hey folks
1) who wants to meet sometime next week so see each other’s work? Wednesday, maybe before or after the department swine flu thing that is supposed to happen? Lizzy, is the Piedmont room available so we could see stuff projected?
2) i wanted to write something up quickly to start off an after-action review of the labinar. I am super sleepy from making that film draft all last night, so don’t pay too much attention to what’s below, just add, develop, correct, respond…it would be cool to get something from everyone, no matter what it is. Really, you never know what observation of yours that seems self-evident will end up being informative to others. It’s an ongoing experiment and we want to figure out lessons learned and where to go from here.
The labinar this semester experimented with a “design studio” format. We know that collaborative creativity requires structure, and we are still trying to figure out the best form. We hoped to address some standing questions about the time and space of intellectual collaboration, and how to best design both. What works best, of course, can only be evaluated in relation to a goal, and i think this ambiguity tends to be our downfall. Most classes have two types of goals. One type is “content”, to impart pre-determined information, and the other type is a “product”, a paper that involves doing something with the class’s information. We should keep in mind that rather than that, we were experimenting with/on ourselves in order to develop methods of inquiry and shared thinking. Still, this experiment requires content: themes, problems, projects, and a product. Our ambiguity was twofold this term, in that we had neither a theme (which in the past has been approached through texts and/or data from individual projects) and no preset production goal. We eventually stumbled to cases and interviews, but not very gracefully, and filmed interviews, although i fear this was my imposition.
There’s not that much overlap with a seminar, but the major elements that are shared are time and the space–weekly meetings of three hours, in a classroom/office. Ultimately, i think the time and space constraints are determinative. We need to carefully consider what to design, start and complete in a semester. While the obvious retort might be that learning some texts and writing about them seems fine, but there a lot of other options for doing that, if that is what you want to do. We’ve also worked with writing collaboratively, and wanted to try something nontextual. However, we needed to have started with something or at least have determined it in the first week or two, not later. A practical question, from the beginning when we conceptualized a “lab meeting”, was when and where does work get done? Is it outside of class, and then reported on, critiqued and advanced during the meeting? There’s some shared thinking in producing that advancement, but we have resisted accepting that as the limit. When work would happen was a critical ambiguity this semester, as the initial proposal was that we DO something together in the labinar, but i think realistically, a lot of work has to go on outside of class. Three hours once a week is just not enough. It is a long time in between meetings too, which again makes it difficult to work together, and points to the need for outside work.
