So far, it appears that we have a very few suggested readings for our second-to-last week of class. These include a few online sources:

-- Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

-- The Semiotics of the Web

-- A New Alphabet

-- The Onyx Project

I'm still reading all of the sections, but I'd recommend checking out Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, an interesting paper by a MacArthur-funded professor out of MIT. Among other things, the paper presents concrete ideas for using media (often, but not always, "new media") to achieve unique kinds of education and explores the idea of participatory media.

In doing some research for my own final project, I came across the website for a course at Sarah Lawrence College that spends the whole semester reading about and learning how to do pretty much exactly what I've proposed to do for this final project in a little over a month. Of particular interest for our class in general is the page from which you can access all the students' final projects; like us, they had to create online content, it could be critical or creative, and is generally hypertextual in form. It's useful to look at all the variations this group of students came up with, and to see what turned out well and what definitely didn't.

So, as many of you know, I have a pet interest in embodied cognition and I try to apply this to every class that I am in. Thus far, I have been rather quiet because I have had trouble deciding how to make it work with a media that seem disembodied by their very nature. Now that we're getting down to the wire, I found myself looking again for inroads into the topic. I'm not satisfied with what I found and I'll be looking for more, but the most promising one thus far is a masters thesis called A New Alphabet [note: this views a little better in IE and I'd recommend reading the "about" page first].

I came across this through a knowing the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy who made it sort of scenario. It's called The Onyx Project, and it's the first experiment in video story telling using a software called NAVworld™. As it's explained on The Onyx Project's website:

NAVworlds™ are a new form of video story telling - a world that is written, directed, acted and edited. [NAV means Non-Linear Arrayed Video.]

I've posted a scanned copy of Michael Joyce's "Walking Mornings" on Sakai, for those of you who are interested; this is an essay based upon the talk he gave at Pomona a few years back, and a very interesting reflection on his later thoughts about hypertext...