We covered Billy Collins last night in my American literature class. We talked a lot about the false dichotomy between poems that are reasonably direct and easy to take in and notions of intellectual complexity and depth. I love Collins, for thumbing the eye of such pompousness.

One poem that gave us particular insights was "Workshop" which is easy on the brain, but also as rich as any I've found in language about language, poetry about poetry, and similar abstractions that open levels of meaning beyond the surface message of the text. It's also funny. Really funny.

Another great thing about these poems is they still get the idea that poetry can move on an emotional level. Ever since I heard Collins read it a couple of years ago, "The Lanyard" has been one of my favorites. Again, funny, but also touching.

It also turns out that there is a small YouTube cottage industry springing up around composing animations set to Collins's poems. My favorite has to be "The Country." The visuals really do give the work an extra kick. In some ways, I sense a connection here as well with ideas about the future of English Studies. There are, for instance, somewhat similar videos set to Wordsworth's poems, but they lack the freshness, and I would guess relevance in forward time that I feel in these Collins adaptations. "The child [may be] father to the man," but "The Country" is winning the "Favorited" competition big time.

How crazy is it that the new semester is starting and I haven't even posted anything reflecting (on) my summer teaching. Without further ado, I give you YouTube trailer film reviews by Susie Warden and Hannah Choe

and the mashup below by Jivan Achreja

Transforming the Teaching of Literature from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I decided to do my Computers and Writing presentation this year as a Sophie book. Sophie worked well at bringing together a number of videos and images and also at allowing me to weave in snippets of text. Having the ability to use timelines to sequence the pieces was also very helpful. The Sophie book is currently over 100mb, so I'm not linking it here. Instead, I have just done a screen recording of the project. In addition to this one from vimeo, there is a 30.8 megabyte QuickTime file.

6:10 minutes (5.65 MB)

Our notions of what counts as literary shift constantly, a theme woven throughout much of the work that has happened in courses I've taught this semester. Sometimes as these shifts play out, it can be difficult to recognize the emerging forms among an evolving landscape formed around stalwarts like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austin, Morrison. We need podcasts like this to help us make such identifications.

I'm starting to think about the upcoming Computers and Writing presentation. The last time around I wrote prose, which was a nice change of pace from the show and tell routine I've been doing at conferences for the last few years. I'm thinking some combination of reading prose and showing stuff, but haven't arrived at a decision yet. I might just do a video ala 2006 (below)

From the teaching files, an extension of the idea of using found images to create videos, this project rips YouTube videos and compiles them into something new.

Here is a draft of my bit for the panel Jenny Edbuaer Rice, John Biewen, and I will be putting on in New Orleans. The panel is on sound in composition, so it's a bit ironic that the audio quality of this is somewhat dicey, but you do what you can.

Musical Pieces: Readymade Audio Projects and Creativity from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

From the Washington Post comes this piece about corporations playing fast and loose with images found online. The article is of interest to writing teachers working with new media for its illumination of fair use principles. If one of the four lenses through which we might view fair use is the potentially commercial nature of the use, it's tempting to look at the "photonapping" of images by corporations and argue for more flexibility when applying the profit criteria to use decisions. This, however, might not be true to the phenomenon reported in the piece. It's not that the uses by the corporations are fair. The article quotes Lawrence Lessig, who points out, "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur." For educators, these legal dimensions might be discussed as part of a broader conversation about how to make decisions about using materials in projects. I put a screen shot of the Post article above to serve as the link to the article, which I've attributed and which I'm discussing in terms of educational uses of media. Is it fair? These questions are sometimes complex.

Lessig's quote and the rest of the article, more interestingly, get at what is behind much of the trend of companies wanting to appropriate amateur materials from the Web:

"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."

It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."

If nothing else the trend asks us to continue thinking about the power of citizen media as reflected in the desires of corporations to be like Mike, or Allison, or Tracey.

This piece in the NY Times offers a nice counterpoint to some of the recent complaints about the stultifying state of most non-digital education. I pulled down some of the lecture video and added a few questions. The are other questions to poke at as well: what does it mean for the haves like MIT to hire such teachers and create such content while others get to may only be able to consume it on the Web? How is it that teaching like this get valued? Must it become public, superstar fare? Mostly, though, it's just nice to think about how teaching can take place outside of the digital box sometimes.

As part of the end-of-semester reflection on the teaching that has gone under the bridge during the last few months, I offer this screencast. This is not an adjudication, arbitration, or investigation. Just pushing.

The real sticky example in the video is the last one, in which an entire song is translated into a video expression. It might be that using the song in the original video bumps into or spills over the limits of fair use. I'd be curious to hear what people think. After you chew on that one, you might ruminate about using the entire song in this video.

You'll need a good Internet connection and about twelve minutes.

Let's be Fair: Intellectual Property and New Media Composition from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.