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Assignment: Write a Good Syllabus |
You're receiving this Thursday Briefing as part of your membership. Thank you for supporting independent publications!
Charis writes about crafting her syllabus for her new teaching job.
I started a new job this week as a teacher in the Communication Design program at School of Design, Hong Kong PolyU. Classes start at the end of the month and I’m preparing my syllabi. I’ve been reading books and skimming PDFs to figure out what texts I want to assign to my classes and I found myself struggling to strike a balance when it comes to the background of the authors. I’ll be frank: I do not want to assign primarily white male authors or even a majority of Western authors (regardless of gender) considering how our school is located in Hong Kong and has a mostly local student population. I think that even if my students do not expressly question the authorship of the texts I assign, something might happen in the subconscious along these lines: “The thoughts and ideas of Westerners are better than ours. Important design history and design thinking is established overseas.”
I talked about my dilemma with my good friend Joan. We did our undergraduate degrees together at Parsons and I learned just today that she read maybe 30% (if that) of all the assigned readings and didn’t feel any loss (for the record, I did all of the reading but can not argue convincingly that it made a difference). Furthermore, she questioned how useful it is to an undergraduate student to read about design as opposed to engaging in making and doing. I realized then that I was overly concerning myself with picking the correct texts because I was trying to behave like a professor. I’d slipped into the performance of teaching rather than determining what is good teaching. The course of action we decided on: assign fewer texts, do in-class reading with discussions, and look for more contemporary and less academic-sounding writing.
I have a request, if you’ll oblige me. Would you send me an email to charis@maekan.com with any article, essay, poem, interview, story, short piece of writing, etc. you read in the last few years that you recall vividly? The students are required to submit writing in their classes and I still believe that to write well requires reading things you find exciting and compelling.
Thank you in advance!
- Charis
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The Bulletin
Listen and see the latest from MAEKAN and the community. |
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OFFLINE MATTERS: Underground Living with V. Vale
Offline Matters: An Interview Series is co-presented with No Fun Mag, a membership newsletter by Jess Henderson, author of the book Offline Matters: The Less-Digital Guide to Creative Work.
This time, Jess meets with one of her longtime idols, mentors, and now friend, V. Vale of RE/Search Publications (on Instagram as @vale_research).
Vale is a creative firecracker and legend (documentor and participant) of the 70s Bay Area punk movement—he was part of the original configuration of Blue Cheer, and you might be familiar with some of his iconic publications, from Search & Destroy (San Francisco’s first punk rock publication) to the books Modern Primitives, Pranks, Modern Paganism, and Incredibly Strange Films.
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Making It Up 180: The rise of curators and “genuinfluencers”
Charis and Eugene talk about the factors that lead to the prominence of curators and curation. They also discuss the trend, as WGSN calls it, of “genuinfluencers”, who interact with their audiences differently and share content that is a departure from the traditional influencer fare.
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For Your A-10-tion |
The best links from across the Internet.
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1. 🥉 How the Prospect of Hosting the Olympics Has Become Less Attractive
Among costs, controversies and built-to-be-abandoned white elephant venues, awareness around the lasting impact on host cities could see the number of bidders drop (more than it already has) and the end of the Olympics at the scale it remains today.
2. 👀 Watch: Reservation Dogs, a new Hulu/FX comedy series produced by Taika Waititi
The half-hour comedy series follows four Indigenous teenagers living on a reservation in rural Oklahoma dreaming of reaching the distant land of California.
3. 🎨 Banksy Goes On Stenciling Spree, Hits Five English Coastal Towns
The works, which have yet to be publicly claimed by the artist, were found in Lowestoft, Gorleston, Oulton Broad, Cromer, and Great Yarmouth. While most of the works are murals done in the stenciled spray-painted style he's known for, the last one saw him add his own miniature graffiti-covered house to the Merrivale Model Village in Great Yarmouth.
4. 🧠 The Challenges of Staying Rational
Joshua Rothman tracks the rise in the need, the discussion and the interest in rationality in an era of fragmented opinions and worldviews. He talks about the value of not just about being right but also recognizing when you might be wrong.
"Introspection is key to rationality. A rational person must practice what the neuroscientist Stephen Fleming, in “Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness” (Basic Books), calls “metacognition,” or “the ability to think about our own thinking”—“a fragile, beautiful, and frankly bizarre feature of the human mind.” Metacognition emerges early in life, when we are still struggling to make our movements match our plans. (“Why did I do that?” my toddler asked me recently, after accidentally knocking his cup off the breakfast table.) Later, it allows a golfer to notice small differences between her first swing and her second, and then to fine-tune her third. It can also help us track our mental actions. A successful student uses metacognition to know when he needs to study more and when he’s studied enough: essentially, parts of his brain are monitoring other parts."
5. 💡 A Twitter Thread Chock Full of Useful Sites
Sahil Patel shares a thread of specialized sites that include finding $20 Amazon gifts or new things to watch, and other interesting concepts such as Drive & Listen, which lets you sit front seat in a car as it drives through a major world city and plays tunes.
6. 😕 How Review Bombs and Other Factors on Goodreads Impacts Authors
Unfortunately, it's not just a random person posting a bad review but one with other malicious intents. Scammers and cyberstalkers have been using the popular book review platform Goodreads to extort authors by threatening to review bomb their books with one-star and other negative reviews. Worse is they are also targeting authors from marginalized communities who shed light on controversial issues.
7. 👕 Chinatown Market Delivers On Promise, Re-Names As ‘MARKET"
Since pledging to change its name in March following a rise in anti-Asian hate incidents and accusations of cultural appropriation, the Mike Cherman-founded brand formerly known as Chinatown Market has rebranded to MARKET (or stylized as MA®KET). So far, aside from the logo changes to its apparel (which still retain the original graphics), the brand has unveiled a new website at MarketMarketMarket.com.
8. 🥾 What The Tech Industry Says About Fashion with Its Clothing Choices
Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus discusses how the tech industry's views of fashion, specifically its obsession with projecting utility, reflects its disdain for the communal and connective aspects that fashion gives the general public. An excerpt:
"Fashion and the public space upon which it depends are both participatory zones in which culture is created, and neither is meant to be consumed individualistically. Fashion can be understood as a collective experience of the zeitgeist in which everyone can participate, which is open to innovations from outsiders. The tech industry would like to reimagine it as a series of fully instrumentalized status signifiers that attest to our social rank and are always already integrated into branded “universes” of intellectual property. Social media have already trained us to think this way: Now that platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become fundamental to fashion discourse as well as public discourse in general, their affordances are more likely than ever to shape our understanding of how culture works. The influencer ecosystem and the artificial scarcity of streetwear “drops” are unsurprising outcomes."
9. ☑️ The Role of Curator in A Commoditized Web 3.0 World.
Gaby Goldberg discusses the next phase of the Internet where curation centered around good taste (and the business model to match) will become fundamentally more important for filtering through an oversaturated content and information landscape.
"But being a curator isn’t as simple as it might seem. In what we like to call the Social Media Paradox, there’s an often overlooked difference between following someone to be entertained and following someone to make a purchase. Put simply, influence is not synonymous with taste. This misunderstanding plays out in real-time: some influencers have large followings but still struggle to monetize, while others — oftentimes curators, or coolhunters — can successfully monetize without developing an image or personal brand. We’ve seen this particularly over the last few years, as a myriad of primarily anonymous Instagram accounts like HIDDEN®, Nineties Anxiety, Furniture Archive, and New Bottega have risen in influence as prominent tastemakers for the next generation of fashion and culture."
10. 💾 Highlighting The Importance of Archiving the Internet
That said, even as we usher in the incoming, we shouldn't neglect the outgoing. As the Internet Archive celebrates a quarter century, it becomes important to recall that most of the Internet isn't forever and why it's important that its ever-changing contents are preserved, even by the likes of citizen archivists.
"Archiving the Internet is a monumental task, one that librarians and archivists cannot do alone. Anyone can be a citizen archivist and preserve history through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The “Save Page Now” feature allows anyone to freely archive a single, public website page. Bear in mind, some websites prevent web crawling and archiving through special coding or by requiring a login to the site. This may be due to sensitive content or the personal preference of the web developer."
Max Miechowski’s Cinematic Travel Photography
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