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The second make cycle of CLMOOC is on and I struggled a little bit with what to do in remediating something. Using one of the suggestions from the prompt, I reworked my first introduction (or #untro) which is the catchy tag that emerged by reading it in my voice. This gave me a chance to get back into some audio recording and editing as well as trying out some stuff with Soundcloud and GarageBand.
[soundcloud url=“https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/212842650” params=“visual=true&show_artwork=true&callback=YUI.Env.JSONP.yui_3_17_2_1_1435846696659_49853&wmode=opaque” width=“100%” height=“400” iframe=“true” /]
For the remediation I read my blog post from last week (and found a typo in it) and recorded it using a microphone on my headphones with GarageBand on my MacBook Pro. I did some light editing and processing, but wanted to focus a lot more on making stuff and less on editing stuff. This is inspired partially by Amelia Greenhall who has been doing some fantastic blog posts / podcasts on her blog under the theme of “Amelia Explains it All” which are essential resources for feminists and allies for navigating the socially mediated world (her newest is “What to do if a woman is funny on Twitter.”)
This remediation cycle has me thinking about how I share things and the locations where they go. Everything blends together after a while and spills into other aspects of what we do. So when we are teaching or talking with someone the things that are top of mind tend to inform everything. For me, teaching filmmaking, it tends to be films or tv shows. But it also extends to how we do things, so when I was intrigued by podcasts a decade ago I was telling everyone about it (and wrote a podcasting blog post).
During last week’s Google Hangout it made me think about other aspects of the people who are part of CLMOOC as you could see and hear some of them too. It’s a different way to get to know someone. In the Twitter chat it’s another form. In each of these media we have strengths and challenges and not everyone participates in each of those in the same way. Our choice of media (and language) includes or excludes people based on what they are comfortable with and what they use and what they understand.
This make cycle also has me thinking about the places where you share changes what is shared. My own blog is the primary, more thoughtful place for writing. Everything there is written, rewritten, and edited. When I wanted to add another #untro last week I wrote it up in Google+ instead of as a blog post as I didn’t want to spend a lot of time writing a blog post. But the limitations frustrated me and I wanted to add more images and links to it. The other challenge with that is that it only exists in G+, so if someone is participating in CLMOOC, but isn’t there, they won’t see it. So maybe I need another place for stuff like that and I think for things like that it could be Medium, which is between the speed and concision of Twitter and the longer blog posts that I host at my Squarespace blog.
I love to improvise and change things on the fly, but at the core of much of what I do I need to have some sort of structure or rules. So for posting things online I am careful to think about where I share what I share. I don’t want to have too much overlap between the different services so someone won’t see something from me 3 or 4 or 5 times in a row. I try to keep things where I’ve chosen to put them with a little bit of overlap between them. So longer and more thoughtful writing goes here (on bitdepth.org), shorter writing on Medium, short movie reviews on Letterboxd, photos on Flickr, more social photos on Instagram, and daily stream of consciousness on Twitter.
Years ago I had a podcast where the audio files were on a few different services, but they were also mirrored to the audio section of the Internet Archive and that’s the only location for those files now. For the second make cycle remediation I uploaded audio to Soundcloud and that worked well. That’s where I’m planning on putting my new podcast that I’ll be doing during my Learning Leave too.
It’s good to rethink things and try out different ways of doing and as CLMOOC progresses I need to do more things and push outside of my comfort zone and the familiar ways of doing things that I’ve developed over the years.
