Phaedrus

This week’s mission required us to rework an extract from Plato’s Phaedrus:

week 10 task

The first step in this process was to modernise the original text. I did this in OneNote, working up my translation alongside the original:

translation

This process of reworking and reinterpreting helped me to fully grasp the nuances of the original which, at first pass, felt a little impenetrable in places. Once this was done, I opted to use eMaze; if I’m truly honest, the rationale behind the choice of tool was that it was one of the first results in the list of sites which was returned when I Googled ‘presentation tools’. Our Moodle site was down and I couldn’t access the lists of recommended tools, so I opted for expediency.

This is the resulting presentation:

Powered by emaze

Papyrus_of_Plato_Phaedrus
Fragments of a papyrus roll of the Phaedrus from the 2nd century AD

The aim was to suggest connections and parallels between Plato’s text and the internet. One of the things I was keen to try and achieve was to allow the images and the videos in the gallery to serve to critique Socrates’ criticisms of writing; I also hoped that the reader would be encouraged to play in the gaps between the text and the ‘paintings’ and develop their own response both to Socrates’ arguments and to the artefacts within the multimedia gallery.

My experience of creating the presentation was enjoyable; I knew that I could let the images and the videos do some of the work for me. I was crafting somethigapng academic but the crafting was more immersive and less pressured than writing alone; it was more more creative. I could exploit and revel in the gaps. I didn’t have to worry about creating a closed text, I was, instead, laying out the start of a discourse: I was inviting the reader into the spaces and they were going to have to do some of the work in creating meaning:

christine

 

 

Panic

I’m currently writing this (at 21:00 on Thursday night) in OneNote, not in WordPress and, as I write, I’m panicking. I’m panicking because this has happened…Panic 1 I can’t access my blog; I can’t access the course pages, I can’t even access the Edinburgh University webpage.

Panic 2

I guess the servers have gone down and all will, eventually, be well. However, what’s of interest to me is just how disabling this is: I’ve lost all that I need to participate in the course: I can’t access the discussions; I can’t access the links to the useful tools I need to make my adapted version of the dialogue from Phaedrus.

And there’s the rub with online education. When the online disappears, so does the resource, the community, the notes, the links and the content. My class, my exercise book and my teacher have all disappeared. In a week where we’re contemplating and playing with a text which examines the negatives of an over-reliance on the written, my reliance on the multimedia hypertexts that comprise IDEL is exposed.

I’ll just keep shouting for help…

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