SELF IN THE GLOBAL REPUBLIC: INDIVIDUAL STATES OF MIND
Resources

 

Lesson Three: Ecology, Technology and the Individual

 

 Activities

 

YOU

Activity 1: Finding Yourself in the World

How well do you know your landscape?

Go to http://maps.google.com/

Click on "Satellite"

Can you find your home using the satellite image alone? Give it a try.

Find your house, your school, and your community.

Think about your answers to the questions below and prepare a short paragraph (4-6 sentences). Share your response with the class by posting it to the forum called, “My home environment”

1. How does it appear to you from this perspective?
2. What is around your community that you never noticed before?
3. What does it all look like to you?
4. How is it different from your view on the ground?
5. How is everything connected together?
6. How is this map the same or different from the one you drew of your social network?
7. What are you sharing your space with? Any idea from this map?


YOU AND YOUR SOCIAL CIRCLES

Activity 2: Making a Map

In groups of three students, make a social map.

Find out more about social mapping and social networking

This map could be of your classroom, of your school, of your home, or of your community.

You may draw it by hand and then scan it, or you may use the diagramming features of Word or use a draw or paint program.

While preparing the map with your group, answering some of these questions might help you decide what to put on your map:

  • What are the objects and which are important and which are not so important?
  • What are the pathways, the hallways, and the routes people take?
  • How are people grouped?
  • Are they with one another?
  • Are they with objects such as computers or at desks?
  • How close or how far are they from each other?
  • How are they related?
  • Are they friends?
  • Do they belong to the same teams or the same groups of friends? Or are they enemies?
  • Which places are shared? which places are exclusive? which places are public? which are private?

Prepare a short written description (2-3 sentences) that explains the map and post both the map and the description to the forum called “Map Gallery”.


Activity 3: Write a Software Review:

There are three different social software sites listed below. Choose one, evaluate it, and write a short review for a software magazine. Your review should be two paragraphs and must contain the following:

1. A description of what the software/website does.
2. Your evaluation of its usefulness. What is your opinion? Would you use it? Would you recommend it to your friends? Explain why or why not.

When you have completed your review, do two things: post it to the wiki page of the same name (FOAF, Foundcity, or Friendster), AND email it to your teacher. This review is a marked assignment (10 marks).

Choose only one of the following:

A. The Friend of a Friend Project:
"The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do."

B. Foundcity:
“With Foundcity you send photos and text messages from the street to your personal map and tag it, share it, blog it and more ..”

C. Friendster:
"Friendster aims to make the world a smaller place by bringing the power of social networking to every aspect of life, one friend at a time."


YOU AND YOUR ENVIRONMENT

Activity 4: The Three Ecololgies

Choose one of the following two artists/exhibitions below. Using the following questions as your guide, post your thoughts and discoveries (one paragraph) to the class forum called, "Making meaning of the 3 ecologies"

Guiding questions:
Examine your choice and compare it to Guattari’s three ecologies.

  • Do you see evidence of any of the three ecologies in their work? How?
  • How are the artists subjective?
  • Can you identify their point of view? For example, do they agree or disagree with the subject they are examining?
  • Do you agree or disagree, or do you just feel confused? If you feel confused, can you describe your confusion?
  • What do you think of the artworks and the artists' intentions? What do they make you think about?

Choose either A or B:

A. Art and Advertising

Chris Woods is a Vancouver-based artist interested in the intersection between advertising, capitalism, and art. Visit both links below:

The Billboard Project: link 1

Click on the pictures to make them larger and click to listen to Chris Woods talk about the project.

Think about these questions:
1. How does landscape and capitalism intersect?
2. What do you think of billboards? What do they make you think about?

More Chris Woods' Work: link 2

Click on the following pictures and listen to Chris Woods talk about them.

1. LighthouseII
2. Houdini
3. Angel’s Revenge
4. McDonald’s Nation
5. Avalok
6. Devil, Devil


B. What is environmental art?

Go to greenmuseum and click on “What is environmental art?” to find out.

A current exhibition at the greenmusuem is “The Voice of the Planet is the Muse.”

“Notice how so many of the human sounds are mechanical, the voices not of us, but of our machines. How is it that we have claimed the right to make so much noise, with so little thought?"

1. Read about soundscape art by clicking “Introduction,” and then “Styles,” and then “On Soundscapes.”

Can you define what Acoustic Ecology is?

2. Listen: Click on “Soundscape Artists” and listen to at least one artist from each category, more if you want and have the time.

What do you notice about the different sources of sound and how they mix, or don’t mix?

  • human voices
  • animal sounds
  • elemental sounds like water
  • machine sounds
  • human-constructed sounds


BACK TO YOU

Activity 5

Write in your learning log about your own ecologies. Where do you fit in the web of Nature and Social Relations? How has your mental ecology been affected by your environment? How does your social ecology affect the environment?

Also, while you are training your bot, talk to it about what you have reflected in your learning log. Ask your bot about some of these ideas. What does your bot respond? Reflect on your dialogues with your bot in your learning log.


B.Johnston/2006