Losing friends

I guess when you're young, the idea of losing a friend isn't quite as painful. Or maybe it is. Loss is always a shock to the system.

Today I found out that someone I admired and got to know while taking a class with him, passed away a few weeks ago. We weren't close, but I knew he was there. Now there's another hole in my universe where this friendly, enthusiastic, full of interesting experiences and stories man used to be. And I'm saddened. He survived one bout of cancer to fall to a second one.

Mike Laurence had a long career in the movie industry. He worked on films I knew and loved as well as those of which I had seldom heard. He walked into a classroom with a class that had been dumped in his lap only days earlier and made it work. We learned and he learned. By the end of the first 12 weeks we could set up a C stand, knew what a baby was and could level a camera on a stand. We could light a set and move a dolly so that the camera onboard wasn't jerking. Some of us filmed with a Country Name for a Christmas special, one left for a real job in the industry.

The second half of the class, instead of sending us out to work on small projects, on commercials and videos and things like that, we took in the talent we had, wrote a script and then scored a real, name director to help us shoot the 50 minute movie about a local boy who didn't quite make good, in spite of one heck of an idea. We spent four weeks shooting the movie, we sweated, we learned and the finished product was one we were all proud to see our name in lights on.

Mike was our guiding light and our friend. He was liason between "above the line" and "below the line" and made things work when we didn't know exactly what we were doing or how to do it.

Now he's gone, and the world is a little dimmer for his passing. We'll miss you. And you'd better have places for us when we get there .....

Ruminations on OLCs

Inspiration strikes at the strangest times. Sitting at the Sonic, surrounded by the visually commanding posters for their offerings, I wandered into why the Arts and Science, most particularly Anthropology, are not as online as they could be. Which led to how Anthropologists work ... mostly on their own. Collaboration is not a by-word in the Anth community. While archaeology is conducted with a sort of team ethic, there is usually one and only one leader of said team. Discoveries are his/hers. Everything is written up under the dig leader's name. The Leakey's may have scoured Olduvai Gorge together, but the publications, until very late in life, were under Dr. Robert Leakey's name, not both. While his lady may have been credited with finding the first bits of something, the fame was his, the accolades were his, and the grants were his.

OLC's are about community and collaboration. Ethnography is frequently about one person investigating one culture, or a portion of one culture. Paleontology is sometimes more of a group effort, but even there, the discovery of a new fossil is generally attributed to one person, not to the group working on the site, but the the actual uncoverer. (Is that a word?)

So, when attempting to sway the Anthropological academic culture to online classes, one is faced with not only overcoming the F2F mentality of traditional lecture delivery, but a resistance to collaboration. Reports may be written in collaboration, but discoveries are, more often than not, solitary.

All of this sort of erupted from the thought that I tend to take online classes because I am more solitary than community oriented and therefore more inclined toward indepentent work than collaborative work. I have resisted the entire concept of collaboration where my writing is concerned since I was about 15 because "if I get help, or work with someone, it isn't mine". Oh, yes, I have taken that to heart sometimes which makes it interesting to offer up anything on the writer's list I belong to. (To which I belong ). It is not easy for me to accept criticism, but it's getting easier. I hope this will help with the collaboration worries and in finding my own way to working with others on learning, I will see a way to start working through the perception barriers between the current status quo of arts and sciences classes and where I think it would benefit them to go.

Whew

Ok, rough week. What did I learn? Moving an 80 year old mum unit is not easy.

Read the syllabus and write the dates down correctly. Take a deep breath. Breathe.

Onward

blog, blog, blog, blog. for classe. kewl.

headed into class

Kewl. Setting up new things to work on class. otl. kewl.