5 Closing Points

you can be hurt

school is no longer a game

events do occur in real time

not everyone is as they seem

everybody else is using live ammunition

gunther  October 31, 2013

Advanced Research for the Liberal Arts: the Library as a (entrepreneurial-ish ) Research Incubator

As we struggle with multiple concepts and assorted directions for library growth and development I keep coming back to the concept of the iterative, entrepreneurial research incubator. These would be spaces for students and collections of students and faculty (classes?) to camp out and develop, over time, experimenting approaches to original research in all areas of the academic program. That, I think, is what a library in the new age should spend its resources of time, effort, space and dollars promoting.

It’s a shot of industrial strength research skills and techniques both for finding data and turning it into analytic information for further testing and hypothesizing, the results of which are presented through compelling stories, images and sounds that capture and enthrall our attention and promote and deepen our understanding of the world, our history and our future.

If you buy into my concept of the new research or are at least modestly intrigued let’s just stop a moment and step sideways. This will be the easy part of the project. It’s also going to be the fun part, but there’s an associated hard part.

The hard part is the space between walking in the front door and signing up for the new research carrel. (Oh, did you notice that easy sliding in of the term research carrel? In my mind it’s more of a Silicon Valley corporate team space (of various sizes) decked out with advanced media devices and capabilities that a team could “rent out” for long/short time intervals. Well, that’s my concept at the moment.)

Back to the hard part. So much time and energy is lost to a student in that limbo time between the front door and starting an advanced project in research. We treat the building much as a department store used to do. There are “areas” that serve differing types of products (LC numbers) or experiences and we let the customer wander through the racks perhaps librarians answering questions about color, size and where the dressing rooms are – maybe really technical questions about the ice maker in the door – until they drift over to the checkout counter and make a purchase, then leave.

The new library environment should be aggressively interactive, we should approach and confer, advise and direct, discuss and evaluate and most of all collect data about the experience, the process and the outcome. We’re a service organization, but deliver that service at only a few touch-points none of which we track deeply enough. It’s that concept of tracking a customer as they turn into a user and what makes (promotes) that happen most effectively and can you polish that experience to be more enjoyable and productive.

I wonder if we utilize the data we already have? We know who checks out a book, but I would suspect we treat that as privileged data. Or the printers? No one gets to see it. Wouldn’t it be useful to let a professor or advisor know that some of their students have never used the library and who they are. That’s the power of big data, oddly it can be quite personal, yet used responsibly.

As for the entrepreneurial research spaces? Well that’s the easy/fun part isn’t it. We’ll have a good time deciding what’s in those spaces, how it’s arranged, how big or small they are and how do you get to use them – useful, useable, affordable, sustainable.

gunther – November 29, 2013

There’s an Important Math Equation We Need to Know

We’re (well the Summer Media Institute actually) about to buy 15 DSLR cameras with money from an outside donor. Wow, that’s a big deal for us. We almost never get to make that large a purchase and certainly not that many of any one thing that expensive. This will be a decision we will live with for some time, affect the style of work students make and commit us to spending more money in the future to maintain that equipment. Is it the right decision and how do we know that?

One of the most important math equations that we can rely on to help us make good decisions shows us the distribution effects of camera life over both a long and short time span: from 3 years to 13 years. Our worry is that we might purchase the wrong cameras and then later we’ll have a lot of items we regret.

The question: is it smarter to buy a lot of less expensive cameras or fewer higher-end more expensive cameras and more importantly how does that play out over time as cameras break and have to be replaced. Additionally is it better to buy it all at once or spread it out over a period of a year and buy different models of cameras. 

There will inevitably develop over time a drift between the original camera models and the ones that we buy to replace the ones that die. For a short period of time we can just buy the same ones for replacement, but at some point they’ll no longer be manufactured and only new/different models will be available. It’s inevitable.

A second part to the equation is how long before that happens, how fast does it take to tip the balance, at what point are all the cameras completely replaced and finally how much money have we spent as we reach the end of the complete cycle. Oh, yes, one more important question - are we happy about the whole outcome or will we wish we had played out a different scenario. 

So here’s the equation:  (oh wait, there isn’t any).

If any of us could figure that out we’d be working for some investment bank instead, right? The reality is no one knows how it’s going to play out, what to buy, what’s going to break, in the end was it all affordable and did we have a good time. Just stop back in in a few years and then we’ll know. Until then, think hard, read up, try stuff out, think about what’s happened in the past and then go for it.

However. This is a great test case and we should track the hell out of it for data and user satisfaction. Indeed, is it better to buy low or high? How long will it take before we have to replace a camera with a different model and how does that affect everyone? Are we now obliged to keep that many cameras in the pool and what will be the cost of doing that? Will we notice a shift in the style of work and how might that affect a programs direction? All good questions and I’ll bet there’s a ton more that we’ll come up with over time. We should embrace this as a great experiment and formally track the data and share the results quite formally.

gunther   November 19, 2013

Hampshire Needs A Story

Hampshire needs a story. A story that allows others to more easily comprehend what the Hampshire experience will be. It’s definitely not a mission statement. It’s not a list of buzz words on the level of collaboration or entrepreneurial. It’s not about feminist politics nor sustainable agriculture. It’s not a listing of what the best students are doing this year, though you might use some examples. It’s a story that explains what will happen, what good that will do you, and why you should care.

It should be easily tellable not convoluted or have complex sentence structure. You shouldn’t have to look down at a piece of paper to remember some important point or where you are in the story. While it’s not really an academic story it should explain our academic process while honestly reflecting what really happens, not just what we say happens. It should have warmth, insight and drama. It should be fun, open and believable. We should be proud to tell it and believe it ourselves.

It needs to be long enough to not feel rushed or have topics crammed in though there’s no need to mention every program or department and it definitely shouldn’t have any Hampshire jargon or acronyms. The story should be about people working together and the pleasures and problems we all have, how we approach those problems and how they are resolved. It should be about how we engage personal and social issues and how growth, personal and intellectual, occurs through experiences, actions and interactions.

It should honor the philosophy of the liberal arts, but from a modern view point. It should be about what happens in and outside of classes from the perspective of a student. It should describe and reveal the differences between the three divisional levels and what each experience feels like over time. It should illustrate the benefits of a division contract and it’s accompanying narrative evaluation for both faculty and students.

Finally, it should provide examples of what life after college could be like and some possibilities for living a meaningful life in the future.

Hampshire needs a story.

gunther    December 3, 2013

Do The Math

How much is 5 + 6 ? Ask three different people that question. If that question was a job you needed to fill who would you hire and how much would you pay them. It doesn’t matter does it, the answer is always going to be the same. There’s no differentiation from one person to another so you’d pay the least possible to get that job done.

Next, what does each number represent and how did you find that out. Ah, that’s slightly deeper work that requires some important skills and analytics. You’d hire the person with the best track record for delving into the analysis of the field and pay them the market rate.

Finally, tell me the real story behind the 5 and 6 and deliver it as a 20 minute movie on a Blu-ray disk. That’s even deeper, combining an historical reference of some depth, an analyst’s insight into the relevance of the past and the direction for future action with a storytellers skill in organizing that information and conveying it back to us. Who to hire would be based on the total quality experience and its usefulness. We might pay quite a lot to get it right because not only can we benefit directly from the information about the numbers we can also use the story itself. It’s no longer just analytics, it’s also an experience and one that everyone can understand.

You don’t want to be one of the three people back at the beginning just building the same answer. They’re in a race to the bottom, undercutting each other selling the exact same product.

The middle group is just that, they’re analytic middlemen stuck in a marketplace economy in competition with each other over reputations, referrals and analytic speed.

The final group are independent contractors that may be singular entities or collections of people working toward the same goal. The quality or valuation of the product is based on both their insights about data and their artistic skills at storytelling and presentations; it’s an artistic entrepreneurial skill set – the art of producing the insightful deep-structure story/experience.

We want to be in that last group. It’s a more intricate job, but much more interesting and we think, much more sustainable into the future as everything around us changes. We would prefer to be in the business of telling stories about the meaning of the numbers, not shuffling them. If you’re not in a high-value-added job, one with creativity as a significant part of the process, then you’re in a race to the bottom or maybe even in competition with a digital version of yourself.

We understand that you would have to at least understand the analytic process, though not necessarily run the numbers yourself. In fact that final value-added group would probably hire both of the other two groups to work for them, but end up keeping most of the profits. It’s the business side of the new liberal arts media education and that sound you hear is the future knocking on your door. Remember, just a few time zones away it’s already tomorrow. 

gunther   November 10, 2013

Why We Are Here

I frequently ask prospective students what area of study they’re interested in. There are all kinds of responses back as you might imagine, but sometimes there seems to be more anguish than necessary, more uncertainty, more worry or a nervous blank look and no answer at all. Here’s a small hypothetical "welcome speech" to first-years to help them think about how to stake out personal and intellectual turf. It posses a simple question that they will eventually confront.

Some time from now you will be asked a question. It may be eight years or fourteen months or two decades, but it will come. It will be the most important question you will ever answer. You may not have studied it in school. You may never have thought about it at all. You'll think, why are they asking me, but they are and you'll need to answer, because there'll be no one else.

Your response will save the life of your friend, your lover, your next door neighbor, the person at work you hate. Your answer will save the company you work for, the neighborhood you live in, your daughters school, the little park just down the street, New England.

The person who asks you the question will be your younger sister, the guy in the elevator, your best friend, the CEO of the company you work for, the woman in the car across the street, the governor of Massachusetts. They'll be depressed, crying, fearful, in pain, desperate, stoic, angry, or simply have a blank look on their face. You won't have time to look it up, ask someone else, talk it over, think it through or read about it on-line. Everything will stop. People will turn to hear your answer. Faces will lift. It will get a little quiet. Suddenly it will be now.

The question you will be asked is, "what should we do?" Your answer will change the course of your life and the lives of others for better or for worse. Will you be able to give that answer?

Is this actually going to happen? Maybe. But here's the "really scary" version – perhaps more likely is that no one will ask at all. People will just stand there frozen, uncertain, bewildered, baffled, trapped in the middle of a horrible, desperate situation – physical, emotional, economic – and simply wait for something to happen. That's when you need to lead. Unasked, you have to step forward and say what you think we should do. Answering the unasked desperate question is the hardest thing in the world to do and the most important, but to be able to do it you have to prepare – starting now.

So that's why we're really here, to get you to a point later in life, where you could answer that question or even more importantly the unasked desperate question. If you want to change the world you need to get ready. You may not think you're up to it, but everyone here is. However, if you're just here to have a good time, later you're not going to be much help to anyone because you won't be able to answer the question – you didn't prepare, you didn’t learn enough, you didn’t grow, you didn’t gain enough confidence. You'll have small ideas and that great desperate question will just hang there – unanswered.

So what is it that you’ll have to learn to be able to answer that question? What is it that you’ll have to develop in yourself to be able to stand and respond? Who will you have to become to be able to do all of it? There’s your curriculum. There are your learning goals. Find the questions that you want to be responsible for in the future. Don’t pick something trivial, choose to be responsible for ideas and actions that are truly important.

But wait, there’s one more thing. Not only do you have to be able to answer the question, you also have to be there, don’t you. Step forward. Get on the front line. Always be at the head of the crowd. Not only is it a better view, but you’ll understand more and have more influence. One day in the future, right there, right then, it could, you know, all come down to just you. 

gunther   October 14, 2013

Das Neue Implementation 2.0

I just survived one of those well meaning, but off-target how to group-think about priorities and get (more) stuff done workshops. Now, in retrospect, I think it simply needed a better preface, focusing discussion and progressive lead-in. Instead we jumped into solving the problem. Wait, I said, what problem? How do I come up with a solution if I don’t even know what the problem is? I showed up just to discover what the problem is, not solve it. I don’t need a prescription, I need a diagnosis.

The methodological approach of todays technique was to write down the problem, post it on a wall, notice other people’s problems then draw on possible resources, develop actions and feel good about having solved the problem in less time than talking about it. Well some hits and some misses I think.

I’ve come to value the “talk about it” model more and more. Not actually for solving problems, I agree it’s way too slow, but for discovering them. That always seems to me the more important and less examined area. We’re all too quick to come up with solutions, but less interested in the taxonomy of how problems relate or separate. Are they perceived or actual? Are they tactical or strategic? Are they engineered to happen or are they accidental? It reflects my Hampshire philosophy that I think the power is in the question, not the answer.

This isn’t the only workshop of it’s kind. Bob Crowley and folks in IT are doing similar kinds of trainings that offer a small range of approaches and methods for feeling better about your workload. Well, at least feeling better about the method of approaching your workload, but Bob’s current method – service design – is much more introspective while being analytic at the same time. Nice house blend.

This also meshes well with the frequent and on-going strategic planing discussions that we’re all invited to. The end result is an increased awareness of how to think about problems at work, of work and how to approach their solutions. That’s good regardless of how modest or off-center it is.

What this really shows, I think, is what I’m calling The New Implementation. It’s the next fast approaching version of Hampshire now that so many of the first generation faculty are retiring and the new folk are looking around and re-examining the lay of the land.

The New Implementation isn’t about new buildings or a bigger budget, but simply refining the way and the why of what we do all day (also perhaps slightly into the night), though there’s going to be nothing simple about it. What we’re going to experience is a fissure of procedural behaviors. As we think through and work differently what we end up doing will slowly reveal the next iteration of what we call Hampshire, the college. There’ll be a lot of congruity in some areas, but less in others.

It’s all to be expected and embraced as long as we build a common and agreed upon story that captures the spirit, drive and excitement of what education needs to become to be both effective and sustainable and still wear the name Hampshire. Everyone is going to play a part in The New Implementation – whether they want to or not.

gunther  12-5-2013

Multi-asking: the professional use of questions

It’s common for people to have significant difficulty asking meaningful and important questions even in situations where asking those questions is their number one task. Part of the problem is emotional fear and social reluctance. We’re all shy at some level and usually loath to actively make ourselves look foolish to others, so instead of speaking up we remain silent and try and blend into the background – a poor choice when we’re actually trying to learn something.

I see this in the early part of the semester where students in a class have not fully bonded together and have limited trust of each other. I also see it in tour groups of prospective students and their parents. None of them want to be thought of as the people who don’t know what’s going on or show how little background they may have. Silence seems to be the cloak of invisibility that gets pulled over their heads to let time pass in those slow tick, tick, ticks, hopeful that someone else will ask or that it’ll all be over soon. Sad.

Unfortunately people seem to think that questions are like arrows that must be shot directly into the center of the target to be useful or feel important. That’s wrong, or less critically, that’s not a useful understanding of the function of the art of questioning. First, it’s not a competition. It’s a dialogue. That means it’s more like ping-pong, but it’s not a game anyone should try to win. Think of it more as an extended practice session. The longer you can keep the volley going the more practiced and developed each of you become. It’s the flow that’s the goal, not hitting the ball off the table. If you try to win, you lose.

Asking questions is like open-air thinking. Part of it is conversation, part of it is inspiration and part is effective listening. The goal is to move understanding from one person to another and maybe even back again. A sequence of good questions can lead a conversation, highlight lack of clarity or reveal insights.

Done well it offers participants the pleasure of discovery and the gratification of personal growth. Done poorly it may feel like a knife fight or the demeaning harassment of bullies. Ouch, don’t want to do that again do you? In a classroom people are not opponents, they’re colleagues and friends. In large open lectures that may be less so, and yes, perhaps more confrontational at that, though if you’re trying to win it’s a unattractive sport. But our goal should always be directed to personal development and, alas, practicing to withstand bullies may play a useful part of that after all.

I admit that one of the fundamental problems with using questions for learning is that you have to follow the dialogue. What, you actually have to follow the thread of the discussion - astonishing. A useful question pauses the speaker and informs them that there might be some vagueness in what they just said, or there’s some confusion about how a statement might apply to a variant of the situation. The point is to address an uncertainty directly related to or just slightly a variation of what was said. If you didn’t get what they just said you derail the flow, there’s an abrupt stop and then you all have to realign and start in again hopefully with more attuned listening.

Another useful result of asking questions is reverse interrogation. The speaker discovers from the questioner just how far off the track they are from the questions they ask. A pointed question shows both people are aligned while an inappropriate question shows the questioner is way off base. Both are useful, though one requires a lot more work to get back on track.

Our Hampshire mode is, I believe, to value the question even more than the answer. I keep telling students in the film building to beware of easy technological answers because they have a finite shelf life and soon become the wrong answer, but by being able to ask the appropriate interrogating question you can derive the correct answer yourself again and again. It's not the answers that set you free it's the questions.

gunther 12-10-2013

Metrical Questions or Who Is Sitting at That Table

As a faithful disciple of the cult of the brightest shiny object in my mind, also know as “what are you reading now” syndrome; the ability to generate an accurate persona of who is the patron sitting at the far table is my current favorite (it’s basically Service Design).

Lots of people come through the front door and mill about. Some even sit down and look like they’re doing work. I wonder who they really are – first years, Div III’s. Who knows? No, I mean who knows. I would suspect no one. It’s something we don’t track, but if we did how would we do it, what would it take and do you think it would be beneficial? Oh, maybe the most important question of all – what would you do with that information now that you know.

We often think we’re doing a good job helping people, but it’s really based more on assumptions than facts. In the labs I can usually judge who’s an advanced worker simply because I recognize them more often from simple repetition of showing up over the years. But not always. The discussions I have with them are fundamentally different than what I talk about with a first year student. Talking with first years is more directed at concrete answers that add to functionality with a little contextualization spread around to rationalize why we do things the way we do with the hope that they can buy into that also and give them a perceptible pathway into how they’ll work in the future (while it may not be exactly a straight path it is usually continuous).

Talking with Division III students is a little more slanted to mental health, the benefits of diligence, a supportive dialogue about their project, family history, track record with their committee, suggestions for project development, techniques for managing work over a long period of time, prospects for the project and a gentle reminder that there is a future beyond graduation and are you sufficiently prepared for that. It’s as much social as technical. 

It’s also more about how the added time factor (significant temporal duration versus a typically truncated class assignment) affects all aspects of the work (scope) and how our emotions play out differently over such an extended time period. It’s about how work is done in an immersive world not the artificial ephemeral effects of short assignments. Not only does the time scape of a year add to the quantity of the work it also adds to the quantity of the worry.

But back to the question of who’s sitting over there at that table. We can take it down to the fundamental question of do you think it would make a difference if we knew? I do. Not only is that the fundamental knowledge of who the patron is (or the theoretical persona), but it’s the consequent knowledge of what’s an appropriate interaction – some, none or in-between. While the first floor is a remarkably social space it’s also one in which staff doesn't seem to interact with the patrons unless asked (approached). Is that an appropriate business model? It may be traditional, but what do we care about that at all. Is it effective? As I’ve said before, it’s not interactive unless you interact.

But perhaps I’m completely wrong. Maybe the students who sit at the tables are all doing fine, their work is exemplary, need no help and will flourish in our absence. Oh, but wait – we don’t know that either do we. Say, if that were true wouldn’t we want to know that even more.

gunther  12-1-2013

I've Discovered Time-Travel

You can see for yourself that I post to this blog about every two weeks give or take a few. (OK, maybe it's every two months or so, but it's the same idea.) The previous post was dated at the end of May 2012 and here I am today in the middle of July 2013 and for me it's only been two weeks – as usual.

What better proof could you ask for than a regularly occurring event suddenly leaps into the future by over a year. Remarkable, but obviously true. Obviously. Time-travel is real – well at least for me.

I've just finished listening to the History of Rome podcast (oh, for you that was last year, right) and somehow in the last two weeks I've listened to it all over again even finding it more interesting the second time around. Oh the pleasures of finding out what we don't know, which for me is quite a lot or at least seemingly endless, but now that I've got time-travel in my kit bag... Say, wait a minute I jumped forward in time. Does that mean I have less time or more time available to me?

Anyway, I've also just had an "opening" for a photo show in the film building yesterday (certainly have been busy the last two weeks). The whole experience of putting up a show validates for me again the power of formal presentations of work. In the process of getting work up on the wall the work gets better. It's a combination of repeated practice and increased self-evaluation; all with a little more internal pressure than usual over a shorter period of time so that in the end you grind out more work of a higher caliber.

Part of the success comes simply from the faster turn-around time of the shoot, edit, print, evaluate cycle and the enforced concentration of effort and thought, repeated and repeated again until you amass a significant body of work you actually like. It's both easy and hard. (If it were that easy everybody would be doing it, but also if it was really hard no one would be doing it.)

It's also a reminder of how much emotions play in the process of doing good work, any kind of work. The emotional landscape is not to be overlooked as an influencing factor in the growth of any significant body of work or even the accumulation of skill sets and professional practice.

If you get depressed or deflated by a few wrong turns, failed outcomes, or lack of seemingly forward progress you can not give up. You need to keep working and try and solve your own problems or perhaps first, find your own problems. This is what really separates the amateurs from the pros. The amateurs just stop. The pros never stop, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems. That's why they end up being the pros. Remember they didn't start out that way; they ended up that way. It's not over until it's over, but if you quit it's immediately over and you lose.

If you're lucky and skillful you produce a few "good" pieces of work early in the process that give you enough inspiration and pleasure so that you keep catapulting yourself forward. Once you get going you can build up some emotional momentum to let you glide more easily over the rough times and keep accelerating with the good times. A rolling stone gathers good will.

Oops, I just realized one of the problems of jumping ahead in time – all my library books are really overdue now. Gotta go pay those fines.

gunther

The End of Rome

Just a few days ago the History of Rome ended. No, not the empire, the podcast. I found the History of Rome just after I listened to most of the Norman Centuries by Lars Brownworth. It made so much sense out of what few fragments I remembered about the Normans. Embarrassingly most of what we know about the Normans comes from what we watch in Robin Hood movies and you can just imagine how deep and faithful to history that is - hah.

So after being impressed by how little I knew about the Normans I though I’d benefit from a run through the History of Rome podcast. The Normans were just 13 episodes long. Rome however, ends up running for 179 episodes and ironically seems way too short by the time you get there. Hey, we’re talking the history of Rome here - a lot happened.

Now, at the end, as the empire fights one petty tyrant after another our author, Mike Duncan, declares that for all practical purposes the Roman Empire is sufficiently dispersed that it’s history no longer matters in the epic sense that we usually think of it. It all degenerates into soap opera and trivial affairs. No one will benefit from continuing, not even Mike. That, probably, is the deepest insight into how the Roman Empire fell than anything else will ever provide. Even the people most involved no longer really care.

However, the easter Roman Empire does continue for another 1,000 years and is still yet another story to be learned. I look forward to someone claiming it as their turf and expanding our understanding of how that part of history unfolds. We’ll see.

But to mollify my grief over the ending of Rome, I went back and downloaded all of them and have started over from the beginning. To my great surprise I hated the first one. Mike is stiff and way too formal in his reading. The writing, too, is stiff and clunky. It’s too pedantic and caught up in trivialities and the whole experience is nothing like what I enjoyed at the end – a feeling you had a personal friend versed in historical perspective who was explaining it all just to you.

But of course – he got better over time. It’s a great example of how doing the thing makes you better. That practice and action win out given enough time should be obvious. Reading a podcast is a practiced art as is the writing and even doing the research. It all takes time and repetition to come together to form a personal style that’s both authoritative yet relaxed. (To say nothing of finding the right mic and sound deadening the room.) He’s built up his own perspective on what’s really important about the epic of time and events passing before us. It’s what you’d expect of study, improvement and knowledge gained.

Knowing more now, at the beginning, gives new perspective to actions and events. I can’t wait to find out how the History of Rome ends, again.

gunther

What To Study?

I frequently ask prospective students on tours what they want to study. Often, I get blank looks and long pauses and finally, “I don’t know.” Unfortunately, it seems to be stressful for the whole family, not just the student. At Hampshire it’s OK to relax a little more when someone asks you that question. I certainly don’t expect the response to be a singular answer. Oddly, what you answer back isn’t even important, it’s just a conversation starter – an interaction.

A response to an asked question is really the gateway to leaning; it’s that technique of a back and forth question-and-answer interaction that hopefully turns into a useful conversation of discovery for both people. It’s not that either one of us knows the correct answer(s) – frequently we don’t. Instead we use conversation as a method of discovering our interests and possible actions based on those interests through suggestions of books to read, good classes to take and appropriate people to talk with.

Certainly it’s not that anyone expects you to know what job you will want for the rest of your life right now. You’ll most likely be wrong no matter what your answer or how much you believe it to be true. It is, however, a question of what you actually want to do all day. What do you like to do? What are you willing to invest a lot of effort in? What, at the end of day has made you happy?

Our style is to find promising situations and jump into them and then later assess the outcome. A Hampshire grad once said, “ Life is full of once in a lifetime opportunities.” Some he took, others he let pass by and later he found more. It’s about thoughtful interactions and timely participation judiciously chosen.

Work on things you find interesting and that will offer you still yet more options later (both short term and long term). You need both sides – fun now and possibilities later. Work on projects that are hard, but doable. It’s just like working out. You need to stretch a little, work up a sweat, build up stamina and get stronger by doing so – over time.

An important criterion for judging the worth of what you’re working on is suspense. Yep, just like in the movies. If you aren’t worried about how your work is going to come out, if there isn’t uncertainty, what you’re working on isn’t very important or hard enough. Some things are way too easy to do to really benefit you. Remember, you’re trying to learn and grow, not just turn in homework. If you just want to turn in homework you should go somewhere else.

Find questions that make the world interesting to you by learning enough to notice what those questions should be. With deep insights and strong questions the answers take care of themselves.

gunther

Some time has passed

It's been quite a long time since I've written a new post. At first it was the busy end of the semester rush that turned into the pleasures of vacation time and then it happened. My 95 year old mother calls saying she's dizzy and can't get out of bed. Off to the emergency room for a night of worry and waiting, followed by a diagnosis of vertigo. OK, that's better and understandable although it's irritating and she needs more assistance.

For all of the nice people who work hard at providing health care services my praise and thanks, however health care in America is much like the sea - indifferent, vast, mostly unknown and on a remarkably different time scale. You enter into it and then time and space collapse into grayness and waiting with usually too little understanding of what might occur next and what that might mean.

Things get better, a return to normalcy and then it happens. She falls and breaks her arm. Well, fracture of the arm really. Back to the emergency room with x-rays and more waiting. The orthopedic specialist says it's not bad, it'll take six weeks to heal - just wait it out. Then it happens - she falls at home alone and spends most of the day on the floor in the bedroom.

With more assistance things stabilize again and seem manageable, but the visiting nurses say she can't stay home alone, she should be admitted again. Back to the emergency room and she stays overnight and is admitted to the hospital. I show up to visit in the morning and am led into the nicest hospital room I've ever seen - wow. However this is just a holding pattern to allow her to quality for the next round of care in a rehabilitation facility - where I don't know.

They find an opening in Ludlow which is a 50 minute drive each way for me to visit. It's no where near as nice as the last room. This holds four people in various stages of physical capabilities and outcome. It's a little grim to be honest and she's not too happy about it at all, but she needs the help and the therapy.

A week and a half later they find an opening for her at a facility that's only 8 minutes away from my house and she's transported and settled in. It's much nicer, closer, friendlier and seems more promising, but how would I know.

I visit every day because I can. I collect the dirty laundry and bring back the clean, drop off the magazines, bring a can of nuts and some bottles of water, and sit and talk for 20 minutes each day.

We hit the six week mark and return to the orthopedic specialist and he says, wow, she's heeled quite well, can now put weight on that arm and he'll see us in four more weeks, again.

The therapy is really working, she's out of the wheelchair walking, though a little unsteady. She's reading again - having asked me to buy a desk lamp to make it easier to see. At some point she'll be going home and need more assistance with daily living and we'll see how it goes.

With only Medicare to pay her way it's lucky that she's got enough money in the bank to cover the extra expenses that they don't fully pay. As we all get older as a society there's only more of this to look forward to on a larger and larger scale. I can only hope that not too many of us get caught up in the sea.

gunther

Back to the Beginning, Again

One of the things that strikes me again and again as I see tour groups come through the film building is the difficulty that people have in asking meaningful questions, even when it’s really important that they do so. It’s hard for people to put up their hand and ask a question that would give them sufficient information to make a decision. Most of them just stand there and look around as if seeing a hallway will provide enough information from which to select a future college for their student.

But with a little banter back and forth, a few pointed questions at them, a slow painful response, you can build up a back-and-forth exchange that will finally allow them to express their concerns and address their uncertainties. It takes time to build that interaction and time for it to unfold. Usually that time is lacking.

I see this also with first year students in class. Everyone sits there uncertain what a reasonable question would be. What, they think, do I even know enough of, to be confused about. They’re baffled by the whole thing and sit there in a puddle of inertia waiting for clarity to simply strike them.

How do you break people out of that and get them going?

The real goal is to get them finally to a level where new questions can be self-answered or they have sufficient skills to discover the answer.  But, fundamentally, you need to learn how to discover what is the question that should be asked right now?

So I see all of this as much the same problem, the problem of being a beginner. At the earliest stages of learning anything you have no vocabulary, no methods, no history, no resources, and often no hope. It’s depressing.

It is problematic, but if you make your way past this initial stage with even some modest amount of understand under your belt you might find yourself, through positive actions, miraculously able to do things , which then allows you to feel better about what you’re doing, maybe even good, which then makes it easier to learn the rest of it all. A rolling stone gathers good will and then goes faster, sometimes even in the right direction.

If you miss that turn in the road of simply being able to do things, you will, mostly likely, never succeed. Energy sapped, you’ll give up and walk away disappointed and disgruntled thinking you failed. Mostly, you never had a chance. The deck was stacked against you and you didn’t even know that.

So what’s it take to show up at the right place with just enough skills to do something that makes you feel good enough to keep going and eventually get much better?

Part of it is understanding that there is an emotional landscape that we’re walking across with dips and hills, elegant vistas and murky views, quiet times and hectic days. We’ll experience a range of emotions and feelings that we need at times to embrace or ignore, but always realize that it’s a flow that’s as natural as the passing of the day. Some days it rains, some days the sun shines brightly, but it will always change and then change again.

We also need to feel that there’s actually a path we can follow. Even more useful, that there could be a map to show us where we are, where we’ve been and what the options are for future exploration. With out a map to discover the terrain we’re not just lost, but lost with no insights about where we even want to be. Maybe we’re actually right where we want to be, but we just don’t know that.

Questions are like surveyors sent out ahead to draw the landscape, plot the pathways, find the way and then report back information that we can use to make better informed decisions. Without strong questions we’re just wandering in the wilderness, just short of being  totally lost.

The Hampshire way is to ask, ask again, and ask someone else. None of the answers are necessarily true. So not only do you need good questions, but you also need to question the answers. It’s up to you, with strong questions and valid answers, to build the map to find out both where you are and where your really want to go.

gunther

What Do You Call Those?

This week Johnathan Singer, the person who printed Jerry Liebling's fantastic show, visited Kane Stewart's photography class and spoke for about three hours. He was quite interesting and shared a lot of background information about the process and his studio.

It's really remarkable that even after Jerry has died he's still leading the way for us, showing us what photography has to offer. HIs show in the film building now is a collection he curated himself and had printed on large format Epson flatbed printers at Singer Editions in Boston. The images are from Jerry's original film negatives scanned at high resolution, lightly processed in Photoshop and mounted and framed in Jerry's traditional white frames.

It's a great show and Jerry was really happy with the results, seeing things in the prints that were not possible with previous darkroom processes. It shows that photography isn't tied to any one medium or process. It isn't a fixed concept, but a constantly evolving approach to capturing images from our lives, from the world and sharing them in the form of prints on the wall.

These images are much larger than we've seen before which just by itself allows us to see deeper into the image, with new discoveries, new appreciations. I feel inspired to shoot more myself. It's like Jerry is there leading us down the hallway as usual, pointing to things we should see and waiting for us to hang our own prints to talk about. It's all quite inspiring, motivating and emotional.

As always, thanks Jerry.

gunther

A Three Light Night

Thinking in small units is sometimes a big help.

What the heck are you talking about?

Constraints. If all you have is a one foot ruler, then all of your measurements end up being in units of one foot. If all you have in a light kit are three lights, then you start thinking in terms of a three light setup. If all you have available to you to shoot with over the weekend is a Canon HV-30 camcorder then thatʼs what youʼre going to use. Life gets easier, well sort of, but you see my point.

We donʼt really have to know how to use all of the cameras in the world, just the ones we can get our hands on. Suddenly the world is a little easier to understand, well, at least for a while it is.

Iʼve been reading a very interesting book (Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner) on the history of audio recording and the mutual effects that both technology and commerce have on what we think is a viable and desirable recording, or more accurately the sound of a recording. Weʼve gone from the attempt to capture a faithful acoustic recoding of what it sounded like to be in a small room with a bunch of musicians to electronically manipulating sound recordings to produce previously unheard sounds and effects.

The evolving commerce of records, tapes, and CDs over the years has taken itʼs toll on what passes as good music. The complexity of multi-track recording moves a lot of decision making away from the performance of the music to the mixing of the music.

The early Beatles recordings were faithful acoustically, certainly more immediate and most likely more fun to make. The performance was the recording. Later with 24 track tape decks, the song was manufactured in the control room on playback, not during the recording. That meant the performance part was really just collecting elements from which you would later build the song. You were just making parts for the whole, more like filmmaking than a faithful live performance.

This approach of after the fact mixing led to many heated discussions in the control room and fostered conflict among the participants. A lot of bands didnʼt survive the method. It wasnʼt what they signed up for.

Itʼs no longer can you play the drums and sing, but later can you survive the discussion of what kind of filter should be applied to the sound and how many small clips from multiple takes can you cut and past together to produce a completely new sound. Many additional people get to throw their opinion up against the performers view of what they should sound like. More people, more opinions, more arguments. Bands now need counselors to keep harmony on the emotional plane, not just in the music.

So thatʼs the other side of constraints - how many. When your options multiply and more and more people have a vote in each decision the kind of work thatʼs happening changes from a maker to a manufacturer, from artists to committees. This is the dangerous side of the concept of collaboration.

gunther

The History of Photography

Jerome Liebling died this week. I hadn't seen him for almost a year and I knew his health was an issue. He founded the film/photo program at Hampshire College and taught here from the beginning until 1990 when he retired. When I read the date 1990 in the Daily Hampshire Gazette article I was quite surprised. For me Jerry had just left a few years ago, but I was wrong, quite wrong.

When he retired he had a wonderful photo show in the library gallery and I had the honor of helping to hang a couple of walls of his photographs. Toward the end of the day there was a discussion about how to hang two photos (part of a larger group of images) - which should be on which side. I said the distant shot should be on the left and the closeup shot should be on the right as if you were looking into the group of photos (scanning from left to right you moved into the image), not away. Everyone paused and looked at Jerry. He thought a moment and said I was right. Bingo, best evaluation ever. Jerry though I was right. Hah.

I think I took his concentrators class four times and each time my photos got better. Jerry could make a walk down a hallway a memorable experience with questions, comments and stories. It was the stories that surprised me the most. I loved his photos, but his stories were even better which I guess was the real reason his photographs were so good. He saw the story in the image and as a result each single image had the depth of a ten minute story in it, not just the length of the click.

I always said when you talked to Jerry you were talking to the history of photography and you felt it. After he retired that history, without him,  took many odd turns at times. Photography seemed to flounder and not know what to do with itself. Fashion took over and every year there was a new "look" to how photographs should be made. The classic documentary photo was deemed old fashioned and out came "text". You had to have "text" somewhere in the image to be hip or look like you were "making a statement". Gender politics took over for several years, and hasn't completely disappeared, making photos an ideological opportunity, though not really interested in photography at all.

It all thrashed around. Color came and went and then came back again. Size has always been troublesome and unresolved. There were arguments about frames, but everyone has forgotten that now. Digital was the new kid, then the only kid, then still a kid. Finally everyone just got tired of the changes every season and it's all settled down again. Most photos look like classic documentary photos after all. What a waste of effort. It should be a lesson for all of us, but it isn't, is it.

So Jerry really was the history of photography - from World War II until now. The people who knew him, were students of his and, ever widening, were students of his students have had that history touch them.

The power of photography is in the story that's captured by the image and the relationship of the photographer to that story. The method of a great photographer is to have the camera disappear in their hands. The measure of a great photograph is to have the photographer disappear and leave only the image and the story. Jerry's photos are still telling his stories and will forever. Thanks Jerry.

gunther

What Works Around, Goes Around

Thankfully there are a lot of smart people out there poking Final Cut X with a stick to see what it'll do. Sometimes that's even useful. On Ken Stone's web site Steve Martin posts a method of making and using disk images to keep your work separated from other editors on a station. It's easy and clever and has the added advantage of allowing us to also edit across a network as we did previously with Final Cut 7. So that takes care of my two big complaints against the new kid.

It would have been nice if Apple has just mentioned this right from the beginning, but maybe they didn't know about it either. I can't tell if I think that's good or bad. Hmm.

I surprised myself yesterday, editing in Final Cut X, with the ease of copying a "look", or rather matching a color pallet from one shot to several others. That was useful. It gave a more unified look to a quick montage sequence I cut using good and not so good shots.

I had the RGB parade view up (to give me insight into what's off with the color) and I was also using a second monitor for the Events window which made it much easier to see the clips I was working with. So, all in all a pretty good experience with our new friend (or is it the devil in disguise, just tempting us).

I haven't had as much time working in Final Cut X as I would like because we're, as usual most summers, remodeling the labs in the media basement. This year I cut down the depth of the desktops by about a foot. I built them quite a while ago to fit all of the video equipment we used to have at a station: decks (DV and VHS), video monitor, two 17" or 19" CRT monitors, a tower computer, hard drives, (Zip and Jaz drives, remember), a mixer, headphones, speakers, Final Cut colored keyboard and I'm sure something else, too. Well those days are over. We have much less stuff at a station now and that empty space ends up just collecting dust bunnies and tumbleweed.

Now, we're down to an iMac, an external Raid drive. speakers and headphone, a regular Mac keyboard, an Epson flatbed scanner and a couple of desk lamps. A little sleeker and, I hope, a little sexier. I still have to stop off at Target and get some more of those chrome desk lamps that everyone likes.

We used to have a couple of stations facing each other, but now they all look in the same direction at the large projection screen so it'll be easier to do training sessions in the lab. We're also taking over the old tech shop space and converting it to a classroom. That will relieve the use of the studio as a classroom space and  get it back to being a real shooting space again, something we all need desperately.

So lots of real work to do yet, but the results are already paying off in the cleaner look and feel of the lab, which always makes it easier to maintain, and the open-ended potential of an adjacent, high-end, media classroom. We were surprised to notice that we'll end up with three adjacent spaces all with large projection capabilities and good traffic flow from one to the next.

Oh, and we have the new InfoBar concept to work with up on the main floor of the library – we'll have a public presence for a change (that's a whole other post to talk about). Looks like it could be a fun year.

gunther

Working Your Way Around

So I've had a little time to work in Final Cut Pro X – just a couple of days. But first we really do have to modify the name. It's now "officially" FInal Cut X, no Pro in the name please. Now I'm not mad about it, not crazed like some have been, but let's be honest it's not a pro app based on what's still in our heads from past experiences. Sure it still has some bugs if you go by the discussions, but it is a good application for editing video in an easy, yet powerful way. I want to use it and I think a lot of students will also. It's what iMovie should have been.

If you remember, my biggest complaint was that it wants to give you access to all the footage and projects all the time. For a home computer that's OK, but not in a multi-user environment, nor particularly in a business environment, no, not at all. Is there a way around that – yes.

In the old days the Avid Media Composer had the same problem. All we did was add our name to the name of the folder and it disappeared. The software could only see the 5.xMedia folder and nothing else.

Well, same thing here. Final Cut X makes two folders. One is the Final Cut Events folder for the footage and the other is the Final Cut Projects folder for the sequence (see even the application doesn't call it Pro). All you have to do is rename or better yet move them into a new folder with your name on it and the application can no longer see your project and footage. Easy.

OK, it's not going to be easy, people are going to get it wrong and lose track of their footage and project, but in the end it'll be OK. Does it bother me that I can't output to tape? No, in my world tape is dead, no loss there. Do I think the color correction is a little clunky - umm, yes, but I"m far from being a perfectionist. In fact I may be the perfect customer for Final Cut X – lots of in-house projects, mostly short form and working in a lot of differing formats.

So, will I toss out the old Final Cut Pro Studio? No way. People are still working on projects with that and I suspect people will also start projects with that. Will I switch over to Adobe Premier to edit? No, probably not, but I am interested in their DVD authoring application to make interactive Blu-ray disks and once I've got the whole package of applications maybe I'll use Premiere a bit.

In the end it's been useful to see that a monolithic approach to our problems isn't such a good idea after all and that we should have a broader range of options for doing work. It's also important to notice that, for a lot of us, the work has changed and the concept of the monolith video editor is no longer true either. It's a new day for all of us in all respects.

It's also been amusing to see how vocal everyone has been. We don't usually get as rilled up as this. That has made us feel like a community of users, but also with differing opinions and different needs. Let's keep talking to each other and help all of us get through this transition into the future. As we say at Hampshire we're driving fast into the fog. Good luck.

gunther

Final Pro – It's not just software, it's a business.

Oh my goodness, what a ruckus. Just when you though you knew the lay of the land and the direction working in media was headed we suddenly get involved in a four car accident in the middle of a busy intersection with thousands of bystanders gasping and running around in circles shouting that aliens have landed. Well it sort of seems that way.

What really happen was that Apple computer said some things about new software that most of us impressionable youths took to mean one thing and then the reality was something different. How different depends on what kind of work you do - broadcasting, web-based, feature films, art, student work. If you have clients you were mad. If you work for yourself it was odd and maybe you were mad. If you just play around it was great. Pick your favorite. Oh wait, I'm in all of them - drat.

So I've always said that we have no real loyalty to any software, we just like to use the best tools we can find. For quite a while that has been Final Cut Pro. When I said that people would smile and say, oh sure, you're always going to go with Apple no matter what they have, right.

Well, maybe not, but, sure I do, have always, liked Apple products and I would just expect that to continue, right, but the bottom line is I have to get work done for me and for a lot of film students in the easiest, safest, most reasonable way possible. Over time I've built up expectations, developed an approach, experienced successes and failures and come to think that the way we work is the norm and is a reasonable, thoughtful method. If a new software doesn't fit into that method I stop fast and say, whoa, what's that. That doesn't seem right. In fact that's wrong. Stop. Corporate rhetoric doesn't play a part in shaping what I think is an appropriate approach, just my personal experience. Hype quickly disappears with a few frustrations under your belt.

So what's the new reality? Well, I think we've all agreed the new software isn't Final Cut Pro, it's iMovie Pro, but wait, it's a really good replacement for the old iMovie (not that I ever liked iMovie, but I've gotten over that). For some people the new app is just what they need, a really powerful, sophisticated, more reasonable, more understandable iMovie replacement (upgrade).

For the Pro crowd, the business crowd, the people with clients standing behind them it's not enough. It may not even be usable. For me the worst part is the lack of accommodating multiple users. The application thinks you own the computer, all the footage on it is yours, and it would be a good thing to have access to that footage all the time. That's a problem, it's not what I want to have happen and I need control over that. I need to hide projects and footage from other users. I can live with almost everything else.

When the new fiscal year starts next week I'll buy a copy of Final Cut Pro X, throw in some clips and see if I can figure out a work around to hide projects and files I don't want seen. Either I can do that or I can't. After I find out I'll decide what's next. Luckily it's not the end of the world, it's just an inconvenience and has added more uncertainty to the media world that we really needed, but in a few months we'll all be working some how.

gunther (1)