Net Works panel and book launch

Eyebeam, Thursday October 14th, 6-8pm

Eyebeam presents a panel discussion among authors in the edited volume, Net Works (Routledge), followed by a reception and book signing and launch party. Net Works offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media art. Panel participants include xtine burrough (editor of Net Works), Michael Mandiberg, Ethan Ham, and Robert Nideffer.

Publishing Disruptions at Mobility Shifts

New School, Friday October 14th, 1:30-3:30 pm

I will be talking about my work with FlossManuals.net booksprints in the context of new platforms and tools for publishing outside of traditional infrastructures and open formats and licenses. Participants are: Morgan Currie, Sam Gould, Amanda Hickman, Michael Mandiberg, and Simon Worthington. Full info here.

Learning in Public and the Knowledge Commons at Mobility Shifts

New School, Friday October 14th, 6:30-8:30 pm

I will be talking about the benefits and difficulties of teaching by writing Wikipedia, in the context of a panel on the opportunities and challenges of learning in the digital commons, where learners study open materials and contribute original work back as part of their learning experience. Participants are:
Matthew X. Curinga, Michael Mandiberg, Roddy Schrock, Ian Sullivan. Full info here.

CUNY Open Access panel

CUNY Graduate Center room 9204, Friday October 28th, 5-7pm

As a culmination of CUNY Open Access Week 2011, and in conjunction with the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, this panel will unravel issues surrounding creative commons practices and open access publishing. Our panelists will share their inspiration for becoming open access advocates. The panel will include: the Radical Teacher editorial collective, Matthew K. Gold, Michael Mandiberg, and Trebor Scholz. More info here.

Bringing together an invited group of media practitioners, academic publishers, digital content developers and academics, the conference is designed to assess the impact of digital media on academic work and academic policy and authority.

The schedule is here

Participants include:

Cheryl Ball – Illinois State University
Brett Bobley – NEH Office of Digital Humanities
Steve Duncombe – New York University
Kathleen Fitzpatrick – Pomona College
Eileen Gardiner – ACLS Humanities E-Book
Josh Greenberg – New York Public Library
David Greetham – CUNY Graduate Center
Ann Kirschner – Macaulay Honors College, CUNY
Clifford Lynch – Coalition for Networked Information
Ronald G. Musto – ACLS Humanities E-Book
Phil Pochoda – University of Michigan Press
Tom Scheinfeldt – George Mason/CHNM
Trebor Scholz – The New School
Bob Stein – The Institute for the Future of the Book
Siva Vaidyanathan – University of Virginia
John Willinsky – Stanford/Open Journal System

Conference Description

The conference is built around a series of workshops, roundtable discussions and panels, spread across the day, at which conference participants will discuss and debate a broad range of issues related to the main conference themes, including: the impact of digital technology on academic instruction and research; the transformative impact of digital media on traditional forms of publishing, including academic monographs, textbooks, and academic journals; tenure and promotion in an era of digital scholarship; and collaborative research relationships within and across academic institutions and national boundaries. Demonstrations of diverse digital media projects, developed by faculty and doctoral students, will be offered throughout the day.

The conference will culminate in the evening with a public keynote address by cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. Prof. Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). We anticipate streaming the conference panels and keynote, both to preserve a record of the proceedings and also to make them accessible to those who are unable to attend in person.

The conference is designed to launch a dialogue about the radical changes made possible by digital media as they fundamentally reshape academic practice at all levels. We hope to explore multiple approaches to these major issues, mixing together academic skeptics and enthusiasts, media visionaries and naysayers, scholars from the global North and the global South, as well as digital and traditional publishers and content developers and providers.

My online collaborators Mushon-Zer Aviv and Jonah Bossewitch and I are leading off a day of workshops on online collaboration. I love that Jonah and I will be meeting in person for the first time, and that Mushon will be joining us via Skype. How online-collaborative is that!

ElectroSmog SkillShare: Tools and Models for Online Collaboration

Saturday, March 20, 2010 | 10AM – 5PM

Free with RSVP

Limit of 30 participants (in New York).

This SkillShare was conceived as part of the ElectroSmog Festival, a new, three-day, international festival that will introduce and explore of concept of “Sustainable Immobility”: a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.

10:30AM: Michael Mandiberg, Jonah Bossewitch, and Mushon Zer-Aviv (online) will present current models and challenges of online collaboration:

• What is and is not collaboration? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different models?
• Distributed Collaboration as promsing new model of group online development and collaboration
• Online collaboration methods as a way to bridge cultural as well as geographic distance
• Discussion of their work together in Berlin on Collaborative Futures

More here

Whenever I am asked, I never remember them all at once. And I seem to be asked more and more, so I am writing them all down here, to refer people to.

I should emphasize, that these are just opinions, not hard facts. Every situation is different. And this is primarily based off of experience in arts focused searches.

Advice on Academic Job Interviews

1. You should ask the department administrator or search chair (whomever your contact person is) for the names of the people who will be interviewing you. This is an ok question. Research their research. It might give you a sense of what they will ask. If you think it is relevant, and doesn’t look too sycophantish, you may refer to their research in the interview process.

2. The whole day of an on campus interview is an interview. Though it may seem purely a formality or informational when you meet the Dean or Provost, that is part of the interview; she may be sizing you up to see how you will do in your tenure process, or just getting a sense of whether you will fit in the school’s culture, or the makeup of that particular department. When you are having lunch with the members of the department it is part of the interview; that is where you prove that you are a nice person, and can have a relaxed and collegial conversation that IS NOT about work — do not talk about work, or yourself at the lunch/dinner. At all. And, when you are walking with the department chair, or search chair from the meeting with the Dean, to lunch with the department, that is part of the interview too. Is the chair silent? Is he chatty? How do you respond to his personality, during those five minutes walking across the campus quad, or walking down hallways. Explicitly or not, this will all be evaluated.

3. Identify what you want the committee to know about you. What are the key points you want to get across. These are your talking points. You should be presenting these points, ideas, feelings, emotions, etc on all levels, from answering questions, to your body language.

4. Don’t necessarily answer their questions directly. Use their questions do deliver your talking points.

5. Expect certain standard questions. Here are a few common questions:

• Expect a question about your field. “So what is New Media?” or “How do you define Journalism in the blogging age” or “How do you define the difference between art and design”
• Expect questions about what you do, how you define your practice, what your 5 year research plan is. This is your chance to really go off on your talking points about your work, and what you *have* done, and what you are planning on doing. Prove that you will hit the ground running, and become more and more productive. Prove that getting tenure will NOT be a problem.
• Describe a conflict with a student or colleague, and how you resolved it. This is a trick question: this is the collegiality question, so DO NOT pick a peer/colleague. Pick a conflict with a student, and choose something that isn’t just about a disagreement over a grade, or a straight up conflict. Choose something that is not confrontational, and required true pedagogical creativity on your part to resolve it. And choose something that resolved REALLY WELL. Some good examples include any instance of working one on one with a student that turned a conflict student into a star student, helping students overcome their phobias, their disabilities, and their prejudices, or other feel good resolutions. DO NOT talk about when students come to you demanding their grades be changed and how you say no, and then go to the chair, etc… Prove you do not create problems, and that you can diffuse problems by yourself in a way that leads to a better classroom.
• Expect questions about teaching. What is your experience, what you can teach, teaching theory, etc. Again, hit your talking pionts. You may be applying for a job just outside your degree or your experience (a New Media artist applying for a Design job, or a Film maker applying for a video job) so this may be where you subtly or obviously point out that you are totally capable of doing the job.
• Expect a question about the difference between where you are coming from and their department. This could have many many permutations, but usually it is  about context. A shift from art school to small liberal arts college. From a big public university to small private school. From a non-denominational to a religious focused school. Or vice-versa.

6. Expect to be asked if you have questions for them. Always have at least two questions for them. These questions should show that you have done research on the department and the school. These should be questions you want to know the answers to, but more importantly, they should prove that you know where the important questions are to be asked. This could be a question about their current curriculum, where their students end up (grad school, working in the field, working at the mall), the role or interrelationships of different departments or degrees in the program, etc.

7. Generally, you don’t want to ask about teaching load, responsibilities, research support, etc, in the phone interview. You can ask these questions in the on campus interview, but only in very careful ways. You can ask an open ended question about how the school supports research, and how much of a focus it is. This may or may not lead to a discussion of what kind of annual travel funding, annual research funding, or one-time new-hire research start-up you may or may not get. But don’t push it too much. Most of the time, the department decides they want you, and then you get to fight over the details with a Dean or Provost.

8. Most importantly: it is all about fit. Do you and your research fit with what the department needs are. Can you teach the classes they need taught? Is your research in line with what they feel will benefit the overall research climate of the department. Is your professional profile high enough to be competitive within the institution, especially when it comes to tenure? Is your professional profile too high such that the committee is either threatened by your achievements, or is afraid you will not stay long at their institution? Will you be able to handle the students and their specific demands or requirements they bring to the classroom — this will a very broad range of specific needs that will be different in every case, from a small Community College to an Ivy League University.

9. Aim for a conversational tone in your interview. If you can make it become as if you are just in a faculty meeting where you are discussing curriculum and the future of the department, you have proven that you fit in all of the above ways. Watch for pronouns. If someone switches into the plural “we” and is including you in that, it is a sign. While this is a rare occurrence, in a sense, it should be your hypothetical goal to focus on. Make them feel like you are really part of them already.

10. On the flip side, do not change who you are and what you do just to fit in. You are who you are. Stay true to that. If you turn yourself into someone else, they are going to figure it out. If they don’t figure it out during the interview process (which they probably will), it will become apparent over your next 3 or 5 or 7 years in the department. If you are a Photographer, and you manage to convince the department that you are a Video artist, you are going to end up having to teach courses that probably don’t interest you as much as they should, and more importantly, you are going to be evaluated based off of your Video art… but you are a Photographer, and you don’t really make Video art… See the problem here? Stay true to yourself, and your practice, it will make you happier in the job, and will make the job happier with you.

Talking to someone on the internet? Want to seem cool? Want to photoshop their head onto that of a celebrity? Well – the digital savvy know how to do that, but the REALLY digital savvy know that Photoshop’s not the only way. The world of digital image manipulation is too often seen as a one-horse race, but it doesn’t have to be that way. GIMP is the premiere, super-fantastic FREE SOFTWARE tool for photo retouching, digital image creation, and cover-for-the-CD-me-and-my-friends-made-in-my-basement making. Come get an introduction to both at once, learning the strengths and weaknesses of both as you make your Facebook photos look better, and your friends be more jealous of your skillz. With a “z.”

Steve! Hi! It sounds like you’ve been galavanting around giving lots
of rock star lectures and wining lots of awards. I hope there’s been
at least one Giant Check in there!

So I am teaching a Visual Studies seminar (intro, undergrad) at
Purchase  and it’s going to be largely focused on
advertising. They’ll be reading Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan,
Gloria Steinem, AIDS Demographics uh, Stephen Duncombe… a range, but mostly cultural theory stuff. I was wondering if you could come in and talk about your work, AAA, or anything ad-related that you think
Purchase undergrads should hear about….

I could definitely try and make you a Giant Czheck, though it would
probably be neon and wouldn’t be redeemable anywhere but Marisa &
Michael’s House of Gluten-Free Pancakes…. (MMHGFP! …pronounced
“meh!”) We don’t have a budget, but I think it would add amazing and
categorically unquantifiable amounts of credibility and cachet to your
C.V. while also not unsettling your political values in relationship
to the state economy, anarchy, and authority by not forcing you to
cash an actual check from a NY government entity.

So basically, it’s Win-Win-Win….

What do you think?

Celebrate Small Victories: Digital Foundations has run through its initial print run of 8000 copies, and gone into reprints. The publisher has reprinted a run of 4000 copies to meet demand. This semester it was adopted at over 100 colleges and universities; hopefully that number will steadily increase semester by semester. But for now, we celebrate reprints!

My new favorite blog, from my long time favorite education collaborator. At Design Educator xtine burrough takes on design and education, with a focus on the role of art in design education, and vice versa. written by an artist teaching design. Full of great things to think about as an artist teaching design, and as a student learning design or art or art & design.

I asked xtine to write a post about bad email addresses. These are only slightly modified versions of some of my students current email addresses. I have modified them enough to preserve their anonymity, but preserve their character:

xxxrlf2k1xxx@aol.com

bellabambola967@aol.com

catseyez1984@aol.com

not coincidentally, the best ones are all aol.com accounts…

I have been trying to find a way to distribute my CC licensed master files, from little Illustrator files, master video files, to the 500MB InDesign file for the Digital Foundations book (http://www.digital-foundations.net). This is an experiment. Because these are all graphics and master files, i am going to put them in “Other.” We’ll see how this goes.

Digital Foundations Textbook master file including all files, links, images

This zip contains all of the inDesign files used to publish Digital Foundations. A description (from the intro) is below. Digital Foundations: Introduction to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite integrates the formal principles of the Bauhaus Basic Course into an introduction to digital media production with the Adobe Creative Suite.

via LegalTorrents™ – Digital Foundations Textbook master file including all files, links, images.

I received this email today from a friend of Ebon Fisher’s.

It seems there is a nasty academic freedom and contract situation Stevens has created by dismissing Ebon Fisher and denying him access to his research materials.  It also appears that it results from his valor in standing up to a university policy of overwork and underpayment.  Having been in a similar academic sweatshop myself, it is particularly sad to see that an institute like Stevens is sullying its reputation as it starts to behave more like ITT Technical Institute, or DeVry.

I want to voice my strongest support for Ebon, and his work, and his academic freedom, and condemn the actions that Stevens has taken. This is a big stain on Stevens’ reputation, and is bad for academic freedom and labor relations in academia as a whole,

I encourage you to read the letter, write personal emails to the persons listed below, and make phone calls ASAP.  This is not just about one man’s job, this is about the first amendment, tenure, academic freedom and labor rights in universities nationwide.

-michael

UPDATE: For all inquiries, please contact Ebon Fisher directly at ebon@nervepool.net

————————————-

“I have had many dealings with Mr. [Ebon] Fisher over the last two years. In every instance Mr. Fisher has been nothing other than calm, collegial and fair-minded. The same can be said of his dealings with other instructors at Stevens, with the staff, and with students, who consistently give him superior evaluations. He is very well looked upon by all at Stevens.”

— From a signed letter by Jim McClellan,

Dean, College of Arts & Letters, April 28th, 2008

DEAR FRIENDS & COLLEAGUES OF EBON FISHER:

I need your immediate help in supporting a wonderful friend of mine, Ebon Fisher. Ebon’s first amendment rights and his family’s livelihood have just been swept away by his employer, the Stevens Institute of Technology.

I’ve known Ebon for 20 years. I covered the art scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 90s and published an arts and news periodical, Waterfront Week. Ebon was one of the most important intellectual forces behind that scene which has galvanized Brooklyn in no uncertain terms. Brooklyn is today the living embodiment of the term, creative economy.

Ebon Fisher catalyzed the art scene in Brooklyn in the early 90s, and by extension the art world at large. He brought to the dialogue a focus on networks and culture that was genuinely original and also deeply learned.  This inspired a significant shift among artists from the postmodern literalism and pastiche that had prevailed through the 80s, to the new esthetic of organic forms and dynamic networks that we see all around us in every sphere of cultural production today. He was a true pioneer.

Since then, Ebon has been featured in three important art history books, in dozens of magazine articles, and he has been honored and featured at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim museum, and he has lectured and been on panels in this country and in Europe. Japanese television has also covered him.

Ebon is among perhaps a dozen or more artists from the early Williamsburg scene who have enjoyed fame and success in the ensuing decades.  Ebon, however, continues to have a sterling reputation among his old friends and associates from Williamsburg. He is an extremely kind and generous person who always expresses genuine interest in what everyone is doing and thinking, regardless of their stature in the art world, or any other world.

Ebon has been teaching full time in the Art & Technology program at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey and has been honored with a renewed 2-year contract at the Institute. He is in the middle of work on a complex video project involving 3D animation, live action, and underwater photography. His mixing of media helped him and a colleague at Stevens win a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the possibilities for a new kind of search engine involving organic, synesthetic cross-referencing of media sources. As one of the first instructors at MIT’s Media Lab he is clearly on the cutting edge of the creative economy in both his community works in Brooklyn and his current research.

It has come to my attention that the Stevens Institute’s administration has decided to break Ebon’s contract. Two days ago the Institute forced him out of his office, and they have sequestered his computers, files, and research. They have given no meaningful reasons for their actions.

I believe that the real motive here emits from jealousy and academic politics.  To his credit, Ebon has been vocal about the scandalously low pay of affiliate professors at Stevens.

My wife and I have had Ebon stay over at our apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on many occasions while he searched for affordable housing.  He has carted a sleeping bag from one friend’s couch to another. We were honored and delighted to have the extra time to spend with Ebon. Because Ebon cannot afford to rent a family-sized apartment in Hoboken or any neighborhood for that matter with a good school, his partner and son live in Chicago where they have found an adequate living situation in a decent school district.  We know from experience how difficult it is to find housing in the New York Area.

It is very sad that the leaders of a research institute like Stevens cannot find the money to pay its professors a living wage, and yet the Institute accepts money from our very own US government which goes to pay its president and management hefty salaries.  Meanwhile, standout professors like Ebon have to endure the indignity of living what virtually amounts to a refugee lifestyle.  Stevens has a special interest in US security, as it should, but it can’t seem to connect the dots between the security industry and the actual welfare and security of it’s own community of teachers.

Along with another researcher, Ebon has raised $150,000 in grant money from the National Science Foundation for Stevens.  Evidently this is unprecedented in the humanities there. He is engaged there as a researcher, a media manager, and as a teacher with outstanding student evaluations. Unfortunately it appears the Stevens Institute confers the title “affiliate” upon dozens of its faculty in order to justify inadequate salaries. These have even dropped every year relative to the cost of living, rendering every promise for promotion a falsehood. Ebon is not alone in his quest for a living wage. It is fair to say that the situation at Stevens is almost 19th century in its extreme salary range and exploitive practices.  The dreary London of Dickens comes to mind.

Ebon has shown me a letter he sent to the Stevens management requesting some understanding about the increasing difficulties of the full-time “affiliates.” Difficulties in feeding, housing, and educating their children. One day later he was shown the door.

The Stevens Institute of Technology is undervaluing and exploiting its faculty. Stevens has with impunity broken the contract of one of its hardest working and most well-liked professors. Separating Ebon from his studio and media equipment, which he needs to fulfill his obligation to the National Science Foundation — to say nothing of his obligation to his students —is most likely a serious breach of contract. As a taxpayer this does not make me happy.

I encourage anyone who knows Ebon Fisher, his brilliance, his gentle temperament and commitment to art and research, to send letters of support IMMEDIATELY to the following people by tomorrow, Sunday, June 6th. All the better if follow-up phone calls can be made on Monday morning.

SEND SHORT (AND POLITE) LETTER TO:

gkorfiat@stevens.edu, ldolling@stevens.edu, jmcclell@stevens.edu,
efoster@stevens.edu, andy@andybrick.com, rob@harariville.com,
Garry.Dobbins@stevens.edu, Debra.Pagan@stevens.edu,
msamolew@stevens.edu, Kenneth.Nilsen@stevens.edu, esp3@earthlink.net,
Julie.Harrison@stevens.edu, Jonathan.Wharton@stevens.edu,
Susan.Schept@stevens.edu, Andrew.Rubenfeld@stevens.edu,
Andrew.Russell@stevens.edu, Michael.Steinmann@stevens.edu,
John.Horgan@stevens.edu, mirold2@optonline.net,
Sophie.Hales@stevens.edu, Larry.Russ@stevens.edu, mbruno@stevens.edu,
harold.raveche@stevens.edu, diana.colombo@stevens.edu

NUMBERS TO CALL:

HAL RAVECHE, President, Stevens Instiute of Technology: (201) 216.5213

GEORGE KORFIATIS, Provost, Stevens Institute of Technology: (201) 216.5263

MARK SAMOLEWICZ, VP for Human Resources, Stevens: (201) 216-5218

LISA DOLLING, Dean, College of Arts & Letters, Stevens: (201) 216-5405

JIM MCCLELLAN, Dean, College of Arts & Letters, Stevens: (201) 216-5395

N.B. This post has been updated to remove the names of individuals other than Ebon Fisher at the request of those individuals.

UPDATE: For all inquiries, please contact Ebon Fisher directly at ebon@nervepool.net