Welcome! Let's start by unpacking the course title. GEN 230 Creative Expression: Theater.

General Education. The GEN courses are set apart from the departments that house your majors: Sports Management, Media Communications, and the rest. The General Education courses are the courses every student must take. The 230 means that it's not a course you should take in your first year in college.

We are saying that this course is so important that everyone must take it, but not right away. What is so important about it?

Creative Expression. Creativity is everywhere. There's not a job you would want where a little creativity wouldn't help. Sometimes, a lot of creativity is what gets you raises and promotions. In most organizations, this plays out in two ways.

Creativity means being able to independently or with a team develop new products, services, and processes. Creativity also means doing your job -- the written and oral reporting -- with a quality that can be understood by analogy to how you dress. In any gathering of diverse people, you can compare what people are wearing and how they wear it. As you can see on the right, the "how" in how they wear it is what I'm talking about. Does it look good? Is it engaging?

Many college courses ask you to develop your creativity, in both ways. GEN 230 is the one course in your curriculum that tackles creativity head-on. It drops the A-bomb -- the arts -- into your otherwise factory-like process through this institution.

Theater. This part of the GEN 230 course title depends on the teacher. Some of us concentrate on painting or poetry. But all the arts -- visual arts, performing arts, and literary arts -- are inextricably interwoven, and this course will include them, too. As we'll see, there is not a bright line separating "art" from what you do on the job and in your daily life. Even more fluid are the various "arts".

In its broadest definition, theater is what happens when one or more individuals do things (act) in a specific usually repeatable way (script) for other people, the audience. This definition is broad enough to create a continuum along several dimensions, for example, formal <--> casual. On the formal end is the kind of ritual performed in a church. On the casual end is the acting you do every day.

Everyday theater. Yes, in this broad definition, you are an actor, and you have been an actor your whole life. Look at how many roles you play: child, friend, student, athlete. Look at your clothes closets for your costumes. Think about how you anticipate something about to happen -- you play it out in your head like a writer, imagining the setting, actors, dialogue, and outcome. Look at the stages on which you play those various roles. Friday night you have a job at the Best Buy, Saturday night you go to a party with your friends, Sunday morning you go to church with your grandmother, Monday morning you go to school where you have to make a presentation in class.

For each of those stages, you wear a different costume, you behave differently, you use language differently. Let's take a specific example: on Thursday, you break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend in an emotional, dramatic "scene", witnessed by only the two of you. On Friday, you tell your boss about it. On Saturday night, you tell your friends about it and use your party snapper to record the emotions expressed in your face and gestures. On Sunday, you tell your grandmother about it. On Monday, you try to put it out of your mind when you go to class, but you're still replaying the break-up scene in your head. You change some of your lines; you change some of his/her lines. What you could have said. What you should have said.

You might personally feel the continuity here, as though there is only one "you", but if your grandmother went on Facebook and saw the your friend's party-snapper pics from Saturday night, would your grandmother say that's the "you" that she knows?

A week after the break-up scene, it's hard to remember what you actually said. If you told me what happened, and I asked your former boyfriend/girlfriend what happened, I would have two different scenes. Each would have the same two characters, but after a week, the plots will be different, the hero/villain may well be different, and certainly the dialogue will be different. Why? What really happened that Thursday night?

Looking at it this way, to some extent, each of us is the writer, actor, director, and producer of our own private theaters.

Why is this a THEATER course?

As long as there have been campfires, people have been entertaining other people, so in that sense theater has been going on a long time. Every culture today has a long tradition of a more formal type of live entertainment that I'm going to call theater.

In our culture, you have been in the audience for theatrical productions, that is, scripted performances, all your life. You have spent thousands of hours watching theatrical productions on TV, in movie theaters, on the Internet, and perhaps even in a live theater production. Live sporting events and church services, indeed any civic and most private rituals, share many feature with theater. And there's the perspective discussed above that we're all playing roles every minute of our daily lives.

In this course, GEN 230 Creative Expression, you are going to move from the audience, from the passive receiver of the theatrical production, to the maker of the theatrical production. The biggest difference will be between product and process. As an audience member, you focus on the product. The process of producing it is usually invisible, although "behind the scenes" and bloopers videos are very popular on YouTube.

So what is this process? In this course, you will go through a common standard process of making a video, from first glimmer of idea to final display and distribution. At various times during the process, you will function as writer, editor, actor, director, producer, camera operator, technician, and film editor. To get it all done this semester, you will have a series of deadlines to meet. If you put these off, you will fall behind quickly, so I'm going to be strict about due dates. To encourage you to take risks during this process, you will get full credit for doing these regardless of how good they are. Have fun!!

Your final film will be approximately 5 minutes long and include opening titles and closing credits. In May, we will watch everyone's film in the Lecture Hall with the big screen and powerful speakers.

The final video can be a straightforward, traditional production of a scene from Neil Simon's Odd Couple. I encourage you to depart from that as far as you want to, to depart so far, if you want, that no one would know you started with The Odd Couple. While I am very open to crazy and bizarre ideas, I am even more concerned that you are able to do your film in the time allotted. If you do come up with a completely different idea, I would strongly encourage you to take advantage of the actors and live production possibilities at your disposal. They are very hard to come by in any other setting.

Creativity

An important task that you accomplish in school -- and even more out of school -- is to discover who you are. That differs from two things: who you want to be and who you believe you are. For example, you discover whether you are an athlete. And if so, how good an athlete? For another example, you discover who you are in terms of careers and job skills. Are you an accountant or a veterinary technician or a marketing rep? And if so, how good an accountant or vet tech or marketing rep? You discover whether you are a people person or more of a loner. You discover what kind of music you like, and on and on.

Most often, people want to be more than they are capable of being. And they believe they are less than they are capable of being. How to close that gap?

The question relevant to GEN 230 -- look at the course title, creative expression -- is this:

Are you creative? And if so, how creative?

Please notice that the second question in the box above does not have the word good in it because I don't think it's the purpose of this course to ask or answer that question. This is a gen ed course that everyone must take, not a senior-level course for art majors where that question -- how good is your work? how good are you? -- is appropriate. Here, the question means, how are you creative? In what ways are you creative?

Let's look at the first question: are you creative?

If you answer yes, then you are ready to get the most out of this course.

If you answer no, then you and I need to sit down to talk very soon. I am sure that you are wrong, that you believe you are less than you are capable of being. You are creative and certainly creative enough to do well in this course. I can say that with such certainty because I am sure that if you and I could look at a video of you at age two or three "playing" in your crib, we would see a wonderfully inventive and creative problem-solver totally engaged in the process. The question is not whether you are creative, because you are. The question is what happened that made you believe you aren't. We can develop strategies to deal with that.

The trick is to stay engaged and trust the process laid out on the syllabus page. The creativity will take care of itself.

Failure

Creativity is a record of failure. To create, you fail and fail and fail again.

School as we know it was developed about a hundred years ago to deal with all the immigrant kids who needed to get jobs in factories, where creativity leads to accidents and even the slightest failure can be very expensive. Thus, schools are run like factories; indeed, the classroom may have neat rows of work stations/desks.

The widgets (you) are passed down the production line, first grade, second grade, third grade. Failure is the worst thing that can happen, so the widgets are repeatedly stress-tested and graded, hundreds of true-false tests and grades, thousands of multiple-choice questions and grades, dozens of supervisors (teachers) to please for course grades. Towards the end, around high school, widgets start getting sorted out of the process, dropping out, flunking out, not continuing on to college. Most high school graduates go on to higher education, but look at the table on the right to see how many finish.

What's the best way to stay among the 25.6%? Mistakes are to be avoided, and the most important thing is the grade. Are you a grade-A widget or a grade-B widget? Those who make the fewest mistakes win. Those who fail the least are the best.

The general problem here, of course, is that you are not a widget and you are very unlikely to work in a factory, although Dilbert's cubicle culture may not be much different.

The specific problem here is that you are a student, I am a teacher, and this is a course in a factory-system school. Note that I did not say you are a widget and I am the foreman stress-testing and grading you. If you are going to learn what you could learn from this course and are supposed to learn from this course, you must fail, over and over. Make mistakes, lots of them. Make messes, big ones.

How can I in good conscience, let alone logic, encourage you to fail and then give you a passing grade for the course? In fact, I'm going to do my best to help you get an A and to avoid getting a C. To understand this apparent contradiction, we need to make an important distinction.

Evaluating / grading

How do you know whether your work is any good? Many people do no more than react immediately and emotionally to a stage play or film. However, if you're going to give the question any thought beyond your immediate emotions, you need to structure those thoughts. Such a structure is readily available and its vocabulary and mental models are easy to learn.

We will spend some time in the course developing this mental model, so here I'll say only that we will look at the content, structure, language, and mechanics of each piece of work. Evaluating is the process of applying that mental model to the work.

In this course, we will do a lot of evaluating. The evaluating process produces a complex response to the work that the author can take in, sort through, and apply to the next work. The purpose of evaluating is to improve the process, not the piece of work. The work itself could get worse before it gets better, but that's not our concern in GEN 230.

Grading is very different from evaluating. Instead of a complex, multi-dimensional response, the grader has only discrete numbers on a one-dimensional scale. The grade tells you nothing that you can use to improve. It also sets up false comparisons between the things (tests, essays, courses, people) that got graded.

I am not going to even try to put a letter let alone a number grade on your work. As long as you engage in the process, your grade won't depend on how good the final video is. The evaluation process will tell you that, and it's very important. Instead, your grade for that part of the course will depend on your level of engagement in the process, and I am going to make only a crude distinction there. You can see from the pictures at the top of this page what I mean by engagement.

If you seem to me to be sufficiently engaged in the process over the next three months, you will get an A- for that part of the course. If you do not seem to me to be sufficiently engaged, I will point that out ASAP and indicate that you are heading for less than an A- for that part of the course. I will give you every opportunity to re-engage and still get an A-.

By emphasizing the process over the product, I have found that you will produce more and better work than you would if I were bringing the hammer of a grade down on each piece of work. Learn more about my philosophy of learning and grading.

When students struggle in this course, the struggle can be necessary and worthwhile. However, some struggles, while outside the scope of this course, can determine your ability to engage in the process. One is poor management of computer files: too many, too big, incompatible with software or other file. The other is poor time management: you simply don't have the time for this course. Other struggles are unnecessary because they come from trying to fit a "creative" course into a rigid format -- teacher-controlled, 16 weeks, three class sessions per week.

Even when you're engaged and practice good file mangement and time management, I've found three things can inhibit you.

project too small / large

inability to do another draft

impatience with detail, settling for "good enough"

What does it take to overcome these inhibitors, these restraining forces?

it asks for a leap of faith	it seems like an insurmountable task	it takes forever to tediously nail down every detail
You will be rewarded for ...
sky diving	mountain climbing	carpentry

User-Generated Content

This is a course about making stuff. We're going to focus, especially at first, on fiction and poetry, but your projects are going to connect/embed/link/extend/mix/mash the fiction and poetry and other arts, especially music, images, and performances. Why?

I believe that we are in a cultural transition similar to what happened in Western Europe between around 1450 and 1650. At the beginning of those two hundred years, knowledge was controlled by the few, it was very scarce, and it was mostly in a language no one spoke except the monks, who produced the few "books" by handwriting them. Then came the printing press. Two hundred years later, knowledge was widely accessible, shared in fixed, printed form, and shared among many. It was mostly in a language the author spoke at home, and it was produced by the many people -- governments, companies, private persons -- who owned printing presses.

Let's compare that two hundred years to the two hundred years starting around 1900, so we're over half-way through it now in 2010.

Around 1900, less than 2% of young Americans got bachelors degrees. Today it's about 30%, pulling the whole adult population above 25%. The only "media" before 1900 besides print were theaters and churches, which often put on the best show in town. Of course, the pubs and taverns had plenty of entertainment, too.

Then came electricity. A hundred years later -- now -- we are saturated in media. We have telephones, radio, TV, movies. Most recently, networked computers have replaced the printing presses and delivery trucks and the expensive production studios and TV stations. Knowledge, information, entertainment are no longer fixed to scarce paper and CDs. They are quickly copied and distributed worldwide, and can now be produced by everyone.

Where do I think we're heading?

thought experiment from
Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson

Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

"Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying -- which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements -- books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to 'follow the plot' instead of learning to lead."

In GEN 230, you're like the person in 1450 who grew up listening to the priests and monks speak in Latin, a language that you didn't understand, and taking their authority for all that was worth knowing. Suddenly, there are books printed in your native language. So you learn to read, at least. Writing, as you know from school, is easy to do in terms of to-do lists and refrigerator notes. It's not so easy in terms of reports that inform and essays that persuade and marketing slogans that sell. And then comes the hard part, thinking. If you can't trust the priests, then you have to think for yourself. This is very difficult.

To continue the analogy, you grew up at the end of the 20th century listening to and watching and reading mass media -- TV, movies, pop culture in general -- and taking their authority for all that was worth knowing. Media was produced in a language of cameras and printing presses that you did not understand. Suddenly, you got your own tools -- a computer connected to the Internet and a video camera in your cell phone. So you had to learn not only to consume media, but you also had the means to make media. Just as with reading and writing two hundred years ago, not everyone is going to learn to make media at all, let alone learn to make media well.

The question of this course: are you? It's easy to chat on the phone and keep up with your friends via chat and texting and upload your vacation pix to Facebook and watch video at YouTube. But now comes the hard part, making media.

The latest buzzword online is Web 2.0. This is a new and ambiguous term to distinguish what has been happening recently online as opposed to what happened during the first decade of the Web's development. We don't need to get into that discussion here, but what we're talking about is blogs and wikis, Facebook and MySpace, folksonomies and podcasts, and the fact that five years ago, YouTube didn't exist. Yet here are some numbers.

Online Video Boom Sparks Concerns
by Associated Press
Wired News, July 2006

YouTube, the leading video site that helped catapult the genre with its public launch in December, 2005, attracted more than 20 million visitors in May, 2006. The company says it averages 50,000 new video uploads per day and shows 100 million videos a day.

Almost four years later, in early 2010, people upload 20 hours per minute to YouTube.

Who is making that content? Who is taking all those pictures at Facebook? Who is writing the 103.5 million blogs that Technorati tracks? (September 2007; up from 50 million in Sept 2006). Who is contributing all that poetry and all those beats to Poesybeat?

You are. Do a Google search for user-generated content or look at some of the links on this course web.

Sprint Details Mobile WiMAX Plans
by Katie Fehrenbacher
GigaOM, August 8th, 2006

Sprint confirmed it has chosen mobile WiMAX as the technology for its 4G network and says it will spend between $2.5 billion and $3 billion on capital expenses by 2008. ...

Sprint executives said the network will offer between 2 to 4 Mbps, and will be launched in the Q4 2007, with a nationwide rollout in 2008. With that much bandwidth available, Sprint executives referred to a network that will be built to run user-generated content, and enabling subscribers to access “YouTube and MySpace on the fly.”

This section of GEN 230 will give you the means, motive, and opportunity to participate in the conversation online. You are not powerless to change your circumstances if you make media in an active, participatory process and learn to lead.

The Course Web

The Course

What's old: GEN 230 is an art course, so you will make things. What's new: You're going to make stuff with digital media.

Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about and know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?

The Syllabus

This is the page to bookmark. It will change often and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class.

The Reports

The oral presentations and the written assignments. The conferences with me. What are the other students doing? When is yours scheduled?

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