Christy Dena has a wonderfully useful post on the differences between her approach to crossmedia or polymorphic narrative, and my approach to what I’ve called distributed narrative. Isn’t the web awesome, letting us find each other like this, now, as we’re figuring out what this is rather than years hence? There’s plenty to think about, I’ve only had time to just skim her post so far, and I’ve peeked at her work a little before too, but just the skimming it inspires me to dig down and figure out how this fits in with my view of the world. Yay!

No time right now: I’ve been coordinating all the myriad details of a course on webdesign with a likely 70 students (40 BA students in new media and in TV production have to take the course this semester, and usually about 30 general humanities students choose it, too) and four teaching assistants and a second lecturer and lectures and seminars and groups and assignments and portfolios and a (wonderful) external examiner and rooms and projectors and net connections and orientations and pedagogy courses for the students and choices of technology and contracts and books and considering the needs of two departments and other courses some students will be taking this semester and my goodness I had no idea what a lot of organisation teaching can take. I’ve got great support from the administration, too, that’s not a problem, it’s just plain old lots of work, that’s all, and there’s way more to do yet.

Orientations are tomorrow. And the next day, for the new media and television students. The first lecture is Monday. Right now I’m going to finish the pretty one-page version of the syllabus so I have something to hand out tomorrow. I wonder what the syllabus template in Pages looks like? Would it be wonderful to just pour it in there and be done with it?

And perhaps tomorrow afternoon an hour thinking about distributed and/or polymorphic narratives.

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