Category: media management

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!

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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)!
silver_flyer

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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…

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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.

Media Management Praxis course blog

I’ve started setting up the course blog through which I’ll run the Media Management Praxis course this winter term (2010). The blog can be found here. Please feel free to poke around in the blog, but I’ll warn you now that it is not fully populated. I’ll get more up as we move toward the beginning of the term, especially with regards to content related to the first few weeks of the class. For those of you enrolled in the course, be aware that there are some readings to do for the first meeting connected to our guest for that day, Richard Herskowitz. As of right now, I’ve set up a password-protected page for all readings (to maintain ‘fair use’ on copyrighted materials), but I’ll get a post up with links to the readings Richard has recommeded since they are all online articles anyway.

a "technology guide" for nonprofit arts/culture sector leaders…courtesy of NPower

The hard copy of this document (linked to below in PDF form) came across my desk a several weeks back, but I’ve only just gotten around to looking out it. Put out by NPower, an entity dedicated to “providing comprehensive, high-quality & affordable technology assistance to nonprofits,” the guide outlines ways in which robust (though not necessarily complex) implementation of technology can help nonprofit arts/culture agencies deliver information, engage diverse audiences, and generate a participatory framework for arts and culture programming. Well worth looking through, especially as we continue to explore ePortfolios, information design, and various media with regards to cultural policy, arts management, museum practices, and the myriad other research/teaching subjects constituting AAD at UO.

NPower technology guide for arts and culture sectors

Keeping on top of things, or "managing" the media future…

A post from Digital Cortex that distills a WIRED magazine “Intelligence briefing” on techno-trends to watch in the coming year. I’ll not distill the post further, but looks like we should watch for talk of “new etiquette” in relationship to new media; social media sites having “half-lives”; and the increasing “unpoliceability” of media consumption.

PBS and Digital Nation

I ran across this via Henry Jenkins’ blog (a seemingly unending source of info & critical insight…):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

The site is essentially a online documentary effort focused on youth involvement with online culture, and the ‘impact’ of the Internet/Web and communications technologies on our lives. The tagline of the site is “Life on the Virtual Frontier”—a bit sensationalist and predictable, but folks interviewed for the project are at the cutting edge of understanding and critiquing ways in which people (young and, um, old) are using emerging technologies and gaining adaptive skills.

Look here for Jenkins’ post.