The format for our interactions over the coming two weeks is a series of informal tutorials in Watch2gether around a film festival, pieced together from interesting short films and classic clips on YouTube and elsewhere. All these engage in some way with themes emerging from the readings, and your brief is to tease these out a bit in discussion, extend the thinking and get familiar with some of the theory. So please do the readings early in the block, alongside your viewing of the movies.
How does the film festival work? We’ve sourced a collection of films and extracts which we’ve loosely clustered around the themes of ‘memory’, ‘machine sentience’ and ‘almost human’. There will be two ‘real time’ tutorials offered in Watch2gether in weeks one and two, so that we can meet each other and watch/discuss a few of the films together. Then in week 3 we will have a Google hangout in which we’ll discuss the readings and ideas generated in more depth.
During the block, blog your thoughts, tweet them and get them feeding into your lifestream-blog.
Watch2gether
Holding a couple of short meet-ups in real time gives us a chance to meet as a group, do some socialising and (text) chat about a few of the films. Watch2gether adds a text chat facility to any YouTube or Vimeo movie, enabling us to watch and talk at the same time. There are two one-hour sessions in week 1:
Wednesday 15th January: 11am-12noon and Thursday 16th January: 8pm-9pm – please try to make at least one of these sessions.
In week 2, the sessions are:
Wednesday 22nd January: 11am-12noon and Thursday 23rd January: 8pm-9pm
Tutorial links will be posted in Moodle here, and emailed to the group (this is to keep the room private for invites only)
Google hangout
You will need a Google account to join the hangout in week 3, so please set one up if you don’t have one already. See the information in ‘Before semester starts‘ for how.