Week8_Sprint4#Revision of My Open Toolkit in Barcamp
Tutorial reflection:
After the tutorial, I found that my existing open toolkit on rebuild confidence has limitations:
- My practices each use the same model, and although they are different activities, as Professor Neil says, the participants are more like ‘icebreakers’ and don’t really get anything out of them.
- I think my theme and content were to a certain extent not relevant enough to dig deep enough into what I was really going for.
- I used the ‘rate for each other’ mechanism, but I didn’t take into account the fact that people are constantly being ‘evaluated’ and ‘scored’, whether they are working or studying.
The content/theory of the books I refer to:
- Hagen, Aina Landsverk. “Sketching with Knives: Architects & the Confidence Theory of Magic.” Anthropology today 33.2 (2017): 24–27. Web.
Malinovsky’s “Magic Confidence Theory” (1935) states how, through ritual behavior, a person has the right to believe that he can master the obstacles of nature, and thus be able to undertake tasks that he would otherwise shrink back from. The relationship between creativity, magic and professional confidence is investigated through ethnographic fieldwork by Snøhetta, an internationally renowned architecture firm based in Oslo and New York.
- Jones, G. (2011). Trade of the Tricks : Inside the Magician’s Craft / Graham Jones. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.
He (Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin) found that, although performance is solitary, preparation is communal, and relationships among magicians are complex. The face-to-face performance of magic, devoid of computer-animated effects, is a kind of artisanal experience in a world where audiences are accustomed to mass-mediated entertainment. Linguistically, magicians are members of a speech community with their own verbal practices, from the patter that distracts the spectator’s attention to the coded phrases magicians use among themselves. Modern magic is traced to the ground-breaking career in the mid-nineteenth century of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin.
https://v.qq.com/x/page/s0905jn1o0s.html
There also is a video of a magic let me start to think our brains use cognitive models to solve cognitive problems by receiving visual-auditory-based signals to back-decode what should be happening in the real world.
- ‘Isn’t gravity wonderful? That’s the magic trick in a way’. The Malinowskian ‘confidence theory of magic’ (1935) points to how a person, through the ritual act, becomes empowered to believe he can master nature’s obstacles, and thus become equipped to undertake tasks from which he would otherwise shrink.
My revision:
I think I found what I really wanted to perform, and I tried to start from a magic perspective, using this seemingly simple and fun art form as a basis for “building a sense of belief”. As the Open and Close game that I have performed in class before, I would like to use it as the icebreaker.
About the “magic”:
When we hear a word, everyone associates and interprets it differently, this difference comes from our perception, which means that this process of transmitting information is asymmetrical, our consciousness determines where we will go, and if we fear that a bad prediction will come true, we find a way to fight it and “finish the hand ” before we know the end.
Our brain’s storage, computing resources are also limited, the body organs as a sensor capacity is also limited, different occasions on the accuracy of our judgment, speed is also different requirements, which evolved a central brain processor. In magic, to be able to find the relatively most credible cognitive results within a given limited range, with a particular goal, rather than what is absolutely correct. Any further deviations from the choice you make will be expected to be inferior to the choice within your perception. This is called Nash equilibrium in the West and the middle way in the East.
https://uoe-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/s2313334_ed_ac_uk/ERlxV4rv7eBNr2qHLibUXZ4BhFrHLPmpsZbTUWgo1H6bdA?e=OtvFvd
Here is my specific Open Toolkit documentation, which is available for viewing in full detail.
Good reflection on our tutorial here. Yes, in 20mins there’s not enough scope to investigate something ‘big’ (the macro), but you can pursue an aspect of that big thing through an example or detail (micro). A good way to think about workshops, then, is how they can the micro to initiate participants’ to pay more attention to the macro. In your case, the micro might be a trick, the macro is ‘how easily are we manipulated?… or suchlike.
I think the rating and scoring thing is ubiquitous and not helpful. It starts with formal education (marks, grades, GPAs, etc.) and then makes its way into everything (rate your delivery?) If we are focusing on’learning’ something, what use is a rating? I’d argue that it is counterproductive – dialogue (feedback) is more important. If you want to know more about this, read the open book in the ResourceList called ‘Ungrading’.
Good to see you digging away at ‘magic’ here, both in the ‘conjuring’ sense and in the ritual sense. There’s lots of things you can do with this of course, but keep your focus on the idea of ‘confidence’, both in terms of the magician (who as to perform rites/methods with confidence) and in terms of the audience/believers, who need to have confidence in the rites and their peformance by the Magician. It’s all a confidence game premised on a thin veneer of ‘belief’!
I suggest that, for your Summative paper, you focus on Jones’ approach to magic (method/effect) and the Malinowskian theory. Looking at your own Toolkit as a case study, you could apply them separately then, perhaps, attempt to synthesise them.