In the newish world of communication-over-a-distance, there are now a number of synchronous media. But for a number of reasons I prefer the asynchronous. Put a small or large number of people (by way of their electronic mail addresses) in a mailing list - a listserv - and you've got, potentially at least, a community that soon or eventually creates a shared language. For teaching there is nothing better as a supplement to the physical meeting of people in a classroom. Some years ago I was interviewed on this topic. My responses might seem somewhat dated now, but I think the gist is still relevant. Here's a page that outlines the presentations and gives links to the RealVideo files that form this interview.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
I heart listservs
In the newish world of communication-over-a-distance, there are now a number of synchronous media. But for a number of reasons I prefer the asynchronous. Put a small or large number of people (by way of their electronic mail addresses) in a mailing list - a listserv - and you've got, potentially at least, a community that soon or eventually creates a shared language. For teaching there is nothing better as a supplement to the physical meeting of people in a classroom. Some years ago I was interviewed on this topic. My responses might seem somewhat dated now, but I think the gist is still relevant. Here's a page that outlines the presentations and gives links to the RealVideo files that form this interview.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
