college was from a federal project in the 1930s.
I mean look at this, the builders of the campus lived in f*****g log cabins!
Brooklyn College WPA Construction Shack, 1936
Eric and I discovered other images in DSpace which were alarmingly beautiful such as this image of Electronics Students who were attending the the New York Trade School, which was taken over by New York City College of Technology in 1971.
We’ve looked more through the DSpace and visited other campus archives and marveled at the history of CUNY discovered – the Brooklyn College Fair, the origins of the College of Staten Island, the first CUNY chemistry lab, and more.
But by far my favorite image we’ve discovered is this photograph of a slate board at the Free Academy, the original CUNY, in 1899.
I imagine this artifact as the original yearbook in a single image. Before there was the oppportunity to photograph, write, and layout all the different perspectives of a particular year at a college, there was this effort to remind those that followed, “Epstein was here.” When I look closely at all the scribblings and scratches of the students of the class of 1899, my mind turns to a scene from Dead Poets Society.
Robin Williams played the esoteric poetry professor of an uptight boarding school and he herds his boys into the hallway to gaze at a display case showcasing the images of alumni long dead. And as he encourages them to lean into the glass for a closer look, he pantomimes their dead voices, “carpe diem…seize the day…make your lives extraordinary…”
I like to think of Pictures of CUNY as a channeling of the infinite imaginations of those that believed that college education would change their lives. It’s a weaving of the visual tapestry of the largest public urban university in the world through a combination of public, personal, and institutional archives. Presenting a unique history of the people of New York City striving to find a better opportunity through a free higher education for over a 125 years, representing an almost cliched portrait of the city of opportunity through the lens of the City University of New York.
So a freedom fighter of fair use got smacked in the face a couple of days ago. The Youtube copytright scanners…
took him out. Why? Because he dared to look copyright holders in the face with this, this, this, and this? (pingback bonanza!)
Groom had doggedly dodged and weaved against claims of copyright violations.
But they simply reminded him of what could happen…
Groom held his ground.
Are you violating copyright Jim Groom?
Using video clips as part of an analysis of culture are not protected by academic fair-use.
Often it seemed completely arbitrary which videos were considered violating, copyright holders blindly lashing out.
Eventually the scanners reached a final solution with Mr. Groom.
His account was terminated, without consideration for his non-violating assets – a digital carcass to them.
In the face of crisis Groom was suprisingly upbeat.
But I believe Groom gets everything he wants. He needs a mission, and for his copyright sins, they gave him one.
While talking about ds106 this summer with my teacher ed students, I described how I wished to complete the five seconds five films one archetype assignment with a mashup of Rocky’s distictive ‘Yo Adrian’ across the six Rocky films.
I’d recently re-watched Rocky which was released in 1976 when I was age five. I somehow watched that film in the theatre (no VHS yet) probably at a 99 cent showing. But I vividly remember going the see the sequel for a Thanksgiving showing, waiting two hours in the rain to see Rocky II.
There were probably a few hundred people in the theatre (yes movies did attract real crowds, imagine that) and when the open titles started with the end of fight from Rocky, the audience literally erupted in cheers. Can you imagine that now? An audience applauding a movie as it starts?
I originally expected this mashup of Rocky’s ‘Yo Adrian’ to be a comical rendition. But in retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised that it turned out to be so sentimental. The best of Stallone as Rocky is ultimately about his relationship with Adrian. Yes the fights and winning and winning and winning are fun (expected), but it’s his relationship with Adrian that really changes through the films.
In Rocky I, it’s so much about their courtship which is frankly goofy. Remember when Adrian’s brother Paulie throws the Thanksgiving turkey out the window for no apparent reason? It leads to the first, ‘Yo Adrian, it’s me Rocky’ moment as he talks to her through the door. And the sentimentality continues in Rocky II with probably the most famous ‘Yo Adrian’ after defeating Apollo Creed.
In Rocky III (Clubber Lang – I pity the fool) and Rocky IV (Drago – I must break you) there’s no ‘Yo Adrian.’ They’ve become a celebrity couple with money so such expressions are crass I guess.. But Rocky still looks to and needs Adrian more than ever. The almost comical standoff between them on a beach in LA in Rocky III may hammer the nail too hard, but it’s really classic ‘Yo Adrian.’
The finale of the Rocky series which carried too long for sure, cover Rocky’s decline. In Rocky V (Tommy Gunn – I’m nobody’s puppet) he’s a punched-in-the-head-to-many-times pantomime of himself from the first two movies. All the sophistication that came with wealth in III and IV is literally stripped away (is it so impossible to imagine a superstar athlete would piss away their fortune). And in Rocky VI (Balboa) he’s trying to live a life without Adrian. In these films ‘Yo Adrian’ returns as a sentimental statement, remembering the goofy loving couple they originally were.
Though Rocky is of course first remembered as a boxing movie about a ‘puncher’s chance,’ it’s really a schmaltzy love story. Creed, Clubber, Drago, Gunn, and whoever the hell Rocky fought in VI are fun, but ‘YO ADRIAN’ is 4LIFE.
This past June I was able to teach a York College course for K12 pre-service candidates, Teaching With Technology during the summer session for the first time. We used a blog I created for the four week session which adopted a thematic title for the class, based on Jim Groom’s Educational Apopcalypse TEDxNYED talk. The site was named Why Believe in Educational Oblivion – WINNER: NONE and in our first meeting, we watched Jim’s talk. He uses 25 animated GIFs drawn out of popular culture to illustrate the point that problems in education are being dramatized to create hysteria and despair. Example: Jim’s analogous GIF to George Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ was Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone.
The talk was a great way to start the class as it emphasized our need to respond to problems not with a call to crisis, but a call to imagine possibilities. There is energy, excitement, and even a sense of humor possible when you are asked to be creative rather than alarmed.
Throughout the four weeks we played with a lot of tools and ideas I’d been learning about over the past two years: ds106 assignments, Michael Wesch’s Vision of Students Today, a ‘visit’ from David Kernohan, a number of the DML2012 Ignite talks, and more readings and videos from Gardner Campbell, Jim Groom, George Siemans, Dave Cormier, and others. The students were responding to and creating so much great stuff for the course, really engaging one another (there were 160 posts and 772 comments by 10 students during the 4 weeks).
But I think the most exciting part of the class was when we watched Grant Potter’s Faculty Academy talk at UMW where he connects the values of maker culture to education. I was at Grant’s talk this past spring, but this time in the context of this class it rang even more true. Knowing that every classroom will always have resource gaps (particularly in NYC public schools), we took this as an opportunity, not a crisis.
To demonstrate our resolve, we decided to do a maker project across the last three weeks. Students were going to create a tool that they could use in their future K12 classroom and describe their building it and then demonstrate it’s use. I even got in the action and built an microscope adaptor for my mobile phone. And at the end of the semester we had a Maker Fair to which students brought family and friends and we live streamed it for those that couldn’t be there (with much help from Daniel Phelps, he rocks).
It was really an amazing celebration of the great stuff students made – a $20 air conditioner (to help students keep focus in hot classrooms), an Altoids box heater (for classroom survival and roasting marshmallows), an essay robot, a set of ball handling skills training tools. We also had great fun making some human animated GIFs:
and ‘SciFied’ some toys and objects people brought to the fair.
This summer class also reminded me so much of where my interest in art, technology and creativity came from – building at a young age. I was lucky enough to have a friend named Chris Hall with whom I spent many hours in his basement and backyard tinkering with just about everything imaginable. We made model cars, rockets, fishing flies, paper-mache medieval castles, even our own paper and pencil war game based on hand drawn diagrams of imagined weapons. We built forts behind the creak and hung out in them talking and imagining. We’ve sadly fallen out of touch, but I known he’s still a maker and can’t imagine he wouldn’t continue to be one.
The inspiration to tinker and play can come from lots of places, and I think this summer course helped a number of my students. Here are a few highlights from their final reflections I thought I’d share:
From arod2290: ‘This class during the 4 short weeks has opened my mind to taking on my new career in a completely different angle. Its help me think outside the box as well as express my views, my philosophy and simply believe that it all starts with your own approach.’
From reyawesome: ‘This was a course I’d like to see other students take because it honestly allowed for exploration, mistakes and growth.’
From Malikaaaaa =): ‘You can say that because of this class I have become a “tech nerd” in some odd way.’
These are just a few of the many great things written and created by the students in this class, which I continue to enjoy immensely for it’s opportunity to learn from and with my students. I couldn’t have started the summer in a better way.