Running with Scissors

Yesterday I had a discussion with a faculty member about a project for his course. Basically, he needed a way to have each student send him a MS Word document, and then have all the students in the course have access to these documents for review and comment. The way he was planning on doing this was through email attachments. I told him a few of the downsides of using email for this, like the fact that student email boxes can fill up and messages can bounce back, especially if the Word files he was going to send them as attachments were large files that had a lot of images.

Instead of email, I suggested the use of Blackboard for this – it easily provides a central place to store the documents and allows students access to them through a platform they already are familiar with. One catch with this – this faculty member is not a Blackboard user. So he took my suggestion and said that “it might work,” and that he would “think it over,” and he would “get back to me if he needed some help.” Though he was very nice about listening to my suggestion, it seemed like he was going to be using email to distribute the documents.

This morning I saw that faculty member again. He had class last night with those students, and they discussed how he was planning to send them the MW Word documents via email. He said to me “I told the students in my class last night about how you suggested using Blackboard for this. They said, ‘Yes! – that is much better!’ ” Then he said to me – “Do you think we have a revolution on our hands?”

“Do you think we have a revolution on our hands?” Perfect.

The students were able to make an impact on this faculty member that I could not – they are moving him to use Blackboard for the first time – we will be meeting today so I show him how to post the documents. Revolution? Exactly.

Of course, now I need to suggest that next time he uses Blackboard not just to distribute the documents, but to have an electronic discussion to comment on the papers as well. :)

People get their inspiration from lots of different places.

I got inspired by this story of a man who built a 60 foot tower in his backyard just so he could have broadband internet service. The short version – a church was blocking the line of sight with the only ISP in this man’s town, but the line of sight was fine, 60 feet up.

You can follow the whole story with photos and narrative of the process.

Hey! Maybe this is a good example of the narrative we want students to do in the THEA 435 class!?

Martha has an intersting post about a classical music artist that moves beyond the strict classical interpretations of pieces and makes the performances more her own. From Martha’s post:

What’s interesting about Montero, and what most of the ATC piece discussed, was that she improvises. She doesn’t just improvise in the sense of “making up” stuff from scratch — she improvises upon the masters. So she plays Chopin, but she plays it her way. The pieces I heard on ATC sounded familiar, but they were distinctly different. Some of her improvisations, for example, have a distinctly jazzy flavor. Gabriela Montero is ripping, mixing, and feeding me something new in classical music.

I love it that she extends the conversation with her playing. But let’s extend the argument: What about the idea of each of us as artists? I would like to extend this ability to mix/rip/feed to the listener of musical recordings as well.

One of my favorite 80′s albums was “Duke” by the band Genesis. For those of you who are unfamiliar, they were a British band, so the “mix” you would get is a little different than what you would typicaly get on a US recording – basically more midrange, less bass.

I wish I could buy a copy of this recording that had not just 2 stereo tracks for left and right, but all the tracks they recorded – the bass drum, the cymbals, the keyboards, the bass. I want to be able to add more bass and drum to the mix – I want to punch up the keyboards – I want to make the mix my own.

Doesn’t this change the “art” that the band originally created? Of course, but why can’t I have the opportunity to build on the art as I like. In this case, I think it is like picking out the frame for a painting – the basic core is the painting, but I can make it my own with how I display it.