Browsing by Author "Kelty, Christopher"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Connexions Project: Promoting Open Sharing of Knowledge for Education
    (2003-07-01) Henry, Geneva; Baraniuk, Richard G.; Kelty, Christopher; Digital Signal Processing (http://dsp.rice.edu/)
    The Connexions project at Rice University has created an open repository of educational materials and tools to promote sharing and exploration of knowledge as a dynamic continuum of interrelated concepts. Available free of charge to anyone under open-content and open-source licenses, Connexions offers high-quality, custom-tailored electronic course material, is adaptable to a wide range of learning styles, and encourages students to explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. Connexions fosters worldwide, cross-institution communities of authors, instructors, and students, who collaborate on the creation of knowledge building blocks from which courses are constructed. The ideas and philosophy embodied by Connexions have the potential to change the very nature of teaching and learning, producing a dynamic, interconnected educational environment that is pedagogically sound, both time and cost efficient, and engaging.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Move! Guerrilla films, collaborative modes, and the tactics of radical media making
    (2007) Stringer, Tish; Marcus, George; Naficy, Hamid; Kelty, Christopher
    This dissertation is an ethnography of video activists with the Independent Media Center (also known as IMC or indymedia) creating collectively made videos aimed at affecting political change. I explore the larger Independent Media Center Network, beginning in the Zapatista Encuentros of the late Nineties, the "trial run" in Seattle during the meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999 and the subsequent growth into a world wide network with almost 200 local collectives producing radical news and providing distribution outlets for media makers. Indymedia is situated within a social movement, commonly known as anti-globalization, but more properly termed the global justice movement. I investigate indymedia videos as insider media; videos that come out of are circulated within and support the social movement. Indymedia videos are political interventions, but they also constitute a social intervention as IMC videographers make politically informed choices to shape the filmmaking process itself. Social movement based media is not a new phenomena, and as part of this dissertation, I explore several examples of other radical film collectives operating in different historical periods with different technological apparatuses. I treat the complication of being a group committed to openness and democracy in an environment of political repression and surveillance. Finally, I discuss doing contemporary experimental ethnography within this complex environment and my role as both an activist and an academic.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Nanotechnology: Content and Context
    (Rice University, 2009-06-02) Kelty, Christopher; Hutchinson, John S.
    This is an NSF-funded (Grant No. EEC-0407237) Rice University course called "Nanotechnology: Context and Content." The goal is to teach students some basic nanoscience/nanotechnology by putting it in a social and cultural context. Students are expected to learn both some basic science and technology and at the same time, some techniques for understanding the social and cultural significance, role, and possible effects of this emerging science. Students from from all majors are encouraged to take this class. In addition, students are expected to assist each other in learning and discussing the content and the context, and to maintain respect for both the scientific and the social and cultural approaches. Many modules in this course are the result of students work in previous iterations of the class.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Text as Property/Property as Text
    (Rice University, 2004-04-23) Kelty, Christopher
    Ownership, authorship, plagiarism, intellectual property, parody, critique, re-use, credit, reputation, allusion, imitation, patronage, payment, piracy, creativity, originality, borrowing, lending, stealing, quoting, citing, lifting, re-writing, translating, acting, performing, impersonating, collaborating, re-creating, editing, sampling, sharing. If you can distinguish between all these activities, legally, morally, culturally and historically, then you don't need our class. If on the other hand, you want to know why ancient Romans sampled Virgil so often, or why some plagiarism is art and some is crime, or what could happen to manuscripts in antiquity when they circulated, or why the RIAA is suing thousands of college students, or how Martial and Galen thought about ownership, payment and credit, or how Hollywood does so, or whether Christians should be allowed to "share" their message, then this is your class.