Learning outcomes v0.1

This is my first stab at imagining some new course learning outcomes. They are currently very similar to the source outcomes I have stolen from the QAA Art & Design subject benchmark statement document that I mentioned in my last post. I hope to simplify them in due course so that they are a bit more student friendly. I also hope to incorporate the views of the course team and students in the development of them, probably by getting everyone to read these blog posts and comment. I've split them into 4 broad categories, Risk, Production, Reflection and Theory, but this is up for debate along with everything else.

BA(Hons) Graphic Arts & Design
Course learning outcomes, Version 0.1

On completion of the course, you will be able to present a body of work which demonstrates your ability to:

[Risk]

employ both convergent and divergent thinking in the processes of observation, investigation, speculative enquiry, visualisation and making

select, test and make appropriate use of materials, processes and environments


[Production]

generate ideas, concepts, proposals, solutions or arguments

develop ideas through to outcomes

work independently and/or collaboratively in response to set briefs and/or as self-initiated activity


[Reflection]

identify personal strengths and needs, and reflect on personal development.

formulate reasoned responses to the critical judgements of others


[Theory]

source and research relevant material, assimilating and articulating relevant findings

locate your practice within the wider social, cultural, professional and ethical contexts both within and beyond the field of graphic arts and design.

analyse information and experiences, formulate independent judgements, and articulate reasoned arguments through reflection, review and evaluation

Your course is about to expire. Please take action now.

Why have I not blogged recently?

I've been busy busy with the reality of teaching and learning in the 21st century; managing the move into our fantastic new art school building, Broadcasting Place, and dealing with the day-to-day hubbub on a massive undergraduate course. I've had things to say about learning and technology, but I've been too busy doing the business to find the time to write about it all.

Also, I don't write things in this blog for you to read, I write mainly to try and pin the things down that I'm intrigued by, but not totally sure about. Today I opened up a massive can of worms when I decided to start planning for the imminent periodic review of the BA(Hons) Graphic Arts & Design course that I'm currently in charge of at Leeds Met.

If you're not familiar with periodic review, it's basically the process by which a course renews its licence. It happens at least once every five years, and as well as giving the institution the chance to do a proper check on the health of the course, it also opens up the possibility to make major changes. It's a chance to refresh and update everything for the better. I've been a bit-part player in previous reviews, but with the departure of nearly all of my senior colleagues in the School, the task seems to have landed on my lap. That's not a bad thing. I like a challenge.

And a challenge it is. A quick peep at the relevant documentation reveals a mountain of paperwork that will need to be produced for the review, and it's not easy stuff. However, as a trained designer, I have a methodology to tackle this mammoth task.

The first stage is to define the brief, which I have made a start on today. These are the things that Leeds Met says I will need to produce:

• Briefing Statement
• Critical Appraisal
• Course Document
• Programme Specification
• Mapping of Subject benchmark statements
• Module Specifications
• Admissions profile
• Staff CVs
• Statement of Resources

Having half-guessed my way through most of these things, I got stuck on the Mapping of Subject benchmark statements. I had a rough idea of what the benchmarks were from the last review, but sensed that this might be the really important bit. Ultimately, the benchmarks define what degree level means in relation to art & design subjects, so it effectively forms the root of the brief. I quickly found the QAA benchmark statement for Art & Design and, surprisingly, found myself enthralled by what I read. This document was obviously written by people that understand the essence of art and design education, and beautifully articulate all of the things that us purists hold dear. For example:

2.2 Learning in art and design develops:
• the capacity to be creative
• an aesthetic sensibility
• intellectual enquiry
• skills in team working
• an appreciation of diversity
• the ability to conduct research in a variety of modes
• the quality of reflecting on one's own learning and development
• the capacity to work independently, determining one's own future learning needs.

And things like this:
"divergent forms of thinking, which involve generating alternatives, and in which the notion of being 'correct' gives way to broader issues of value, are characteristic of the creative process."

Brilliant. The QAA put 'correct' in quotes. Who are we to doubt the QAA in their questioning of the dogma of the measurable.

This is my favourite: 'Students [in art & design] will have the ability to anticipate and accommodate change, and work within contexts of ambiguity, uncertainty and unfamiliarity.' Call me a saddo, but the celebration of ambiguity and uncertainty in the educational process by the ultimate official authority on the subject in the UK fills me with joy. It also gives me a big, big stick with which to beat off institutional doubters when the reviewers try to pick the thing to pieces.

I've just made a start on adapting some of the learning outcomes from this benchmark statement to use in our new course document, but I'm finding it hard to change it to the point where it's not so obviously stolen from QAA. Much more work will be needed over the next few months, but it feels good to get started. I'll keep you posted.

Post-technical drawing

I thought I better do a quick post, seeing as I handed out my blog URL at the EduBloggers F-ALT bash last night, and there is a slim chance that I have new eyeballs to annoy.

Anyhow, back to the old postdigital thing again. I've had a couple of quick chats with Dave-o-White about the slight unease that we both share about the term 'post-digital'. I can't quite put my finger on it (possibly because the concept isn't yet anywhere near fully formed), but postdigital just seems a bit of a distraction, especially when you start discussing it with people for the first time, as Dave and Rich Hall did the other night at an F-ALT debate.

During Dave's excellent presentation at ALT-C this morning about the much more tangible 'Visitors and Residents' concept, he inadvertently tried to explain postdigital by saying "actually, it's more post-technical". This instantly stuck me as a more useful term, as it removes some of the perceived anti-digital vibes. It also draws attention to one of the clearer points in the debate: the desire to focus not on the technical aspect, but on the human aspects. We can reject the technical fetishisation of both the digital and the analogue using the term post-technical, and we use the term to remind us that it is the human triumphs, albeit enabled by technology, that should be promoted.

What do I mean? I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps an example might be useful to tease this out a bit.

'The Manual' that we devised and used in the Open Habitat Second Life pilots is an example of a post-technical approach to learning. 'The Manual' does not attempt to teach any technical skills. Pursuing the tasks in it will inevitably lead to the acquisition of technical skill, but it is the broader and deeper learning that is emphasised, as we think it is more important.

Technical skills are not a bad thing. Technical skills are a very good thing. But over emphasising the technical, especially at the start of a project, sets the wrong tone for learning. By dwelling on the technical, we are saying to the students "You cannot learn the deep stuff, the fun stuff, the creative stuff, the uncertain but important stuff, until you have the technical skills!". Not only does this take all the fun out of learning (well, for me and most of my students anyway), its logic is fundamentally flawed. How much technical stuff is necessary before you can start? Do you need to know, and do you need to have been tested on every feature in Final Cut Pro before you can edit a film? When I used to do software instruction, I used to teach my students one technical skill in FCP - a cut edit - and then I asked them to edit a film for the next hour. And then I didn't do any more FCP classes. Seriously. 99.9 percent of edits in any film are cuts. What is important in editing is timing and sequencing and trial and error. Learning every feature in Final Cut Pro won't help you to become a good editor. As an educator, I shouldn't be promoting the illusion that a comprehensive technical knowledge of software alone will enable them to succeed at HE level. Technical skills are important, but they can be gained as and when needed, at a pace appropriate to the individual learner.

I don't instruct my students in the sharpening of pencils, and I don't prevent them from drawing until they have passed a pencil proficiency test. I ask them to bring me their drawing so that we can talk about their ideas.

Oh, I'm rambling again. If you are new to my blog, I should point out that I use it mainly to tame my badly formed thoughts. Don't take it too seriously. Reading my post back, I think I may have some gaping holes in my arguments. I'll have to plug them later. I'm off the the F-ALT09 party now.

Never believe what artists say, only what they do.

It all started for me with David Hockney. I 'got' art because of him. The reason my alter-ego is called Cubist is because of Hockney. Most importantly, he lives in Bridlington, which is just up the road from where I live in Filey.

Last night's Hockney documentary on BBC1 reminded me why I'm in this game. More than anything, it is Hockney's attitude and approach that I aspire to. The ceaseless dedication to exploration. The blunt, non-nonsense Yorkshireness. The love of drawing. The fact that he does not let anyone or anything get in the way, not even his own previous declarations about what is right and wrong.

Enough of the fan-mail. The reason I'm writing this post is because I viewed last night's programme through the lens of postdigitalism. At one point, Hockney said something like, "This is art for the new post-photographic age", which obviously struck a chord with me. In my postdigital musings, I've referred to the predicted death of painting when photography was invented, and the conflict between these two media forms has been the focus of Hockney's most interesting work. The supposed supremacy of photography as the ultimate form of 'realism' is challenged when Hockney points out photography's limitations. Unlike futurism and, Hockney has argued, cubism and traditional painting, photography removes the time from an artwork. The time it takes to craft the work, the period of time the work represents - all but a hundredth of a second are eradicated from the photograph. Space and time are the same dimension, so traditional photography also removes the space, fixing the viewer to the spot. In real life, we never stop moving - "If your eyes stop moving, you're dead" as Hockney stated in the documentary - but the photograph freezes the world, whereas painting is about the continuum of space-time, with a living human being at its centre.

This recognition of the limitations of photography sometimes sees Hockney reject the photographic process altogether, but at other times it liberates him to use the camera more like a paint brush. The most obvious example of this is a Hockney's photo-collage 'joiner', with multiple perspectives via multiple photographs all collaged into one composition. Time and space return to the artwork, and the photographic medium is commandeered to serve the eye, heart and hand once more.

Might this tension between photography and painting in Hockney's work inform for the postdigital debate? The photograph and the digital have a lot in common. I'm not referring directly to digital photography here, but rather to the way that a snapshot captures and reduces the world to a small abstracted piece. It denies the continuum of life. It is one tiny part of the whole. Similarly, the digital captures and reduces the world into lots of tiny pieces. What is gained from this process of digitisation - the ability to make accurate copies, for example - drowns out the fundamental things that are lost. Identifying something fundamental that education loses in the digital, as Hockney identifies something fundamental that art loses in the photographic, may help us to form a coherent postdigital view. Just as the camera is liberated from the dogma of photography to serve art, so the computer may be liberated from the dogma of the digital to serve education.

Enough of this aspirational theorising. I have a degree course to re-write this year. How exactly will all of this postdigital stuff help me to write a better course? This will be real test. It's time for some convergent thinking.

Imagine (2009) David Hockney - A Bigger Picture. London, BBC1, 30 June.

Google Waves 'hello!' to the postdigital learner

"Where the digital proposes the perfect finite conditions for a perfect existence regardless of matter, (as for example in the human genome project), in the postdigital analogue (as for example in the ironies of genetic and wet biological art) human consciousness is regarded as almost infinitely malleable, able to shape its identity in response to local (and technological) conditions aware all the time of the range of possibilities (digital and analogue) that are not developed." (Punt, 2001)

Excuse me whilst I go off on some uncertain tangents. There is a high probability that I am about to talk poppycock, but as Theodore Roosevelt said, “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.”

A few years ago, I spent a lot of time downloading chunks of DNA from the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Genebank, and wrote some code to visualise them. My basic idea was to read the As, Gs, Ts and Cs, and move a pixel either up, down, left or right, tracing a line. Different DNA chunks drew different squiggles. They looked like they made some sort of sense, which of course they did, and I got particularly obsessed with comparing mitochondria sequences from different organisms. You can see some of this stuff on my old site:

cubistscarborough.com/iantruelove

Along with every other living organism that has ever existed, we are digital to our very core. We are code. Our existence is encoded in a very long sequence of As, Ts, Cs and Gs. We are Data, Not Animals. But, of course, we are animals, not data. We are fuzzy and vague and interesting. We are wet and unimaginably complex. We are a whole, conscious being that exists over time. We are not digital. We are postdigital.

Not really sure where that one is going, but it might give me an excuse to do some more DNA art. Lets move onto some different poppycock.

The original article that the opening quote is taken from also mentions Gene Youngblood, who reminded us 25 years ago that, "the computer translates the continuous phenomena of the world into discrete units." The inescapable reduction of the homogenous whole into separate pieces, through the process of digitisation, might provide a useful metaphor for education. One of the things that struck a chord with me when I watched Liz Coleman's talk last week was her criticism of the fragmentation of education. I have rallied against the tyranny of the module as the dominant unit of learning ever since it was imposed on us. This quantising of education, splitting learning into smaller and smaller units, serves the inspectors, the financiers and the timetable police very well. It does not serve the whole learner – a complex human being – very well at all. The reason I dislike (and refuse to use) VLEs is primarily because they reinforce and often impose this modular approach. Perhaps it is this sort of 'digitisation' of education that postdigitalism might react against. To re-appropriate the words of Peter Weibel as detailed in Punt's article, education should follow the analogical principles of 'similarity, congruency and continuity', and reject the 'discontinuous, non homogenous elements' as characterised by the digital, and played out in the modular system. The 3 year long, holistic view of learning as promoted by Professor Graham Gibbs and others aligns with this newly invented version of postdigitalism. Taking this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, the postdigital learner is the lifelong learner, the informal and formal learner, the whole human learner. Not a learner who has been captured, cut, and pasted into easily measurable and inspectable chunks, but an integrated learner, inseparable from the world that they are connected to. In this parallel postdigital universe, I'm allowed to get excited about Google Wave, as it may potentially provide an excellent way to support the postdigital learner.

I think I'm rambling a bit now. I'll stop.

Punt, M. (2001) Human Consciousness and the Postdigital Analogue. Leonardo 35 (2), 2002. pp119-120

3 videos I've watched this week that have made me think about postdigitalism

The blinded leading the blind

I've been pondering over the 'non-digital' to 'digital' to 'postdigital' cycle, and wondering where the creative potential is. I can see how this cycle can provide us with a useful way of analysing and making sense of things, and I'm sure that it will prove to be a very useful tool in the hands of capable researchers. But I want to make things. I want to do things. I want to create something useful. I want to make new art and design. I want to craft something that helps my students to learn.

I can see quite clearly the possibilities in the 'non-digital' to 'digital' bit of the cycle. It's very exciting being able to do things that you couldn't previously do because of a new digital invention. The transition between the 'non-digital' and the 'digital' is loaded with creative potential. I can see new opportunities for art and design, and for learning, when the technolust kicks in. I am guided by the guts of art and education to keep me from being completely blinded by the technolust, but new technology amplifies my ambitions and accelerates my output. But where is the potential when we come out the other side? When digital loses meaning and becomes restrictive, what can be tapped in the transition to the postdigital?

Recognising that something has gone, is going, or needs to go 'postdigital' might act as an alarm. Perhaps the creative potential disappears at this stage of the cycle, and we need to look for some newly digitalised thing to manipulate. Perhaps the postdigital alarm bell rings when we are flogging a dead horse. Time to move on. What's the next Twitter?

Maybe I'm being defeatist. One of the first things that I pondered over when the term was proposed was 'What might postdigital art be?". The term comes from the arts, but the original 'postdigital' only partly aligns with the spirit of the 52group document. In relation to music, and in particular, Kim Cascone's work, it seems to refer mainly to glitch - the deliberate embracing of digital 'mistakes' (I may well be wrong on this – I need to re-read that stuff). But if 52group postdigitalism is about the natural or forced transparency of the digital, where is the potential in that? Is it in the transition? It it in the forcing? Could an artist identify something that is stupidly digital and force it, kicking and screaming, into the postdigital? The artist as provocateur, winding things up. Smashing things down. Sounds very anti-digital to me, and I don't enjoy upsetting people, so I think this way of thinking is a dead end.

If it's not about art, could it be about design? In an earlier blog post, I quoted an essay by Beatrice Ward that explored the importance of transparency in typography. If you're busy noticing the letter-forms instead of being enthralled by the author's wit, then the typesetting is probably bad. You don't notice good typography, it is transparent. Likewise, if you notice an edit when you are watching a film, it's probably a bad edit. Transparent editing – editing you don't notice – is almost always desirable. Design might have a role to play in helping to make the digital disappear when a need for it to do so has been identified. Designers have no fear of their efforts not getting noticed. They might help tease the digital away from the thing that has been enabled by it, and bring some clarity. Perhaps we are talking about re-design – the equivalent taking a page set in 18 point Comic Sans and resetting it so that it no longer makes your eyes bleed. We could look at something that is overtly digital, and 'redesign' it to emphasise the essence of that thing. By deliberately neutralising the overbearing influence of the digital, we might see more clearly what is important, and unlock hidden opportunities.

Russell Davies describes a project by Schulze & Webb & Jones Crew (Point three in the post) as postdigital. Here, he is talking about a project that has moved beyond 'digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia'. I must admit that I'm attracted to this flavour of postdigitalism. This might be where the potential is, and it seems to align with 52group thinking to some extent. So, the postdigital in relation to design, advertising and art could be about making appropriate use of a combination of digital and non-digital processes. Oh, hang on, that sounds very much like normal practice round my neck of the woods. As I detailed in an earlier post, I feel like we have already moved to the postdigital on the course that I teach on. However, we do still spend a lot of time gently steering students away from digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia in their own best interests. We are effectively steering them towards this version of the postdigital. Maybe I will start saying to techno-blinded and techo-blind students, "Let's consider your work in a postdigital context."

Much more thinking required. I'll pin it down eventually.