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Shawn Dudley - Reflection ENC 4311

Page history last edited by shawn dudley 13 years, 3 months ago

Shawn Dudley, Reflection - ENC 4311

 

“Brains for breakfast, brains for lunch, brains for dinner, brains for brunch. Brains at every single meal… why can't we have some guts?” – The Misfits 

 

ENC 4311 was in many ways the high point of my academic semester – it was by far the best part of my week - every week. This fact is indisputable. There were times when our class meeting felt to me like a group therapy session; at other times it felt like free-form jazz performance. Sometimes it felt like a walk through the muddy midway with a gaggle of drunk circus clowns. Sometimes it involved a heady graduate level discussion of about Canon or Metacognition, or “technology action plans.” Sometimes it was about reading passages from Alan Ginsberg’s Howl out loud, or remixing other people’s work in class in real time. Sometimes it was about listening to scratchy old records. Whatever we did on Tuesday night - FTC 118N was the one place where I felt I was getting a genuine of out-of-my-depth learning experience, that elusive thing I thought this college experience was supposed to all about.

 

 I came to this course in many ways predisposed to the convergent-emergent ideals Trey promotes. At times in the past, I have been an ardent advocate of his same methods. I have stood on the digital streetcorner and I have preached to the heathens before. I understood on a fundamental level what we were here to do. I have to confess that I was disengaged from the wiki more often than I liked. I did read other people’s with interest, but in many cases I could find no voice of my own. I lurked for a long time. Sometimes I didn’t even log in. To be honest, I think I was struggling quite seriously with some heavy shit. Life steps in and knees you in the nuts sometimes. There’s no more sophisticated explanation than that. That’s when you have to figure out what to do next… So I remained doubled over emotionally and intellectually for a bit. And when I stopped wretching and puking blood, I stood up and tried for my balance.

 

That’s when I really noticed Spidermonkey’s flailing free-form evolution start to take a beautiful shape. I was so glad we stopped talking about grants. Lauren was writing a detective story to piece together the missing details of her life. Jenna was finding her voice for the first time, free of academic constraints. MO-NEELS’ Canon remix blew my mind. Jon turned me on to Writing Down the Bones, a great book about writing  I keep next to my bed now.

 

But by this time it was already early November.  I needed to find a direction; some means of expression – a way to contribute to the digital storm. I started to think about audience. And then I realized that the best way I have ever found to express myself was through sound. I started to feel more alive by thinking about sound, and about storytelling, and radio , and audio production. I started listening again to things that made me feel alive: BBC Documentaries. Experimental pieces. features from This American Life, Orson Welles’ 1939 War of the Worlds broadcast, old recordings of Joe Frank (IN THE NAME OF GOD LISTEN to JOE FRANK!!)…. For me this was like eating comfort food, and after a while, it helped me to remember who I was. I picked up a great book that had sat unopened on my shelf for two years: Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production, by Jonathan Kern.  

 

I thought about how incredibly excited I was years ago, when I first started making radio pieces. I thought about how amazing it is to use sound as a tool for composition.

 

I started to form an idea about building a set of tools to help other people find that same path. I thought about my audience. I’ve  worked in radio for years. I’m bone-weary of radio jargon and preconceived notions about what a story is or isn’t. My purpose was not to build a site for experts. I want to help bring new voices to the table. Every radio person I know shares my story – an absolute obsession with the medium. That always bothered me, because it feels incestuous, inbred. I wanted to speak to an audience that never once thought about picking up a microphone and recording another person.

 

So that’s how I came to the idea of A Handbook for Audio Storytelling.

 

I’m not going to explain here how what I created demonstrates advancedRhetoricalKnowledgeofconvergenceandnetworkedwritingenvironmentsbyfocusingonaudienceshifted in contexts ofmediaandmessagewithspecialattentiontothewaystheseelementsofcommunication openlyinvestigatingtheinterdependenceoflanguagepower,and knowledge,purpose, context,medium,and rhetorichaveinteractionswithpeersthatcoordinatesymbolic analytical skillsacrossawiderangeofcomposingmediafindingevaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing ideasrigorouslytestingtheadageofopensourcecultureCriticalThinkingReadingandWriting bydevelopingwritingovertimethroughhigh-frequencywewillopenly prewrite,draft,revise, andeditcontent individually controlling and modulating tone, mechanicsand documentation inavarietyofformats and genre that says "share early and often."

 

You can see it here. Make up your own mind. Please tell me what needs improvement.

 



 

 ** A note about A Handbook for Audio Storytelling and the www.soundstory.info project:

I produced the entire website, and all graphics, text,  etc using open source software. My images were created in
 GIMP 2.6.  The text was created in  Open Office. The website was built using Drupal -- an Open Source content management framework. The site is hosted online, on a Virtual Private Server running Linux, and sits on top of a LAMP stack.

 

 

 

 

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