Pointers

Friends,

In the spirit of getting to know each other's individual interests in the subject at hand, I would like to draw your attention to the work of one of my favourites, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (pictured). Here is the transcript of a significant and accessible talk Dennett presented in 1992, on the mechanics of memory. I can't gauge how relevant this rather technical and basic epistemological discussion will be to our endeavour but I think it could be comforting as a solid basis from which to digress into the more abstract trains of thought that literary-minded people tend to end up following. Dan Dennett is an exceptionally gifted speaker, so I'd also like to point you towards a lecture on consciousness he delivered more recently as part of TED, here. TED, for those who haven't come across it, is perhaps the most bookmarkable address on the net. The most inspiring lectures by some of the world's most accomplished speakers are archived there. It's a profound database of audacious ideas worth visiting regularly.

See you next week,

David

We hear you loud and clear

Hi Everyone,

Here's the image I took with my computer during our second (my first) session. I thought the Aarhus assembly might like to see what it looked like from the UCL side.

David

UCL checks into our virtual classroom

A few days ago we had our first local meeting here at UCL, and we are all looking forward to meeting the Danish participants the coming week. Three out of the seven students met in the Access Grid studio (Diana, Natasha and Elena), and I think we all agreed that this is going to be quite an unusual and fascinating learning experience for all of us - we have been hit by some sort of malignant virus here in London, and we hope to have a full team ready to meet, virtually, the three Danish students (Lene, Christian and Jacob) and Svend Erik on Monday in our first video conference. You will soon be able to "meet" all the participants on the Moodle site.

As a way of introducing the course, I talked a bit about the rationality behind it; and we discussed what it might ad to the course that we conduct it across national borders, why are we using Moodle, hypertext and other WEB2.0 technologies as central tools in the course? One of the more complex and experimental issues is, of course, how the format and technologies of the course will feed-back onto the theme, Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture. Will we, for instance, at the end of the course, be able to determine whether or not the transnational and hypertextual format of the course and its products will influence the way we think about memory?

We wont have time, I am afraid, to continue the discussion we had on some of the "memory images" we have collected in the Moodle database: the Lukasa, Luba Memory board, and Saxgren's photograph of a native-american Dane, wearing traditional costume in the midst of his Danish domestic setting, but we already took some steps towards exploring the mediated, encoded, nature of cultural memories, and the fact that heritage and cultural memory translate, in interesting ways, into other cultural settings - I am sure this discussion will continue with other materials in the weeks to come.

I am looking forward to meeting the rest om my UCL students and, not least, our Danish collaborators - I am certain we will have many transnational memories to share as the course unfolds.