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I have just spent 9 days in Alice Springs and 5 days at the Australian Museum and Galleries Association conference. While there I attempted to make progress on assignments and readings; related mostly to collection policy as that felt like the most relevant part of what I was studying in terms of what I was engaging in at the red centre.

Though the event focused mostly on museums the keynotes, workshops, and concurrent sessions were broadly applicable across the GLAM sector. A couple of key takeaways I have been ruminating on include:

A) the imperial origins of our information institutions constructed in the Western ideological ideal of taxonomic breadth, hierarchical control, and limited accessibility.

B) The unconscious privileging of male white voices over female black voices and how this is played out in the lives of our institutions and practitioners

I do not yet know how to confront these in my practice but I have been thinking about them more and more.

It strikes me as strange that amongst all the successes and privilege of my life that the progress of technology leaves me so far in its wake that I am feeling like I am barely clinging on to access I require with the resources at my disposal.

The hardware I own can just keep up with the demands forced upon it. My laptop from 2006 lies in a bag in my room and makes loud groans of death whenever it tries to use its fan. My current laptop handmedown from a family member’s upgrade is old enough that the most up to date operating system it can run cannot operate an up to date browser meaning I am stuck with older software that warns me the CSU university website may be a malicious attacker trying to steal my credit card details. I was panicked for a while when starting the course that my laptop’s Chrome browser I was using wouldn’t run the CSU online learning environment at all but managed to work around this with an older version of Firefox which as an open source project supports better backwards capability albeit with the same warnings of websites that aren’t particularly malicious being signposted as such.

The most up to date piece of hardware I own is actually my IPhone which I purchased from work when my workplace replaced older models with new. This model was released in September 2015 and issues include Apple’s notorious intentional obsolescence program where later software updates slow down the functioning of the device, the battery lasting only hours of full use, and the model having the minimum 16gb of storage which somehow doesn’t allow the IOS, apps, and media content to happily coexist and so the device will delete apps it thinks I am no longer using to make space for whatever I have most recently downloaded.

Information Literacy can be seen to include digital literacy of the navigation of hardware, software, and connectivity and as without the device, program, and access it doesn’t matter what kind of model you have for engaging with information.

We must be careful not to assume the perfect theoretical environment where all students have laptops that are up to date, fully charged, and the wi fi works without interruptions. Not only will the failures of our systems have to be worked around but the functioning of the system itself will be worked around through students getting around censorship, banning of games, and into each others walled gardens of social media.

Technology provides many pathways to achieve objectives and it is the empowered and informed choice that we seek to encourage. Knowledge of the alternatives, knowledge of the compromises, knowledge of the environmental impacts and consequences.

As an example. My 1995 automobile has a tape deck player but my line in tape deck device for playing audio media become broken. My solution was to use the cigarette lighting 12V port and I have plugged in a FM transmitter, that connects to my smartphone via bluetooth, which also has two USB charging ports of differents amps. In truth this is perhaps actually my latest and most up to date piece of hardware not the smartphone.

We are left in our lives with an empire of asset management; fixing, replacing, upgrading one tool at a time in order to maintain our connection to the constantly progressing technological river of change.

 

A well earned study break and some annual leave gave me 10 days off from my responsibilities; 8 of which involved no course materials. I am eager to dive back in now I’m rested and continue into the second half of my master’s first semester.

There were a few things from the holiday I feel worthy of reflection:

I attended ConFest which is an event that has run since 1976 gathering alternative movements together to inhabit a space of  workshops, celebration, and nature. I’m intrigued by how information functions in this space and other festivals. The transmission of tenets by oral culture and the spread of a literary canon of what to expect and prepare for in the form of written guides emailed to participants. There were also a small number of printed maps which were a valued resource indeed.

The main technology used at the festival to communicate what was on was blackboards. A couple of 10 meter long concertinaed fold out collections of blackboards which had both sides written on provided space for a day each of workshops. This meant you could only ever see what was happening today or tomorrow and provided great flexibility to add events to spaces and some camps even allowed anyone to add events as long as they checked in with the camp first. This time frame also brought people to the central camp multiple times where they were located allowing further messaging about volunteer requirements or weather information to be distributed.

In contrast to this evolved and resilient system our mainstream culture demands 24 hour access to all the information possible. It makes me wonder what is lost in the churn for encompassing as much as possible and what alternatives systems we know of and have discarded and how these may affect space, place, and persons.

I also did some reading outside the course curriculum contravening the directive to focus on the most up-to-date materials possible due to the fast changing nature of the technological aspects of the library. After following a rabbit hole on Quora I found the question ‘What was Dewey’s most important work?’ and a recent PhD graduate who had studied this claimed that his 1933 book How we Think was very significant. I then ordered it to be delivered to my house through the CSU library and read some of it during my break. In it Dewey claims the importance of reflective thinking and differentiates it from other ways of lower order thinking which he also defines. He also references some older theorists which I was less familiar with but found fascinating. This included Sir Francis Bacon and his concepts on where errors of thinking come from (mental idols in the flavour of: tribe, marketplace, den, and theater) as well as examples from John Hobbs who I had attempted to read in my undergraduate and found impenetrable but Dewey’s careful selection of quotes to illustrate his points made for much easier going albeit still not the smoothest of sailing requiring a couple of rereadings.

I am eagerly anticipating the return of my first marks for larger assignments so I can get an idea of how I am tracking in the formal assessment aspects of the course. I am satisfied that I am learning and exploring and am wanting to carefully move towards some kind of balance of self care, work, study, and assignments while preparing to spend 10 days at the national conference of the Australian Museums and Galleries Association in a couple of weeks.

I will spend the remainder of the holiday getting my studies up to where I feel they need to be and ideally that will be ahead of where I am scheduled to be up to in order to facilitate offsetting my time at the conference and the next 2 big simultaneously due assignments.

I never got my other blog up and running but thought I would share a post I drafted from March 3rd 2018

Yesterday was crunch day with two assignments due at the same time. It is rare to be completely happy with assignments and these were my first in 4 years but I know through the process I gained knowledge, or at least certainly information, perhaps even a small amount of wisdom though it feels more like the Eastern sort of wisdom where you begin to know how much you do not know.

I prioritised my assignments this week so need to catch up on the next module in the sequence for both units. This was a sensible thing to do but now  I am feeling more greatly the weight of studying part time with 2 units a semester while working full time. I figured as my job is not as intense as that of a full time classroom teacher that it would be very manageable to do a course load designed for one. Unfortunately I got sick and had to take leave but did not have the mental clarity to produce essays though I manged to do some of the necessary drudgery of the process assembling resources, headings, and rubrics. Having the due date on the first day of a week long school holiday program added to the pressure but by devoting both of the last two weekends exclusively to writing I managed to make all the prep pay off. I feel like I will have to continue to cut out activities from my life during semester in order to make work and university more comfortable bedfellows. Cutting down on the non-GLAM volunteering would be a start but I can already see that my 10 days at the National Conference of AMAGA will put pressure on the next double due date of assignments.