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

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.

Literary Arts. This part of the course title depends on the teacher. Some of us concentrate on painting or theater. I used to give students a choice of the ones we call literary arts, those that traditionally focuses on the written word: prose, poetry, fiction, drama, even screenplays. But the other arts -- visual arts, performing arts, for example -- 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".

As it turns out, all the students chose to make a video of some sort, so this semester, we are going to assume that's what you want to do, too. Also, most students ended up with a video that had as its foundation the traditional arts of fiction and poetry.

What is fiction? What is poetry? Let's look at how we use them as metaphors:

the story of the Sabres' season	the wide receiver's athletic catch was "poetry in motion"

What is it about the Sabres' season or the receiver's catch that makes the metaphors of story and poetry tell you something important?

What is fiction? What is poetry?

I see more similarities than differences among the literary arts -- prose, poetry, fiction, drama, even screenplays. One clear difference: even without being able to read the words in the pictures below, fiction, poetry, and scripts look different.

fiction	poetry	script

The above list can usefully get simplified to two. Good prose uses both fictional and poetic techniques. Drama and screenplays tell the same stories fiction does but the actual written documents -- plays and screenplays -- include only the dialogue.

What is a creative act? Who's the actor? In this course, it's you. We're going to look at creative expression as a process. You're going to participate in that process in a structured way even though we recognize that it is a messy, often frustrating process. I'm going to insist on the structured process so that you can get through as much of the process as possible as frequently as possible.

In short, don't come into this course thinking you're going to write some rhyming lines, and that's all. This is a course about making stuff. We're going to focus on fiction and poetry and drama, and your projects are going to connect/embed/link/extend/mix/mash the fiction and poetry with other arts, especially music, images, and performances.

Some of you may be blessed by having had a teacher in high school who made literature alive and interesting. Some of you may be doubly blessed by having come to love literature outside of the classroom.

For many of you, unfortunately, literature is associated with these ideas: school, dead, boring, useless, confusing. I expect this course to add these ideas: life, work, exiting, and very powerful. For confusing, however, my expectation is different. By the end of this course, you may be more confused, but it will be a more accurate, more sophisticated confusion than you had coming in.

Life, work, exiting, and very powerful

Am I nuts? I'm predicting that by the beginning of December you are going to think that:

fiction and poetry, in the broad sense, are an integral part of life
you can use them at work
they can be exciting, even fun
they are a very powerful tool to communicate with other people and even change them a little, make them smile, make them think, make them wonder

If I've learned anything in three decades of teaching, it's that you are not going to take my word for those four things. I can stand in front of you and talk and talk, professing those four things. I can lead discussions about DWM stories and poems, urging you to make those four things true. (DWM stands for dead white male.) And we're back to the old ideas: dead, boring, and useless.

Or I can structure a process that, if you are engaged in it, will cause you to learn by doing and will move you in the direction of those four things. But we aren't going to concentrate on the destination. We're going to concentrate on the journey.

What I've learned in three decades of teaching is that if I can get you to take the journey, learning will happen. However, you are not sheep to be led or vessels to be filled. The trick is your level of engagement.

Like the skydiver on the right, you can take the journey fearfully, fighting it all the way, and come out with all your old ideas intact. Not only are fiction and poetry boring and useless, but you don't want to have anything to do with them ever again.

Or like the kids above, you can take the journey enthusiastically, personally, curiously, trusting the process. Then you will come out of the process closer to the four things on the bulleted list above.

reluctant	enthusiastic
distant	personal
tentative	curious
tense	trusting the process

The Process

So what is this process? We're not talking about dashing off a scene or poem on a scrap of paper during lunch, maybe typing it up and sending it to the professor in an email. We're talking about a sophisticated, complex process that we can compare to three similar processes.

Even though these processes are laid out in four neat columns, they are recursive. You go over and over them, they loop back around on themselves, and more than one can be going on at once. If you step back from it, you can see the similarity to other complex processes, for example, how the Earth rotates on its axis, rotates around the sun, rotates with our solar system within the Milky Way galaxy, which is part of several larger movements of galactic rotation and expansion. Relative to earth's axis, someone standing on the equator is moving about a thousand miles per hour in half a dozen directions all at once. Here in the northern latitudes, we're moving about half that fast. Yet all the while, we feel as though we're standing still. Fiction and poetry can be like that, too.

Each of the activities in the columns are themselves processes with recursive steps within them. If you're familiar with one, you can use it as scaffolding to help you learn another. In the picture, the scaffold is the temporary structure on the right used to build the permanent structure on the left. Then the scaffolding will be removed.

Writing

In your life, you started this process last of the four. You learned it in school, and you still take courses in it in college. What's hard about this process is our tendency to want to do only two parts: write and publish. Most people who write stories and poems are not novelists and poets, and here's how you can tell. They write the stories and poems quickly, maybe proofread them, and then immediately want to show them to someone be it privately or in a more public way on the internet or, sometimes, in print.

Most people do not consider themselves fiction writers and poets, and their participation in this process is one way of describing the difference. Creative writers -- serious, deliberate, self-conscious fiction writers and poets -- spend a lot of time in the first three parts of that process: research, revise, edit, over and over, recursively. By contrast, people who simply write fiction and poetry want to pass through the process. They want to have written a story or poem. The process itself is uncomfortable and mysterious to them. Fiction writers and poets, on the other hand, want to (re)write their stories and poems. The process is often uncomfortable -- call it "work" -- and it is even more mysterious because the process itself fascinates these writers.

Problem solving

Of the four processes, problem-solving is the one we all learn first. Leave a two-year-old alone in a big crib with a bunch of toys and you will see this process demonstrated before your eyes. It is characterized by failure.

In the picture on the left, what the baby is learning is systems: the blocks aren't separate. They connect and the connections form patterns. Events have causes and effects.

That stack of blocks is going to fall down because it got too high. If it doesn't, the baby is going to knock it down -- and probably laugh at the crash he caused. Most of the time, the baby fails to come out of the process. The baby stays within the process and just keeps playing, as we call it (compare to the poet's "work" above), until he falls asleep or is taken out of the crib.

The baby, of course, isn't conscious of this process and doesn't have names for the parts, but that's my point. This process is so natural to us that we have been doing it all our lives. Some biologists would say that it's not a learned process, that we're hard-wired to do it. We've also woven it deep into our culture. At the other end of the formal education process, most PhD dissertations, especially in the sciences, have the same basic problem-solving structure.

Digital development

In this course, we're going to explore fiction and poetry's relation to each other and to other arts, especially visual and audio. Ten years ago, we could not have done this with computers very easily. Twenty years ago, we could not have done this with computers at all. We would have needed a lot of very expensive equipment and technicians, so we probably would not have done it. At all. Twenty years ago, this course wouldn't have used any technology that wasn't available five hundred years ago, ink, paper, and maybe a printing press, albeit updated to a copier.

GEN 230 was developed in that world, not the Garage Band world we live in now, where the tools are on every laptop computer and the materials are freely available. Rip, mix, and burn.

The Future of Ideas
Lawrence Lessig

Rip. Mix. Burn. Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet its ad (on the right) touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it -- meaning to copy it; to "mix" it -- meaning to reform it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, "burn" it -- to publish it in a way that others can see and hear. Digital technology could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process.

When academics do it, by the way, it's not rip, mix, and burn. It's gather, create, and share.

The Scholar’s Box: A Tool for Gathering, Creating, And Sharing Reusable Digital Learning and Research Content
by David A. Greenbaum, Raymond Yee, and Peter Brantley

Quality

You may not have encountered this process yet, but you will.

The big difference between the process you will go through in this course and the process you will go through at a job in an organization is teams. In this course, we're going to take the heroic stance. Each of you will be responsible for your own project.

In organizations, the kinds where you will spend your working life, teams are common. Their work processes are often organized according to a model that was first articulated in American business over twenty years ago. It has since metastasized and developed and become institutionalized, usually with a bewildering array of terminology.

Learn more about the tools and techniques that organizations use for process improvement

At its core, however, all these processes in all these organizations share the generalized plan-do-check-act format. Note how neatly it maps against the other three: writing, problem solving, and digital development.

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 yellow 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 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 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 story or poem. 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 early 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 do the project, the stories/scripts/poems, and the oral presentations, your grade won't depend on how good they are. 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 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, 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

Learn more about 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 2007.

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 IM 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 two Thanksgivings 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.

Who is making that content? Who is taking all those pictures at Facebook? Who is writing the 103.5 million blogs that Technorati is currently tracking? (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 accompanying visual aids, the conferences with me. What are the other students doing? When is yours scheduled? How will they be evaluated?

other pages

The Arts

User-Generated Content

Media Assets

Software Tools

Rights and Copyrights

Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement