Technology again...

Sitting in my office in the pointless hour known as "my office hour," I'm killing time (injuring eternity) by pondering and googling. I googled my way to a critique of the work of John and Merce. This most excellent piece expressed a perception that I always had about these two: that the proscribed method and the apparent result did not match up in terms of marketable dogma. This is not so unusual. In the case of Schoenberg, the method is clear enough (the liberation of dissonance). The result throws the weight on other parameters or the human response is lost. That this is the case accounts for the profound apathy that this material generated in audiences. Mozart keeps getting more hits, and Schoenberg has tanked. (Not completely, of course.) Cage touted chance, but, as the essay posits, left nothing to chance when it came to end results. The chance went in before the trumpet began to blow. Cunningham technique class does not liberate technique from "technique": it does not make simple, pedestrian movement the heart of the vocabulary. Instead, the technique turns simple acts into virtuoso acts with their astonishment factor morphed into mere difficulty.

But I was thinking also of the difficulties of teaching a technique of technology. The astonishing tie in came from this: "The title Walkaround Time, Carolyn Brown tells us, “is computer jargon and refers to the ‘walkaround time’—oh so long ago, before high-speed computers blanketed the world—when computer programmers walked about while waiting for their giant room-sized computers to complete their work” (Brown 503)." It is not in any way true that we do not have 'walk around time' in these days of high-speed computers. I shot an hour of video. It took four hours to get it onto a DVD (which looks like bloody hell - since HD does not look good when iMovied to death), and a good three hours of that was in fact walk around time.

The difficulties of teaching, where the model expected is that knowledge moves from the teacher to the students, is that I do not have my act together. I don't know iMovie even as well as the students do. I didn't spend a summer on it (deliberately - I wrote that novel instead). I didn't own it until last week. It won't run worth a damn on my computer at home, and I'm not quite up for buying a new machine just to teach a course.

I didn't even get to iMovie in the CAMIL II lab. The students discovered instantly that the software didn't work. It booted and ran, but no files could be written since no one had permissions to write to a drive and the software expects to be used in a administrator environment. I was also unable to get more than a third of the way into translating youtube video into something editable in iMovie. There was no codec on the lab machines. Perian was required.

Well, I can get in that lab during the week and experiment with my lessons in there. That's the only way to get it to happen.

But meanwhile, as I futzed around, the students got busy laughing at something they found on youtube. I'm directing them to that earlier piece on the Church of Technology. In the silence of this office, after the wasted class, I found a solution to at least one of the CAMIL II problems. Andrew the administrator was required for all else. The solution to imovie and using network drives was googleable in an instant. The students might have (had I guided them) found this at the time. They giggled me right out of all sense of striving for a solution. That human, Dionysian impulse to goof around...it is as good as the best drug. Wouldn't we all rather laugh our heads off than keep it together?