Closed, isolated, antisocial

This is not I’m doing.

Educational technologists may well at this point wonder if “remix” is just a souped-up version of the learning objects vision that absorbed so much energy from so many talented people, with mostly disappointing results.  In 2005, Susan Metros suggested in an EDUCAUSE Review piece that “learning objects have not fulfilled their promise of transforming education,” and little has changed since then to contradict that assertion.  Why might a culture of remix take hold when the learning object economy never did?  For one thing, the relationship between  standards and practices is inverted.  Proponents of learning objects, with the noblest of misguided intentions (this author was one of them), went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing a complex set of interoperability standards and then attempting to convince the wider community to radically change their practices to meet the standards.  Users were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff — not surprisingly, most of them passed.   Meanwhile, in the wider web world, millions of webloggers were gleefully sharing their materials and forming fluid ad hoc communities of interest without any central coordination or organizational incentives whatsoever. The practices were easy to adopt, the benefits were immediate, and the interactions were fun.  Around the same time “users will never add metadata” was becoming a mantra at learning object planning meetings (again, this author was there for many of them), and most LO repositories were floundering, resource sharing sites like del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tags.

The preceding overview of remix culture is not meant to suggest that educators should throw out traditional approaches to presenting instructional content and concentrate their efforts on making YouTube videos that mash up old archival footage (though some are doing just that). But it does assert that the broad outlines of what it means to create something have been in a state of flux for some time, and that the broader web culture has embraced reuse to an extent that educators are only beginning to do.

Keep in mind that “remix” can be applied quite broadly to digital content. As Tony Hirst argues: “The easiest remix is not really a remix at all, and barely counts as a reuse, though it is a republish or represent – just take a direct copy of someone else’s content and make it your own property/publish it on your own site, in your own content area etc.; which is not that interesting… but at least it shows someone else cares enough to take a copy. And it’s another place for eyeballs to see that content.” From there, modest steps toward remix might be to delete or edit inappropriate specific references, adding or updating links. Perhaps you add an appropriate online video, or link to a podcast. Perhaps a dynamically updated RSS feed from a relevant weblog or del.icio.us tag can be rendered on the sidebar of the content. Hey! Now you’re mashing it up!

Elements of remix have been present in art from the beginning. Maybe the borrowing was framed in terms of “tradition,” or “influence,” but artistic and scholarly work has always built on the work of others. Having said that, it is also clear that the past century’s developments in technology have corresponded with a new attitude to the “aura” associated with an “original” work of art, and more aggressive attitude toward appropriation. Perhaps it’s coincidence that the rise of photography and audio recording occurred alongside the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques. But judging from Walter Benjamin’s highly influential 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” it’s clear that these effects of reproductive technology were not lost on contemporary observers. The Gould quotation excerpted above, itself obviously influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, demonstrates that changes in how art was produced, distributed and consumed in the electronic age were expected to have effects on the character of the art itself.

Pioneers in the art of music remix as we currently think of it worked with pre-digital technology, by laboring painstakingly to loop and splice tape, or by manipulating vinyl turntables. But without question the rise of digital technology pushed the practice to new levels of activity and imagination. The ease of copying and manipulation of digital media naturally supports the practices of sampling and recombining artifacts. And as with other new forms of participatory media such as weblogging, the tools have gotten cheaper and easier to use even as they have gotten more powerful. The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous new media artists, reimagining the icons of popular culture or unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers, and we all have our favorite examples of the art. (Two of my most enjoyed clips are the remix of The Shining’s trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjl7gK4HGU, and the mash-up of the original TV series of Star Trek with a Monty Python song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEnyT0_BjxA).

I was looking for images to add to my wiki page for tomorrow’s session, searching on images tagged with “mashup”, and came across the one above. I’m not sure it’s right for the presentation, but it sure is right for something.

I have a lot of great materials I have created for courses, but I keep them safely locked away in my password protected space. You can’t see them, link to them, and you certainly can’t reuse them. Why should I let deadbeats like you learn for free?

Also, I’ve ripped off a lot of copyrighted stuff, but I hear that if it’s locked away privately then I’ll probably get away with it.

RSS is a fad. Blogs are an online singsong kumbaya chorus. Wikis are for fools.

I’m looking forward to taking part in this seminar, whatever it is. Who’s running this show?