For the past week or so I’ve been doing a little research into the idea of “desire lines” after it came up in a discussion with my co-worker, Lee. I was talking about stories I’d heard about landscape architects waiting for people to make trails before laying down official paths, as metaphor for observing where people stray from the beaten path as a way to understand how the path is inadequate.
It occurred to me that this has happened with The Campaign. I know from talking to the students that the Mailbox function failed, and they strayed to email to take up their own interchanges there. This had the unintended effect of changing the students’ experience of the role-play, however, because they then spoke to each other out of character for the most part. This is a desire line for them — wanting to talk to each other, student-to-student. An oversight in the design of the system. An example of where the system was subverted.
What’s interesting is that they also described the fact that they knew how to subvert the system even further by getting to materials ahead of time, but they didn’t. While in The Campaign, where they knew they could be watched, they behaved. Foucoult, anyone?
Lee reminded me of Jacques Lacan’s work in relation to desires. I realise I’ve only really been in touch with Lacan through Turkle’s later work. So I’m hoping to get a hold of some of his stuff to check out what he says about desires.
Wikipedia tells me he wrote this:
The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis*, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968
I hadn’t seen this before, but this clip is really worth watching. Borat interviews a few Cambridge Dons in front of Kings College, and learns how to play cricket.
The BBC Cambridgeshire website posted a story on swing dancing today, featuring me and Lotte answering some funny questions in a short video interview. There’s even some shots of all of us doing the Shim Sham, and if you listen really closely you can hear us talking to a woman on her bicycle who wanted to know why not all of us were dressed up in 40s gear. It was all pretty unplanned, and the music’s timing is a little off, but we really enjoyed doing it. Hopefully a few more people will hear about us as well.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on launching a website for our new student society, Cambridge Lindy Hoppers. We’re hoping this group will catalyse new interest in Lindy Hop in Cambridge, and we’re planning to start classes with social dancing next month.
This week we were visited by Justin and Sara. Below are just a few of the 700+ photos taken mostly by Justin during the week. They spent a few days here in Cambridge before we headed down to London to hang out with Dozka, Heidi & Ian and Simon & George. Visiting London means we actually got to go social dancing, which we’ve been missing recently. We also finally got to go punting when the weather improved on Tuesday evening, and it was worth the wait.
My last post was a bit short on detail wasn’t it? Perhaps I should explain. Every year (well almost) we go to the Herrang Dance Camp in Sweden. This year was my 6th at Herrang, and Lotte’s 4th. The only recent year we’ve missed is 2003, and I can’t remember why that was — probably we’d already done too much travel that year! We’re already planning to be there again next year.
More photos, including of Gothenburg and Kungshamn, here.
Here are a few photos from Herrang and Stockholm. We’ve just returned from our trip this morning. It was a really fantastic holiday and involved an awful lot of dancing and an awful lot of sleeping, with some sightseeing in between. I’ll post some from the second part of the trip (in Gothenburg and Kungshamn) shortly.
Posted by matthew on Jul 19, 2006 in dance, travel
The past two weekends have been spent away, with Lotte assisting Bill to teach workshops in Dublin and Norwich. The photo is actually from Dublin, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it. The group was really fantastic and learnt an awful lot in two days. The workshop in Norwich was very different — part of a swing, tango and salsa “fusion” weekend. It had mixed success in the sense that their was a lot of learning but not much actual fusion between the different dance styles. I took part in a tango class and marvelled at the technical skills of the teachers. The fundamental concepts were very similar to Lindy Hop, but more emphasis was put on keeping everything on one level in tango instead of “sinking into the floor”. When I took a step I was warned about “collapsing” my legs. I didn’t take part in many classes however. For the most part, I did my own thing at these weekends. In Dublin this consisted of finishing my thesis and watching The Da Vinci Code on my laptop, as well as getting a good look around town. The city is beautiful, and the wide suburban expanse by the bay reminded me of home.
In Norwich the experience was quite unusual. We were staying at Bylaugh Hall (pronounced Beela Hall), an amazing restoration in progress of a rural mansion that was requisitioned during WWII by the RAF. There are still all kinds of temporary wartime structures such as bomb shelters standing near the house, all overgrown with vines and rusting. The building itself had become decrepit before restoration work started 6 years ago, and when you walk through some of the partly restored areas you can still see dead vines clinking to the pillars. It’s now used as an arts and culture venue, and is hired out regularly for weddings and parties. We were treated to gourmet dining and luxury accommodation, all of which was very much appreciated after a hard slog for both of us. Lotte’s been invited to teach with Bill on a more permanent basis in Europe, with the next set of workshops in a couple of months.
This second podcast is about role-plays as well, but this time the role-plays don’t use online technologies at all. The Knowledge Resource Network (KRN), sponsored by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), aims to make learning materials developed for the CMI M.Phil. courses available to other UK higher education institutions. The KRN Project identified a number of role-plays as exemplars for possible reuse. This presentation to the CARET Evaluation Group describes a qualitative research project to investigate the usage of these role-plays. Also on The Zotcast.
