Starting Over

I decided to resurrect this Blog, My Own Tech Performing Space, since it reinforces the concept of the Internet as a performance space, and that our work in scripting and exploring the arts through multimedia is a performance.  In addition it has an earlier entry about Marshall McLuhan who anticipated the Internet and did more to heighten our awareness of media and its impact on our lives and culture.

So along with the class Tech Resources for Performing Arts Educators, I am engaged in starting a new Blog, in thinking of topics that I would like to engage in, and wondering if I should switch from a Blog approach to a WIKI approach in which we write to a single source.  I guess I still favor individuality and personal choices, and a WIKI to some extent surrenders individual choices in favor of a group consensus, although consensus may not be accurate.

We have a diverse class, and many interests and points of view are represented.  Blogs provide a platform for an individual. It is freedom of the press in its fullest glory. WIKI's are for pursuing mutual interests. Apparently the term comes from the Hawaiian "wiki wiki" that means "quick." It was used by Ward Cunningham in 1995 when he created the first Wiki.  The success of Wiki's had been noted by many, the most well-known of course is Wikipedia in which print-oriented people vilify anyone who refers to it as a source for information (yet almost everyone does).

Cunningham describes the origin of the word to fit and generate a new technology:

I learned the word wiki on my first visit to Hawai'i when I was directed to the airport shuttle, called the Wiki Wiki Bus. I asked for that direction to be repeated three or four times until the airline representative took the time to define the word wiki for me. The next day I picked up a small book about Hawai'ian and learned more interesting things about the language.

I wanted an unusual word to name for what was an unusual technology. I was not trying to duplicate any existing medium, like mail, so I didn't want a name like electronic mail (email) for my work. The community that formed around my site were willing to explore its capabilities without preconceived notions of how it should work. An example of such a notion is the "timeless now" in which "conversation" takes place. Curiously, Wikipedia aspires to be only an encyclopedia, but has inherited many of the non-encyclopedic properties of my original site. Wikipedia would not be as successful as it is now had I named WikiWikiWeb "electronic-encyclopedia". Its unique social conventions and properties would not have evolved.

Professionally I study how programmers think about the structures they create within their programs. I'm a proponent of systematic naming of computer structures based on continuously evolving metaphor. I'm inspired by the cognitive psychologist George Lakoff. My work has lead to the development of "automatic refactoring tools" that can, among other things, correct poorly chosen names in large computer programs. My work helps programmers think clearly about the universes they create. I hope that this will improve the computer experience for all users.

Language can be a persuasive force, and as I explore our class further, maybe we will need to try a Wiki, just to see what happens.

The Medium and Message 4 Decades Later

Marshall McLuhan's seminal work, Understanding Media, was published some 40 years past, but many do not credit his visionary work as literally changing the way we think about the world and technology. Many will parrot his famous equation: The "Medium is the Message" without understanding what McLuhan meant by this. Some have interpreted this to mean that only the medium is important and content is not. To some extent McLuhan's concept of medium is almost a synonym for technology. On the Ginko Press website there is a comment in relationship to a promotion of the critical edition of McLuhan's book: "The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." This serves to clarify that the medium is an extension of human range.

Mark Federman clarifies McLuhan's use of McLuhan defines medium for us as well:
"Right at the beginning of Understanding Media, he tells us that a medium is "any extension of ourselves." Classically, he suggests that a hammer extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and feet. Each enables us to do more than our bodies could do on their own. Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind out to others."
"What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?" by Mark Federman

Further, Federman helps us understand that the meaning of message is much more than the so-called content of the message:
"McLuhan tells us that a "message" is, "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs." (McLuhan 8) Note that it is not the content or use of the innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it."
"What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?" by Mark Federman

Thus McLuhan regards the message as the agent of change or transformation. If we start to look at the Internet or the Wide World Web as we used to call it, we can begin to comprehend the complexity of how this new medium (technology) is transforming our behavior and changing the world. McLuhan's work predates the Internet, but his insights in effect predicted the inevitability of technology creating a global village and bring the oral tradition into equal footing with the visual.

Actress and Dancer Cyd Charisse

I was deeply saddened by the passing of Cyd Charisse. She was a Hollywood legend from my home town and I studied dance with her teacher in Amarillo, Dixie Dice. According to the legend, Dixie Dice helped Cyd Charisse get started in Hollywood. Charisse flourished in the arts technology environment of film making. Film opened new opportunities for performing artists and even changed the nature of the contributing disciplines of music, dance, literature, and drama. Film became the Gesamtkunstwerk, a term coined by Richard Wagner, denoting a work of art to which music, poetry, mime, painting, etc. all contribute. But now the medium of film combined these disciplines into a new artistic object.

I went to the Dixie Dice Dance Studio to help me move better so I would be a better athlete. Dixie loaned me some tap shoes. First we warmed up with exercises to make us more flexible and stronger. Then we started with flap-step routines up and down the studio, gradually increasing the tempo and adding music. Then we learned shuffle steps. I caught on fast. Dixie was impressed.

Now you should know that Dixie Dice was famous not only for her Broadway-style shows, but the local legend was that she had discovered Cyd Charisse who happened to be from our town. The legend was that Dixie Dice had taught her in ballet classes and recognized that she had star talent. All of the biographies seem to start when Cyd is about 12 or 14 and don't mention Dixie, but the legend goes so far as to claim that Dixie was responsible for getting her a start in Hollywood. It may or may not be true, but the point was that everyone in town subscribed to the local legend.

When I came along, her legend was already established as Cyd Charisse was a big star dancing the Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, to name a few. I had a tap routine and style similar to Donald O'Connor, who often was a sidekick to Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. I even looked a little bit like O'Connor. Dixie wanted to take me to Hollywood, but my Dad said "No" and the rest is history.

Technology as Performance

Technology a la McLuhan is a medium, so as such I choose to conceive of my forays into technology as performances. There is usually a certain kind of "scoring" that takes place (for example html code is very much like a score). I am composing something that will be rendered into existence in some way.

Dance All the Rage

Dance has come into its own as a popular form. Pop, Rock, Techno and beyond have caught the popular imagination, finding its way into competitions and prime-time television. What a great force for performing arts educators. Dance Education especially has an opportunity to build on this enthusiasm.


Dance is a basic human expression, and a new sensibility of dancing emerges from popular culture and impacts on all the arts powerfully. The young man in this YouTube "History of Dance" connects with the popular expectations of his audience.

Of course Dance has always been at the core of cultural experience whether the culture be primitive or highly developed, dance has served as a means of personal and cultural expression and communication. Often dance gives rise to the "music"---suggesting perhaps that movement inspires sound just as much as sound inspires movement.

Creating Literacy Through Making Meaning

When Jerome Bruner published his Acts of Meaning in 1990, I thought that arts education might seize this opportunity for a revival of the infusion of the arts into general education. After all, his Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966) completely revolutionized arts education in the '70s and resulted in arts revival in schools and educational institutions.

Mr. Bruner, Harper's reports, has "stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey." His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. (Harvard University Press)

John Dewey established the concept as Art As Experience, and Bruner then brought ideas of cyclical structure to content combined with a dialectal, dynamic experience in which learners participate actively as they construct personal meaning through creative interaction.

The time is ripe to include Bruner's constructivist concepts to the process of appropriating the arts to further the teaching of literacy. This provides a powerful model that has yet to be developed fully and implemented on a large scale. More importantly it requires the collaboration of educators across disciplines to address a crisis in contemporary culture: the need for a cohesive literate community that establishes the basis for cross cultural collaboration.

The future depends on how educators transform the current crisis into a cooperative opportunity.

My First Blog

Well I finally made it! To my blog, I mean. It is always an adventure to keep starting a new blog. I feel a little bit like I am in the movie Groundhog Day, as I seem to always be at a new beginning. On the other hand, perhaps that is the nature of the educational cycle. In May, many students graduated, and here we are now somewhere at the beginning or in the middle of a new cycle. We have cycles within cycles: courses repeating in successive semesters. Yet, as I think about it, there is no true repetition. Each iteration of something has its own distinctive niche in time.

Time makes everything different. Time is the dimension of change, and each present is an illusion of permanence as Time flushes everything away in its relentless cycles of erosion and acquisition. Cycles appear to be "true"---although the notion of recurrence is always colored by Time, which never stands still, which waits for no one.

Technology extends our reach through Time and Space. Technology extends our expressive power. There are ways that technology helps us look at where we were, where we are, and where we are going. We find ourselves on the brink of new discoveries and new developments. At the heart of this process is a deeper awareness of the necessity of sharing. Sharing is the essence of the educational process. With sharing we inherit a new worlding of the world.