Critical reading and creative writing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVrnryNCxxg&feature=youtu.be

I have chosen to create a trailer for an imaginary film version of Nice Work because after reading a book I like to watch the film version if there is one, and also because I would really like to see a film version of Nice Work .  Before creating my own trailer I watched on YouTube some trailers of other films so as to see the way in which they were organized and to see the main characteristics that I had to include. In my trailer I included images and key words that aimed to describe the characters.

The tool I used to create the trailer was Movie Maker.  It was the first time I used it. I found it was not so difficult to use. I didn’t have big problems and I’m going to continue using it in the future because I really liked. 

Postmodern Culture

The videos I’ve chosen are War Games and Educational Uses of Second life.

Both of them have postmodern characteristics. In the case of War Games, which is a 1983 American film of a young hacker who thought he was playing with a computer game but in fact he was declaring a nuclear war by entering the United States military supercomputer, there are some postmodern features. For example, according to Frederic Jameson, capitalism has three stages in which the third one is “a multinational or consumer capitalism associated with nuclear and electronic technologies” and closely connected to postmodernism. The subject of War Games is nuclear and electronic technologies and their manipulation. Another feature is that “in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies” and simulations. “A reality created by simulation” especially in computer games like in this film where the protagonist creates his own reality and thinks to be simulating a war. Moreover, knowledge is another key feature of postmodernism where “the advent of electronic computer technologies (illustrated in the film) has revolutionized the modes of knowledge.” The film shows us how everything is stored in a computer and how an unknown person unwittingly can access to the information and cause chaos.

In the case of Educational Uses of second life, we can also find postmodern characteristics. It is amazing to see how a student can be exposed to different situations like being in a virtual museum and learning about paintings or in a virtual theatre and role play and interact with the characters of any play. The connection between this video and postmodernism is the technological and intellectual development of software that can provide students with knowledge and enjoyment. Moreover, as it is software there is no original, only copies and simulations. 

Words in italics taken from Klages' article.

Post modernism Johanna Vassallo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IxcJsXyWtQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOFU9oUF2HA&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HtZ2M4e_AM&feature=player_embedded

 I watched these videos as well as I visited other sites.

 The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today. It is inclusive of a wide variety of disciplines and areas of study including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, etc, that’s why the term postmodernism refers to the idea of multiplicity and incompatibility, because lots of things exist together and may not be directly related one to each other or they may not be grouped under the same category, as a result of different particular processes, events or situations that give place to an interminable amount of changes among different disciplines.

As regards postmodernism in culture, it caused a complete change in productions such as contemporary vanguard film and video - but also a whole new style of commercial or fiction films. These commercial films were focused on every day families and advertised comics and consumer products, as regards fiction films a variety stories were mixed together to produce creative and imaginative films that were a revolution in cinema in those days, but all this wouldn’t have been possible without the invention of the first pictures in motion and animated films with synchronized sound.

Concerning art and education some postmodernism ideas are:

    

1.                           Violent reactions and sentimental world is reflected.
2.                         Moral relativism. People think of values to be based on feelings
3.             Emphasize story and personal discovery
4.                       The knowledge is fragmented. It is distributed and arranged in different ways thanks to modern technology’s inventions such as computers.
5.             The existence of virtual worlds that allows students and teachers to interact in a same virtual environment created by themselves but being each of them in a different physical one.
6.             You learn things not to know them, but to use them. This is called functional knowledge.
7.        Students become active participants in modifying knowledge that is at their hands. 

I believe Postmodernism is controversial reaction to all the things that modernism proposed departing primarily from the technological changes and revolutionary ideas that emerged from a post modern society.

"My November Guest"

http://www.glogster.com/meliribotta2012/poem/g-6l62lto1evurgf08vkiola0

This poem appeals to my visual sense; it also evokes mental images. I feel sad since I remember somebody who is no longer near me. I also picture a detailed description of the setting: I imagine a typical autumn day with cloudy skies, silver mist and bare trees.These look lonely and sad as the birds and the leaves are gone. This scenery is in pale colours: only different shades of gray.

The poet remembers a female guest who is still vivid in his mind although she is gone. It seems that she had a strong influence in their relationship because she recalls her attitude about autumn and, also, about him. Although he used to let her talk without answering her comments, he listened to her attentively. This makes me think that these two people have different personality traits; the woman may have been a lively, cheerful person with a strong admiration for nature while the poet appears to be more like an introvert.

I see some relations between the couple in the poem and Mr and Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay also exerted a strong influence over her family and friends. After her death, she still controlled everybody because her memory was strong in their minds. Mr. Ramsay was similar to the poet in the sense that the two of them were interested in their own thoughts and feelings, both unwilling to engage in conversation.

Hypertextopia

We chose ‘Hypertextopia’ since we found it a practical tool to connect the dialogue between Robyn and Vic with elements outside the text and with part of the text itself as well. The tool allowed us to create a network of links which somehow illustrate he scope of the text. Clearly, it stretches beyond its borders and it is linked to other utterances (music, movies, books, etc.)

Hypertextopia also permitted us create visual and audio-visual support to certain features of the dialogue. Some examples are the cover of the book ‘Culture and Anarchy’ Robyn was reading at the beginning as well as Vivaldi’s masterpiece ‘Autumn’ in reference to the season when Robyn would leave for the US. This tool helped us give the reader an insight of how our metal schema triggered different images ideas and concepts in order to make sense of what we were reading . In addition to that, it allowed us, also, to include links with short appositions to clarify certain parts of the dialogue, without interrupting the flow of it.

In view of the fact that ‘Nice Work’ is a postmodern novel, we thought that the tool would be a suitable one. Up to certain extent it permitted us to “make tangible” or illustrate the different links that exist in the text, not only the intratextual ones but the intertextual too. We tried to illustrate graphically the connections that took place in our mind as the dialogue unfolded before our eyes. We add interpretations of important concepts such as love, knowledge and freedom, being subjectivity and concrete experiences main characteristics of postmodernism. As one's feelings and perceptions of the world are relative, we considered it necessary to portray the mismatch between Robyn's rational perception of love and Vic's passionate feelings about her.

(zalazar, Nardone, Ledesma) 

Embedding Hypertextopia work

Use this code on html view to embed Hypertextopia.

<iframe frameborder="0" height="1000" scrolling="yes" src="http://www.hypertextopia.com/library/read/2203" width="650"></iframe>

Check your own URL and use that instead of the number given.

 We are all indebted to Sue Waters, who tweeted the answer to Julieta https://twitter.com/suewaters/status/264569240722501632/photo/1/large

In case you don't remember, you had Sue's wiki listed as Useful Web 2.0 links. You should make a point of checking her blog, too!

Critical reading and Creative Writing

We selected an extract from one of the letter Charles wrote to Robyn in Nice Work (pg. 310), in which he explains his decision to change career. We thought the letter was an important medium to give straightforward information about some of the socio-economic problems England faced during Margaret Thatcher's government in the 80s' and which deeply affected Higher Education. In this novel, Charles represents one of the many professionals who were demoralized and depressed by such a crisis and who had to make an important job decision in their lives to support themselves -even if it was at the cost of their academic careers. Being Robyn Penrose an extremely devoted teacher deeply stuck to her principles, we know that she would never think or even consider the possibility of abandoning her career for economic reasons. As she completely disapproves of Charles’ decision and regards him with a bit of contempt for that, we thought it fair to give him a voice and support him. His decision is simply based on real life grounds, he as any other worker at the time needed to earn a living to pay the rent, taxes, gas, bills, food, and many other daily expenses. As Vic says "there is nothing like a free lunch". Hypertextopia is an efficient tool to show some of the many mental images that came to our minds while reading the extract chosen. This website proves particularly advantageous because we as readers can interact with the text by not only adding background information, but also giving a personal touch to it. Being such an amazing tool available for free, we as teachers-to-be should bear it in mind, and offer our students the possibility of experiencing the satisfaction of creating an interecting with texts. http://hypertextopia.com/library/read/2198