What an interesting week this has been with playing around with mediums for digital composition, shifting a single short poem here and there into the corners of digital tools all in an effort to see what might happen, as the Making Learning Connected MOOC dove into the concept of “remediation.”
Here are links to what I have been doing:
- Day One: Poem as Printed Text
- Day Two: Words into Audio
- Day Three: Breaking the Poem with Code
- Day Four: Poem into Picture Book
Like many of my friends in CLMOOC, I still remain fairly uncomfortable with the terminology of “remediation” in terms of explaining these rhetorical moves across platforms and mediums (as opposed to its traditional meaning of remediation, as a descriptor of someone who needs extra help because they lack skills or knowledge or understanding). I am trying to find some balance for the word even as I work with the concept.
Yesterday, in a comment to Sarah H., I tried to parse out what I understand the word to mean now, after a week of experimenting, particularly in light of thinking about remix. Here’s what I wrote to her:
She didn’t quite buy it and she wrote a blog post about her negative feelings about the term itself. That’s OK. (And I made her a comic, so there’s that)
I think the pushback on terminology is good and healthy, and skepticism about what we are talking about when we talk about digital literacies is necessary. For me, the call to “remediate” was really an invitation to jump through mediums, an adventure I am always game for. I’m not sure I will be using that term in the future, though.
This is my final “reMEDIAtion” of the poem I have been using, bringing it into a flowchart format to see if it would still make sense. It is no longer much of a poem, but the message still seems to stand firm, even in this medium.
Finally, I went back again to see what I had been doing and I decided to create this very unscientific, completely unreliable personal graph to gauge my own view of whether various mediums “transformed” ย the poem in any significant way.
You can see that some worked better than others, in my opinion. But each one was worth the time and effort. The only downside? I am pretty tired of the poem and ready to put it on its last medium: the archived shelf.
๐
Peace (in the think),
Kevin
Already in the Module Handbook for next year!! ๐
I annotated this a bit in hypothesis: https://hypothes.is/a/-hqPv7GiRBixQGBz0G5sqg
antispam: iced amps Duke and the Boys in the band were jammin’ so hard that they had to ice the amps.
I don’t think the change is largely in the medium. I think the change is in the stance. Most of what people are calling remediation, most of what I am doing in fact, is just a mapping over from one medium to another. Unless the parallax occurs like Sousanis talks about in Unflattening, I don’t think there is a remediation. It’s not the medium it’s the messenger.
I love seeing the progression and your reasoning why you did things along the way.
Your flow chart version reminded me of The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint:
http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm