The occasional reader of this blog may wonder what “Dogme 95″ is, and what it has to do with a blog about education and digital culture. (‘Dogme’ is Danish for ‘Dogma,’ and it appears alternatively as either spelling. I adhere to the native spelling. The film movement was started in 1995, hence 95). The Dogme 95 rules, the list of 10 principles (the “vows of chastity”) that the ‘brotherhood’ of rebel Scandinavian film makers imposed upon themselves received worldwide acclaim for a variety of ‘avant garde’ films produced over the past 30 years since 1995. The impetus for this week’s interest in exploring Dogme 95 is a assignment to conduct a ‘micro-ethnography’ of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). I have chosen to study the www.coursera.org MOOC on Scandinavian Film and Culture. I am collecting selected related materials on Dogme 95 in the ‘MOOC Ethnography’ page above. One of the aspects of studying Dogme 95 that appears to me, as it relates to digital cultures, is that this ‘genre’ or ‘wave’ of alternative film making forces one to consider the nature of reality and humanity, and how we view and experience the world. Digital technologies, social media, augmented reality are also focusing to consider how we view and experience the world in new ways.
I think you make a great link here PJ between Dogme’s ‘defamiliarising’ of flimic ‘reality’ and the effects of new media. I’d really like to hear more on this as your work on the course unfolds, as you’ve made me wonder in particular what a ‘vow of chastity’ for digital education might look like – could there be such a thing? How might it relate to our existing manifest for teaching online I wonder?
Possibly not the most appropriate of topics for valentine’s day but interesting still ; )