Writing & Communication
Writing and communication defined within the confines of IAS is a students ability to package information they have digested and deliver it to a certain audience. This is explored throughout IAS in a multitude of ways ranging from breaking down dense scientific journals into more simplistic forms for broader audiences (pulling more from the sister objective interdisciplinary research and inquiry) to using one’s own imagination to create and distribute original thoughts and ideas to an audience for feedback, critique, or education (leaning more into the critical and creative thinking objective). This, of course, is all a deeply specific but still a watered down definition of communication and writing as this learning objective is explored on an individual level from merely existing in a human society where collaboration and communication are vital to survival. Writing and communication is a skill that all IAS students possess before entering the IAS pipeline but, through this academic journey, a student is expected to refine these skills to ensure that their messaging is packaged and delivered in the most efficient and enticing way possible for their intended audience.
This learning objective has always been important to me as I consider myself a person of many thoughts. Having the ability to effectively collect these thoughts through the medium of writing and express them in my work, without jeopardizing my individuality, has been a welcome challenge within my time in higher education. Communication, outside of writing, can’t be measured by its importance, rather, its necessity to any functioning collection of organisms, let alone people. We communicate with our words as much as we do with our clothes, our walk, our choices, our attention, our gaze, you name it, it's all communicating and it’s IAS student’s jobs to focus these understandings on concepts, discourses, ideas, and realities surrounding subjects of our analysis. Though communication exists everywhere in all forms around the world, it's our responsibility to decipher it, break it down, and extract information so that we may engage meaningfully in advanced communication circles.
The first piece of evidence I’ve gathered to express Writing & Communication is a 5 star review of Abstract Time (See at the bottom of this page or in Archive). This was the final assignment due for a class called History Of Science And Technology. For this assignment, we were asked to write a paper as if we were writing a yelp review on the concept of abstract time. To me, this said that I would be essentially roleplaying as a character who visited this concept as a patron. For some context, this class was almost entirely about the invention of the clock. What life was like before the clock, how clocks were first used, and how clocks became the universal tool that organized everything in the modern age from work, sleep, transportation, etc. The review of abstract time asked us to essentially take in everything we learned throughout the class and write a 1 out of 5 star review on our experience visiting a world centered around the clock (citing different texts we read throughout the class).
Writing and communication were heavily utilized throughout this paper as I essentially had to communicate through two layers in my writing. In the first layer, there was the expectation to give a star rating on the concept of abstract time and then write an essay defending why I rated it poorly or fairly with strong scholarly evidence backing up my claims. On the second layer, I had to pretend I wasn’t a human who grew up in a world where time controlled every aspect of life around me. I had to take on the persona of a being who lived outside of time, popped into our concept of time for a while, then popped back out to give a review of my experience. This was a challenging and rewarding assignment as I had to hash out a way to communicate my experience of time in a creative and informative way through the medium of writing.
My second piece of evidence has to be a short film I made in a Video Art class (See at the bottom of this page or in Archive). This film, again, was the final assignment of this class and the prompt was to make a video project from idea conception to final realization on any topic we wanted. The freedom of choice in this assignment was as constrictive to me as it was liberating. The potential options were overwhelming and as my mind raced, clinging onto so many possibilities, the due date crept closer. This conundrum in itself became an interesting concept I ended up wanting to explore for my project, however I struggled trying to conceptualize exactly how I would express my experience of freedom being a barrier. I found that the best way to communicate this feeling was to reenact my week leading up to the due date while utilizing parody and satire to capture attention and bring focus to this strange dilemma.
This film expresses the learning objective through its very creation and its continued existence outside of my influence. What I mean by that is, this film started as a storyboard and a script. Taking my thoughts to paper and visualizing a medium of communication through a screen. The final product is now out of my hands and exists as a piece of media to be used as an example for future students taking that class as well as online where anyone can stumble upon it. The video will continue communicating my curated message as long as somebody is around to play it.
Writing & Communication is the vehicle that gets all these other learning objectives distributed around. In my first piece of evidence, I was able to show how this LO is used in an academic sense as well as an artistic sense by reviewing abstract time through the lens of an observer. My second piece of evidence captured how communication exists in many forms. It put communication in a vacuum as there was no requirement to rely on scholarly works, rather, pure individual creativity being distributed to a collection of other amateur video artists. It lends itself to a multitude of interpretations, all of which being valid in that specific artistic environment of communication.