#digitalscholar

What Learners Can Do in Scholar's Creator #DigitalScholar @Digischolar2016 @redasadki

So I finally submitted my #DigitalScholar course announcement. It’s hard to believe two weeks have gone by in this course.

This update by Reda Sadki on 5 Practical Examples of What You Can Have Learners Do in Scholar’s Creator had me going back to the drawing board to edit my course announcement.

Now that I’ve finished my course announcement, I’m free (for a short while) to dream about what else…

I haven't posted the concept sketches yet (cause they're only clear for me and not really presentable), but I'll tell you right now: I need bearings, I need a motor, pretty much I need some automatic way to move a paper up and down that is wrapped up like a scroll. 

Does this mean I should go and buy all this stuff for prototyping? Spend a huge sum of money on components that might turn out to be useless for me? Heck no. Because there already is a machine created to move sheets of paper around. It has been made and perfected and all I need to do is find an old broken one for cheap to extract the parts I need. And this machine is the office copier.

I found one at my school's surplus store:

The best part? I paid $1.25 for it. $1.25 for parts that would normally cost me hundreds of dollars. $1.25 for a treasure trove of tech that I can use for my creative works. 

If you want a good idea of why the copy machine is such a wonderful invention for engineering artists like me, check out this episode of "Secret Life of Machines." It's worth your 25 minutes. You learn how a copier works and you'll see the kinetic sculptures they used copier parts for.

Oh yeah, another good thing, these things break down all the time.

My professor Simon Penny suggested me to buy a broken copier instead of buying new components. It's an important lesson I learned about prototyping:

If something else does it already, use it.

Even if it's just a small part of a big machine. It's like the physical version of remixing.

When you look at a Geocities page or a Usenet post from the early 90s, do you feel a sense of nostalgia or the feeling that you are looking at a historic artifact?

That latter feeling is probably less likely because the idea that digital data can feel like a historic artifact is quite absurd if you think about it. Digital data is always copied and always redisplayed. Does Tim Berners-Lee's post on the WorldWideWeb feel any older if it was displayed on a green and black terminal or on a modern Google Groups layout? Do we have to pry the hard drive that first saved that post to view it and experience it like a historic artifact?

It just seems so surreal to me, seeing internet posts turn historic, especially given the strange content that people post online: 

     I don't know how others feel, but I have inkling that they probably don't view classic internet posts as something historic. As an artist, I want to reproduce and share this feeling I have towards these old web contents. I want to reframe them in a way to make them look older than they are. I want to reframe internet posts as illuminated manuscripts, as if it was written by scribes, on a scroll of paper and my audience can flick through this scroll like you flick through a website on a tablet.