Category: Art

What to do:

1. Seek, find, and visit websites and YouTube channels associated with coding and creativity; e.g., https://scratch.mit.edu/ http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ https://girlswhocode.com https://hourofcode.com/ https://processing.org/ https://www.youtube.com/user/CodeOrg  (Links to an external site.)

2. Watch a bunch of the videos that promote or advertise the cause. Consider who appears in the videos and what that reveals about the intended audience for the videos. Take some screenshots and some written notes as you watch. Record the URLs of the videos you watch.

3. Watch and do one of the Hour of Code tutorials (https://hourofcode.com/us/learn), or one of the talk throughs on computer programming at Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming). Lets call these tutorials interactive videos. Document your progress for this step as you did for the last: take notes, screenshots, and remember the URLs for everything you look at or play with.

4. As you select a tutorial to do, you will notice that they are targeted at different audiences — sometimes explicitly, like in terms of recommended age group; sometimes implicitly through their reference to images or sounds from popular culture that appeal to certain audiences.

5. Research who made these videos, who appears in these videos, and who financed these videos (both the promotional videos and the interactive videos). Start this process by Wikipedia surfing the profiles of these people; e.g., with respect to Mitchel Resnick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchel_Resnick) you will find out where and with whom he works, where he got his degree, what he used to do before he was a professor. Follow links to co-workers, personal relations (e.g., brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, etc.), places of employment, etc. To find more than the basics e.g., to find out that Resnick serves on the board of the Computer Clubhouse Network (http://theclubhousenetwork.org/board) and the Scratch Foundation (https://www.scratchfoundation.org/who-we-are/) you will need to broaden your search beyond Wikipedia. Keep track of the connections you find by drawing a social network diagram.

6. Consider the history of the creativity movement. The OED can be a place to start, just looking at the etymology of words like creative (http://www.oed.com.oca.ucsc.edu/view/Entry/44072#eid8014684), but a real history will take some more digging (e.g., https://www.ias.edu/ideas/van-eekelen-discipline-creativity); and, finding the apt intellectual predecessor of specific ideas about creativity will entail even more study; e.g., Resnicks Creative Learning Spiral seems to be a vulgarization of philosopher Hegels dialectic spiral of sublation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufheben). Wikipedia can be of some help for this step too, but to make claims like I have just done connecting Resnick to Hegel requires a reading of the original sources, if you are going to be academically respectable.

7. Consider the cultural, business, and political context of creativity and code. For example, is the code and creativity cause motivated by a view of economics like the creative class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_class) notion advanced by business school professor Richard Florida? Is it a plot by the billionaires who appear in those Hour of Code videos? What does coding and creativity have to do with bigger movements, like the Maker Movement? Is it all just a natural outgrowth of the coupling of hippies and the military that spawned Silicon Valley as detailed in Fred Turners history, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006)? You might also want to consider coding and creativity as it appears in academia and the university (e.g., The biannual ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference: http://cc.acm.org)  (Links to an external site.)

8. Outline a way to tie all this stuff together: Who appears in the videos? Who is behind the videos? Who are the videos designed to appeal to? What are the money and the power behind the videos or, more generally, behind the code and creativity movement?

9. Now you are ready to write. Pick a position: Are you for this coding and creativity thing, or against it, or are you going to point out both positives and negatives? Youve looked at a lot of videos and consulted a lot of biographies: For your argument, who agrees with you? Who disagrees and why? What would it take to convince someone otherwise? To figure out what would be convincing, you need to consider the audience for your paper. Start with the other students in class. How can you convince them? Include both big picture stuff, e.g., what creativity and coding is in the mass media, education in general, etc. And, include close readings of specific arguments and promotions you have seen or read in the videos or texts, like Resnicks text. What do those videos or texts do to you to convince you, or not? Include a screenshot or two if it helps you make your point. List, in your bibliography/references URLs, videos, books, etc. you discovered in your research for this project and that you incorporate into your paper. Usually, it is the case that the more references you include the better. In contrast, a paper that hinges on just one or two references is usually too fragile to withstand a close reading or critique.

10. Grading:

The paper will be graded according to the following criteria:

(a) Spelling and grammar count! We will take off points for poor proofreading;

(b) the quality and extent of your research;

(c) the clarity of your argument: Make your point right up front and then extend your argument in the body of the paper;

(d) the skill with which you weave your references into your argument; Just listing references is not convincing; you need to consider the point (or ancillary point) you are trying to make by citing a reference; e.g., some references are there to convince the reader that you know what you are writing about; others are there to represent adversaries: ideas or people against whom you are arguing; other are positive citations, references to ideas or people who back up or give further depth to the position you are arguing.