tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2516770417837919818.post7866501831729606649..comments2008-02-21T08:19:49.203-08:00Comments on re(EDUC 890): Remediating my practicesGordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13167618537367456375noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2516770417837919818.post-49699812507801829032008-01-27T15:39:00.000-08:002008-01-27T15:39:00.000-08:00I really enjoy how your posts themselves are nicel...I really enjoy how your posts themselves are nicely illustrative of remediation. When you mention that remediation is "taking content from one media and re-presenting it via another" are you referring to "content" in Marshall McLuhan's sense where the content of an earlier medium becomes the new medium? If so, then, while it is more linear than B&G would suggest, I think you are headed in the right direction. If, however, it is just the content that is borrowed but the medium is not appropriated, then B&G refer to this as "repurposing", and they do not feel that repurposing adequately captures the multiplicity, dynamicity, or complexity of remediation. Further, beginning on page 45 of their article, B&G outline how the spectrum of remediation encompasses everything from simple "borrowing" of older media which reappears in digital form (the encyclopedias you mentioned where the print version is now available on-line) to improvement of existing media (you also gave nice examples of this with encyclopedias that have hyperlinking), aggressive refashioning of older media, attempts to completely absorb older media, and refashioning within a single medium. In this process of remediation, there is an oscillation between immediacy and hypermediacy such that the key to understanding how a medium refashions its predecessors and other contemporary media is that it promises a more authentic experience (immediacy) than its predecessors but this promise inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium (hypermediacy). Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy and, as B&G suggest, hypermediacy reminds us of our desire for immediacy. These two logics of mediation are in contradiction with one another, hence B&G's coinage of "remediation" rather than just using the term "mediation". <BR/><BR/>You've also raised a couple of interesting issues here with respect to plagiarism and facts vs knowledge. I like how you're teaching your colleagues to address those issues by suggesting they reconceive assignments to be a search for answers to questions and the constructing of knowledge rather than a search for information as 'given' and the simple regurgitation and re-presentation of 'facts'. After reading the article by Illich and Sanders, especially focussing on their ideas about memory and the related suggestion that schools have picked up a textual notion of memory (whereby it is through literate practices that we have this notion of a self in whom is embedded a memory which is separate from the public world), I am curious if that makes you 'see' knowledge any differently? Also, I wonder, if we think of knowledge as more dialogic in nature (see M. M. Bakhtin's work, especially his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 1986), more distributive, what does that mean for "plagiarism"? Bakhtin would suggest there is no such thing as "original", and I wonder if Illich and Sanders might not just suggest that the entire notion of "original", and all its related assumptions, isn't just an artifact of a society moving from oral to textual (literate) practices? Intriguing to consider the implications: what does this mean for our conceptions of "plagiarism" and the great lengths to which institutions and individuals go to prevent it and punish those who 'transgress'?Mrs. MacQuarriehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03129766676009508185noreply@blogger.com