AAD Program – Fenn's Fac-o-blog

Folklore, webinars, and workshops—oh my!

Image courtesy Wisconsin Historical Images (some rights reserved)

On April 1 I was in Madison, WI for a workshop co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Folklore Program, the American Folklore Society, and the ARIS team at UW. ARIS stands for “augmented reality interactive storytelling,” and the project consists of an iPhone app (the client) and a web-based game editor within which someone would construct a “situated documentary” or place-based educational “game.” Run largely by ARIS team members, the workshop focused on getting folklorists to think about how to employ this platform (and related technologies) in cultural heritage/tourism contexts. We did plenty of hands-on work with the extremely-alpha editor (based on MIT open source code), but also spend time discussing best practices, limitations to application, and conceptual issues related to the whole effort. Since the games in ARIS are place-based, you can’t really play them unless you are physically in the places they reference, but the app is free and once they move into beta stages of development I imagine there will be wider access to the whole system.

Somewhat related, I received an announcement the other day about a series of webinars hosted by South Arts (regional arts non-profit that works with nine state arts agencies in the U.S. South). Geared largely toward folklorists and heritage workers, the series kicks off on April 13. Go here for a descriptive list of all of them, but below are selected highlights:

April 13, 2011 10:00 a.m. ET (1.5 hrs)

Folklife Emergency! 12 Steps to Readiness
All areas of the nation are subject to emergencies including natural disasters and human-caused events. However, our cultural resources-including people, buildings, and objects-are often at risk for severe damage or loss. Learn about 12 simple things that you can do right now to protect your folklife and cultural heritage assets.

May 5, 2011 2:00 p.m. ET (1.5 hrs)

Digital Tools for the Folk
Spotlight on digital trends and tools folklorists can use to advance their work. Participants will learn about an assortment of free and low-cost resources easy enough for the non-techie to use.

June 1, 2011 10:00 a.m. ET (1.5 hrs)

Online Exhibits: Get Your Fabulous Folklore Content to an Online Audience
As more and more organizations jump on the online exhibit bandwagon, competition for eyeballs gets tougher. In this webinar you’ll learn best practices to make your exhibit stand out from the rest.

All of the workshops have some sort of connection to media, management, documentation, and arts/culture work. Each costs $25.oo to register, and look well worth it.

DML 2011 digest…

I was recently at the 2nd annual Digital Media & Learning meetings, held this year in Long Beach, CA. Sponsored/organized again by Digital Media and Learning Research Hub @ University of California, this year’s meetings extended many of the themes, conversations, debates, and initiatives that emerged at last year’s event in La Jolla, CA. For extensive info on the 2011 meeting, go here; in this post, I’m just setting out to highlight and digest some of the fantastic things I encountered.

The Twitter backchannel was active again this year (#dml2011), and led me to a host of resources: websites, projects, conversations, people, and places. One of the coolest—and this should happen at every conference with parallel sessions—is a set of collaborative & public notes put up on Google Docs by conference attendees. Check it out for a wide range of perspectives and reports on the various sessions (plus, I’m certain it will continue to grow as people add to it…). You can also peruse the online archive of all the twittering/backchannel communication going on throughout the conference here (make sure the “view” limit is pretty high…it should already be set to “10,000,” though there weren’t that many tweets).

One of the more exciting sessions I attended was called the “Ignite Talks,” wherein each participant had under ten minutes to give a brief talk and generate some conversation/thinking. I heard some phenomenally engaging presentations on “grading” via “badges;” using YouTube in a middle school English class to explore representations of race, class, and place through “gangster” adaptations of Hamlet; work with Asperger’s syndrome youth in Second Life; and the ways that parents can/should encourage techon adept/adapted living in a balanced way. And that’s just a sampling of what presenters sprung during the first Ignite session!

I also attended two fantastic workshops. One was called “Thinking through Code: DIY data-mining and the politics of off-topic forums,” and focused on tools for ‘scraping’ data in an ethnographically-oriented manner when doing research with online communities. In lieu of a hand-out, the organizers created a “living” document gathering resources and tips; you can access it here.

Another amazing workshop, sponsored and facilitated by Mozilla, featured plenty of hands-on work with some really great tools. Called, “ Hacking as Learning: A slice of the Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival,” the session was basically four concurrent miniworkshops in tinkering, hacking, and playing with emergent tools. One group waded into the realm of Hackasaurus, and learned about/through the often misunderstood realm of web hacking. Another group learned how to “write” with satellites, using a piece of open-source software that allows one to generate text with satellite images (I didn’t catch the name, but check the Google doc collaborative notes linked above…). A third group examined the ‘hacking’ of established/traditional notions of grading-as-assessment strategy in formal education, and proposed some great ideas for reimagining how teachers might think about evaluating student work in the current (and future) cultural environment. Finally, the group I attached myself to worked with Mozilla’s “Web.Made.Movies” project, an emerging platform for creating media-rich or transmedia web-based video content using the HTML5 standards. The authoring tool is called “Butter” (which you can find here), and it is basically a graphical front-end for the Popocorn.js programming environment. If you are adventurous and JavaScript-literate, give it a shot—otherwise, explore Butter (still very much in alpha), which was quite intuitive and fun. Essentially, it allows a user to use JavaScript to call out web-enabled artifacts such as Google Maps, Wikipedia entries, Twitter searches, or Flickr images at specific points in a video timeline. A super-cool idea, and one with many potential applications within and beyond educational settings.

Many more things stood out (or jumped out) during this conference, especially in the “science fair” exhibition space featuring winners of last year’s DML/HASTAC funding competition. Some examples (follow the links for more info than I could provide…):

Finally, kudos to AAD 2nd year grad students Alyssa Fisher and Arielle Sherman for winning two volunteer spots at the conference in a highly competitive environment (30 applications/8 volunteer positions = AAD win!)…

All around wonderful conference, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s in San Francisco!

@ ELI conference in Washington D.C.

So I’m at the annual national meeting for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) meeting with Doug Blandy this week. You can follow the meetings via Twitter with the hashtag: #eli2011. Here is a Twitter search widget running a loop of current tweets:

Sonny Smith & 100 Records in Eugene

Since January 7th, 2011, Sonny Smith’s “100 Records” show has been up in the former Musique Gourmet space on an alley off Olive Street in downtown Eugene. Staged in partnership with Freelance Curator, DIVA, and the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, the show will run until March 4th—scoot down and check it out if you’ve not had a chance already!

The show would not have happened with direct support from the Arts & Administration Program, the Department of Art, and the A&AA Dean’s Office. Special thanks go out to the AAD students who volunteered many hours toward the show: Alyssa Fisher, Daniel Linver, Arielle Sherman, and Tomas Valladeres. In addition to hanging the pieces and gallery-sitting during open hours, they helped staff the opening as well as the extra-special event on Feb. 3: a performance by Sonny himself (along with drummer, Graham). Here’s a clip from that performance featuring the song, “Mario”:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrY48H-IVlw[/youtube]

Thanks are also in order for Ninkasi Brewery and J. Scott Cellars for the donated libations, as well as Bradford’s Home Entertainment for facilitating use of the Musique Gourmet space as a gallery. Finally, kudos to Kristen Gallerneux Brooks and Bernie Brooks for sinking so much time and energy into this show! For those of you who didn’t make it to the Feb. 3 performance, here’s a shot of the amazing “cherry cola” and “chocolate stout” cupcakes Kristen baked:

Another cloud tool…

Just discovered Tagxedo, which is a far more flexible tool than Wordle for making word clouds/visualizations from text. The catch is that Tagxedo requires Silverlight, a Microsoft browser extension…

With Tagxedo, you have a lot more control over shape, which words are included, and potential sources (Tweet streams, URLs, etc). Definitely worth checking out!

Here is a cloud I made from the Twitter feed generated during the Oregon Folklife Network‘s launch-symposium, “Public Folklore in the 21st Century“:

Click on the image or follow this link to get to a “live”/larger version on the Tagxedo site…

OFN symposium: a debrief

This past Friday (11/19/2010) proved to be a successful and energizing day, with the Oregon Folklife Network moving into a chrysallis phase of development via a symposium held at the Many Nations Longhouse on the University of Oregon campus. Titled “Public Folklore in the 21st Century,” the symposium focused on entertaining questions on, insights into, and critical examination of the shape a state-wide public folklore effort should take here and now. An array of local & regional panelists and active attendees anchored the proceedings in immediate context of Oregon, while special guest Bill Ivey brought a national-policy frame to things (often from the 20,000-foot perspective, as he noted periodically…). This combination of distal and proximal, macro and micro, created a dynamic intellectual climate in which we pursued collective analysis of several key issues/themes:

the relationship between ‘non-profit’ and ‘for-profit’ models for cultural programming
developing sustainable structures that support arts & culture (maybe the issue, according to Devon Leger of Hearth Music)
the terminological salad: folklife, folk art, culture, art, or expressive life (Bill Ivey’s suggestion)—which is best for describing the “what” of our efforts?
the difficult necessity of including as many voices/constituencies/interests as possible in developing the strategies, projects, and goals of the OFN such that it serves all communities of the state

An invited panel of arts & culture leaders started the day off, by responding to prompts and offering perspectives on the challenges and possibilities in front of the OFN. Discussion and audience response to this panel bled into a working lunch, during which each table chewed on food and a key question distributed by symposium organizers; my tablemates and I batted around ideas for an OFN mission as well as strategies for generating state-wide engagement. After a short table-reporting session, we moved into the final panel for the day: a student-centered discussion about the relationship between academic training and community-engaged work that emerges at the nexus of folklore and arts management. I moderated this panel, but the four students—two representing the Arts Administration Program, two representing the Folklore Program—did all the work, providing compelling examples from their own research or coursework that gave everyone plenty to think about. To wrap up the day, Bill Ivey presented a short series of synthesizing observations/remarks; the overall theme of these (and the day as well) was: the network-model put into place via the establishment of the OFN is unique and potentially very powerful, so let’s make good on it!

As an experiment, and in order to encourage an avenue of participation that enabled those in the room as well as those far away to partake, a Twitter stream drawing on the official hashtag (#ofn2010) ran on one of the walls as a projection. You can access an archive of it here…While most of the tweets were from people in the room, this stream nonetheless provided a meeting-within-a-meeting of sorts, a meta-commentary on the events and a simultaneous exploration of how/where/why emerging tech can play a role in arts and culture work. Look for video from the symposium in the near future on the OFN site.

David Silver @ AAD Friday Forum!

The Arts and Administration Program is currently hosting Dr. David Silver, a faculty member at the University of San Francisco in media studies and environmental studies. He’ll be presenting at a Friday Forum on his recent collaborations with students at USF that investigate ways to merge social media and community gardening/urban agriculture. Info below (or here as a pdf)!

Another Kickstarter project…media/art/music summit in Austin!

Ran across this via the Twitter feed of Chris Schlarb, a composer/musician based in Long Beach, CA. The New Media Art & Sound Summit looks to be quite fascinating, and is, as noted on the Kickstarter project page, a new kind of festival. It also represents—and here I’m predicting—a new way to think about programming in the arts and culture sectors. I’m still reading up on the organization behind the NMASS and am trying to figure out if I can make it to Austin…

Helen De Michiel's Kickstarter project

Helen De Michiel is a filmmaker and independent media advocate who co-directs the National Alliance for Media Art + Culture (NAMAC), the Lunch Love Community project is her latest undertaking. When she visited the UO Arts & Administration Program during winter term, she spoke a bit about this project and its relationship to ongoing conversations about models for sustainability in funding public arts and culture projects. Kickstarter is one of the emergent entities focused on generating project-level funding through a participatory model—sure, you give money, but you also become part of the process leading up to the completion of the project. Often the ‘ownership’ of individual donors manifests in a reward of some sort—a DVD, a poster, or, in the case of the LLC project, a package of seeds for sowing in your own garden.

Internship opportunity in North Carolina

This internship with Working Films was passed to me by Helen DeMichiel, co-director of NAMAC. Applications are due by April 1, and the internship appears to be somewhat flexible with regards to the specific project an intern would work on. An excerpt from the full post:

The exact fit of each Fellow to our ongoing work will be determined at the outset of the “Stoneyship.” We regard the Fellow as a staff person during the time spent with Working Films which means s/he will participate in the full activities of the staff of Working Films during the course of the summer. Regular responsibilities include sitting in as colleagues in development meetings between filmmakers, activists and other Working Films staff; participating in audience and community engagement efforts; and contributing to our blog and social networks. Poke around our website to learn more about the work we do.

They offer an hourly pay as stipend, and it looks like a great opportunity for someone wanting to be involved in many aspects of realizing a film project.