Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong | Video on TED.com

Why do we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us, and how do we behave when we do? Part of my work as a lecturer is teaching students how to engage with those moments when one is 'wrong' or experiences a sense of failure - how to shift them into learning. At the same time, as a lecturer I'm invested in my own rightness. Schulz suggests that moments where we realise we're wrong can revelatory and transformative experiences, and challenges our resistance to them. This struck a chord with me. Moments when a student corrects a silly error of mine or challenges my argument can become opportunities - for open discussion, for student empowerment - and for the lecturer to model positive ways to deal with the experience of 'wrongness'.

Oooh: Art out of Medicine

As a film academic married to a doctor, I spend a lot of time, one way or another, having conversations about the different academic perspectives of the arts and science. My wife and I have slowly learned each others' academic and technical vocabulary and gained a sense of each others' disciplinary view on the world. I get to enjoy her pointing out the litany of medical errors in House, she patiently tolerates my nerding on montage editing or the representation of disability.

While I remain sadly unable to perform a tracheotomy with a biro, Helen has become steadily more creative during her years as a doctor. I don't get much of the credit for this. She talks more about wanting to balance the intensity of medical practice and reflect on her experiences through journalism and photography.

Bristol University's medical students are encouraged to do so, and the fascinating and apparently notorious results are showcased in a gorgeous web space, OutofOurHeads.net. One of my favourites was Yolanda Massey's witty and wry photo-essay, Imagine If?, in which fruits and vegetables are used to represent the damaged and fragile human body and mind.

Mark Smithers on classroom tech: "Is lecture capture the worst educational technology?"

Read and enjoy.

Smithers is an Australia-based academic whose witty and thought-provoking blog deals with the role of digital technology in pedagogy. His perspective on lecture capture is more balanced than the blunt title might suggest - back in the 1990s, he was one of the first specialists in this technology. Here, he writes constructively and hilariously about the dangers and opportunities digital tech presents us with for learning, and reminds us that active versus passive learning is a concern for lecturers to chew over even as we empower students with the click of a mouse.

Accidental Mysteries

A friend first clued me into the work of artists/art collectors John and Teenuh Foster, and I've been meaning to reblog it. John and Teenuh tour the garage sales of the US and pick up photographs and other objects that seem to tell stories: but enigmatic stories, mysteries in fact. It sounds as if it could easily be a patronising connoisseurship of folk kitsch, but their aims are nothing like that. As their website and online gallery puts it: "They consider vernacular photography to be a long overlooked genre of folk art, capturing elements of history, sociology, psychology and often “accidental” moments on film."

The photographs they use have been abandoned by their owners and inheritors for reasons we don't know. It's perhaps the photographs' imperfections which make them seem to summon up their lost time so vividly. This isn't the past arrayed in its Sunday best, posing for posterity, but the hidden, quietly strange corners of America past. Looking through them, I was often reminded of David Lynch - but his more subtle, lyrical moments, like the openings of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.


I've used this photograph collection now to teach the uncanny, the narrative and lyric in photography, and art as selection.

I ♥ the Machine Age

"For instance, at a performance of Dr. Caligari the other day a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic's brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement 'I am afraid'. In fact, the shadow was accidental and the effect unintentional. But if a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. Terror has besides its ordinary forms the shape of a tadpole; it burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears. Anger is not merely rant and rhetoric, red faces and clenched fists. It is perhaps a black line wriggling upon a white sheet."
                                                   Virginia Woolf, "The Cinema"