new media working group

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

2009-08-17T13:33:00.000-07:00

Andrew Churches, Curriculum Manager Computer Studies and ICT PD Cluster co-director
at the Kristin School in Albany Auckland New Zealand has taken great care to marry Blooms Taxonomy's key action verbs to digital approaches and tools.

This new take on Bloom's could be very useful for teaching in the 21st century.

Read more about it here: http://www.techlearning.com/article/8670

Teaching with Twitter (and introducing 12 Seconds)

2008-10-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Hear how David Parry, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, uses Twitter, a messaging service, for his courses here.

See 12 Seconds for a video tool that functions in a similar manner.

Timeline and catalog of Internet Memes

2008-08-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

For those of you exploring Internet memes with your students you might find this site useful. It compiles an interactive history of memes going back to 1982 with the emergence of the emoticon.

Other formats included within the site are a list, flipbook, and map, so users can select the view they like best.

Michael Wesch on Media Literacy and Teaching

2008-08-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

I've been working my way through this video from Michael Wesch on media literacy and the college classroom. Those of you who've seen his videos on The Machine is Us and Today's College Students will find some familiar material at the beginning, and he goes much further here into how he uses web 2.0 tools for his courses. Very interesting work.

Digital Literature from Penguin Publishing

2008-07-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

PenguinUK has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story - designed specially for the internet.

Their We Tell Stories project took six authors and offered them six weeks to create six interactive, online stories. Check out the 21 Steps story...great fun! Hard Times is intriguing, too.

Elit 2.0: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

2008-07-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Do you want to teach Web 2.0 technologies but need some exemplary creative texts for students to "read" as examples and/or illustrations of the tool's creative potential?

Check out ELit: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

"While students are still developing literacies in new technologies it is important that their adoption involves more than just accepting the software at interface value. What these technologies are and can be has yet to be decided and this set of electronic literary works offers an artistic exploration of their possibilities that will enrich the quest for software literacy."
From: WRT: Writer Response Theory: a blog and podcast dedicated to discussing text arts forms

Flickr and libraries

2008-06-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to "hot tipper" Fiona for this article on uses for flickr in a variety of library and educational settings.

The UWB/CCC Campus Library has a flickr tour - I hope to do some new photos this summer!

Creating a research repository in del.icio.us

2008-05-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

Gray and I, with the help of Leslie, have created an assignment for the interdisciplinary inquiry course in which students use the social bookmarking and online information organization tool del.icio.us to thoughtfully save, categorize, describe, and share information resources.

Through internet research and emerging Library tools, students are creating a research repository online that will be at least 20 resources deep. The "bookmark & share" widget that has been added to UW's WorldCat catalog, for example, enables students to seamlessly post specific research resources and annotate them. After reviewing student work, and compiling their feedback, we will report back on the success of using this free web 2.0 technology to enhance student research.

Embedding Media in Blogs and Other Sites

2008-05-08T05:52:00.000-07:00

Apture is a new tool that enables you to embed a variety of media into a blog post or web page.

You can see a demo on this blog from their site.

There would seem to be much potential here for teaching and learning, even while I do wonder if there might also be a tipping point of Too Much Information if used carelessly.

Flickr blog

2008-05-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

This companion blog to the photo organization and sharing site Flickr posts selections from the site, provides commentary on changing photo formats and techniques (see the recent post on the death of Polaroid film), and lists events and meet-ups with flickr members.

The UWB/CCC Campus Library has a photoset on Flickr, and I am curious to see how courses and students may use Flickr - it seems like a perfect tool for studio art students, photography students, and as a way to visually track a group project, video, play, etc.

YouTube Hall of Fame.

2008-04-22T08:42:00.001-07:00

I am working on a new blog called the YouTube Hall of Fame. I want to feature videos here that have had a tremendous cultural impact. Many of the videos here have multi-million view counts. What other videos belong here?

Literature, Google Earth, and Writing for the Web

2008-03-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

We Tell Stories will publish six pieces of "digital fiction" in the next six weeks, using a variety of interactive platforms to tell/show/reveal the story. The first uses Google Earth to track the movements of a man "in the wrong place, at the wrong time".

Ewan McIntosh, one of my favorite bloggers on learning, teaching, and and Web 2.0 posts a number of links to blogs by and published interviews with project authors.

How amazing it would be to create course assignments using similar technologies.

YouTube in Education

2008-03-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a sampling of other institutions who have YouTube channels.
University of California, Berkeley: http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://youtube.com/mit
Duke University: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=DukeUniversityNews
Purdue University: http://youtube.com/purdue
Princeton’s UChannel: http://www.youtube.com/user/uchannel
Auburn University: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=AuburnUniversity&p=v
Old Dominion University: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=odu
Carnagie Mellon University: http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu
Vanderbilt University: http://www.youtube.com/user/VanderbiltUniversity
University of Notre Dame: http://www.youtube.com/user/NDdotEDU

UWB's channel isn't full-fledged like these examples yet (it requires an institutional commitment that must be approved by YouTube), but hopefully we'll get there!

UW Bothell's YouTube channel!

2008-03-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

University of Washington Bothell has its own YouTube channel! It's still young, but check it out!

Here's one video featured on the channel:

Flow TV Journal - new issue

2008-02-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

The new issue of the journal FlowTV is online. FlowTV is a critical forum on television and media culture published by the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Highlights from this issue include:

Wikipedia and social change.

2008-02-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting event on whether Wikipedia is helping or hindering social change.

Mapping and tracking web 2.0 tool usage

2008-02-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

I heard of WikipediaVision (beta) from a snippet in the Feb 2008 edition of College & Research Libraries News, and while that tool has potential, it led me to even more 2.0 tool/Google maps mashup applications that I found to be more impressive (mainly just because they're further into their development).

Check them out to see in (almost) real-time the usage and content people are contributing:

FlickrVision 3D
TwitterVision - also in 3D version and can be set up to pull from Facebook "twitter" messages.
SpinVisionTV - pulls from YouTube postings

Caveats: Only certain user's activities will be reflected in these tools, depending on user information made public and other functions of the selected tools.

Websites as graph/art

2008-02-14T12:15:00.001-08:00

This tool is pretty neat. Enter the url of the website of your choice, and it will graph it and display the site in a visual manner. It's really quite beautiful as the graph is generated, too, as it's an animated process.
This image is the graph for this blog, and it's still growing and taking form as I write this entry!

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Signs: Studies in Graphic Narrative - new scholarly journal

2008-02-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

SIGNs – Studies in Graphic Narratives – is a new, international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Comics (or, in contemporary jargon, Graphic Novels), from modern times up to the early decades of the 20th century. Read more here.

Wikipedia's Top 50 - Visualized

2008-02-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

For those of you fascinated by the visual display of info as I am, this graphic nicely visualizes the top 50 wikipedia searches from 8/06-5/07. Edward Tufte would be proud of the creator.

It's interesting to see what topics were popular in concordance w/ what was going on in the news of politics and entertainment at the time. It's also kinda funny how one of the top things searched on were 'wiki' and/or 'wikipedia.'

Wikipedia’s Top 50 Visualizations Link

via English Education Professor by Todd Finley on 1/27/08

Scholarly communication: Harvard opens up

2008-02-13T09:44:00.000-08:00

In an exciting development in the push for open access scholarly communication, Tuesday's Chronicle of Higher Education news blog posted: Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement. The policy requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online through Harvard's institutional repository. There appears to be some confusion regarding when the articles can be posted (after peer review? after the article is published?). This is another facet of what MIT's open courseware project has done to make course materials available free online.

Related links:
SPARC
MIT Open CourseWare

One million monkeys.

2008-02-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

I have always been struck by how the logic of Wikipedia has not really affected the production of content- except for the use of blogs by major media outlets. I can easily see Wikilogic being applied in the creation of literature, advertising and even textbooks. (I am aware of Wikibooks- but it is not the force it needs to be, IMHO.)

Now, we have an interesting example of collaborative story telling- one million monkeys. They seem to have very interesting ideas on how stories can be generated using a collaborative approach. Members upload snippets and readers can take stories off in interesting directions based on their preferences. At the end, the book is not a linear progression. Rather, it is a hypertext tree! Check it out and post your thoughts here.

Open-Access Student Video Contest

2008-02-09T22:10:00.001-08:00

North Carolina Student Wins Open-Access Video Contest

via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/22/08

A library group that promotes open access to scholarly data today announced the winners of a contest that had students producing short videos that advocate sharing of ideas and information. Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won first place for this video called “Share.”

The first runner-up was a video by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, of Carleton College, titled “Pri Vetai: Private Eye.” And the second runner-up was “An Open Access Manifesto,” by Romel Espinel and Josh Hardro of the Pratt Institute. —Andrea L. Foster

A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

2008-02-09T22:03:00.001-08:00

Here is an interesting way one professor used Twitter in class and for assignments:

A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/28/08

Twitter at first seemed like a bad idea to David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog your life by dashing out very short notes (140 characters max) to a select group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages on their cell phones. Mr. Parry’s first instinct was that Twittering would just encourage students to speak in sound bites and self-obsess.

But then he gave it a try, and he now sees Twitter as a useful classroom-communication tool.

How is that? He outlines several “Ways to use Twitter in Academia” on a post on the blog AcademHack.

Last semester he required the 20 students in his “Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication” course to sign up for Twitter and to send a few messages with the service each week as part of a writing assignment. He also invited his students to follow his own Twitter feed, in which he sometimes writes several short thoughts each day. Yesterday morning, for instance, he sent out a message that read: “Reading, prepping for grad class, putting off running until it warms up a bit.” Last week, one of his messages included a link to a Web site he wanted his students to check out.

The posts from students also mixed the mundane with the useful. One student twittered that she just bought a pet rabbit. Another noted that a topic from the class was being discussed on a TV-news report.

The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel like more of a community, Mr. Parry said in an interview Monday. “It was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching,” he said.

One downside: Some students have to pay a small fee for each text message they receive, and that means all this Twittering can add up to real money. Students can avoid such charges by setting their Twitter account so that they receive e-mail messages instead of text messages, but that eliminates much of the point of the service.

Should more professors use Twitter? Have you tried it in your classroom? —Jeffrey R. Young

Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

2008-02-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

Participate in a blog-based peer review experiment!

Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.

He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

Digital Toy Chest

2008-02-09T21:30:00.001-08:00

Digital Toy Chest for Online or Downloadable Tools

via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/15/08

From Alan Liu, via Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 465:

“Toy Chest” collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. Most of the tools gathered here are free or relatively inexpensive (exceptions: items that are expensive but can be used productively on a free trial basis). Also on this page are “paradigms”–books, essays, digital projects, etc.–that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create.” Each entry includes a descriptive annotation, screenshot, and link. Included at present are tools for diagramming, game creation, mapping, mashup creation, simulation & modeling, text analysis, visualization/pattern-discovery, and machinima.

New Journal: Memory Studies

2008-02-09T21:29:00.001-08:00

New Journal: Memory Studies

via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/23/08

Via the H-Net’s H-Memory:

SAGE Publications has released the first issue of Memory Studies. They describe the journal thusly

Memory Studies responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourses on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era, and examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. [Read more.]

They’re allowing free access to the first issue (with registration), and it is most definitely worth checking out.

frustration aesthetics

2008-02-08T05:46:00.001-08:00

I’m intrigued by the term, as Douglas uses it in his analysis of Interactive Fiction (which looks quite good as a whole, btw)….I wonder if, in part, that “frustration” is part and parcel of the expeience of art since at least its modernist fragmenations, growing autonomy? Art is the genre that knows how and works to frustrate its own tradition, expectations? Thereby opening up something different, giving chance a chance….

YouTube Ethnography Project

2008-02-07T15:59:00.001-08:00

This YouTube video introduces the YouTube Ethnography Project, lead by Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State. Read more about the ongoing digital ethnography project.

Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media

2007-12-14T16:40:00.000-08:00

A newly completed Ph.D. dissertation by Jeremy Douglass:

Abstract:

The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor’s mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended “close interactions” include Plotkin’s Shade (1999), Barlow’s Aisle (2000), Pontious’s Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

2007-12-14T16:34:00.000-08:00

Currently seeking proposals, but also held next spring in our own backyard of Vancouver, WA.

MediaCommons: a digital scholarly network

2007-12-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

"MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network."

FlowTV

2007-12-11T11:20:00.000-08:00

"FlowTV is a critical forum on television and media culture published by the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves."

Their site also offers their journal articles, reader polls, columns, and more.

museums and the web

2007-11-24T10:05:00.001-08:00

This is a fascinating topic, as the links between the two become thicker and the question of the archive, with its desire for the transmissible memorial, becomes more complex.

gray kochhar-lindgren, ph.d.

director: center for university studies and programs

professor: interdisciplinary arts and sciences

university of washington bothell

425-352-3670

Museums and the Web

2007-11-21T23:05:00.001-08:00

Museums and the Web

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 9/27/07

Museums and the Web

April 9-12,2008
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Join hundreds of your colleagues at the only annual conference exploring the on-line presentation of cultural, scientific and heritage content across institutions and around the world: Museums and the Web.

Call for Participation Closes September 30, 2007.

Demonstration Proposals will be accepted through December 31, 2007.

For more information go to: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/

Museums and the Web addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, senior speakers with extensive experience in Web development review and analyze the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. Together, we are transforming communities and organizations.

The MW Program
MW features plenary sessions, parallel sessions, museum project demonstrations, commercial exhibits, mini-workshops, professional forums, a usability lab, a design 'Crit Room,' and the Best of the Web awards. The primary language of the conference has always been English, but in 2008, the sessions will be simultaneously translated English/French and /French/English to encourage a wide francophone participation.

Prior to the conference, there are full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops and a day of pre-conference tours, including one to the museums of Ottawa, Canada's national capital.
Social events include receptions each evening, a Birds-of-a-Feather Breakfast, and plenty of refreshment breaks to provide hours of discovery and debate among hundreds of colleagues from around the world.

The MW2008 Program will be selected through peer-review by an International Program Committee based on proposals due September 30, 2007.

Who Attends MW?
Webmasters, educators, curators, librarians, designers, managers, directors, scholars, consultants, programmers, analysts, and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, science centers, and archives join the professionals, companies, foundations and governments that support them and attend Museums and the Web every year.

Scholarships and Volunteers
Archives & Museum Informatics awards MW Scholarships to museum professionals from small institutions and developing countries. For MW2008, The Department of Canadian Heritage has sponsored Scholarships for Canadian Professionals. Scholarship applications are due December 31, 2007.

Students are invited to volunteer at MW; they may attend the conference in exchange for helping out. Preference in 2008 will be given to fully bilingual volunteers. Volunteer applications are accepted until all spaces are filled.

Can't Make It? Get the Book.
MW2008 Presenters will be required to submit written papers; the best will appear in print in Museums and the Web 2008: Selected papers from an international conference. All papers are also published on-line and on CD-ROM. Discounted advance orders of the Selected Papers and CD-ROM Proceedings are now being taken.

Past papers from all Museums and the Web conferences – since 1997 – are on-line. Printed volumes of Selected Papers from MW97 – MW2007 are also available to order.

Conference Co-Chairs
Jennifer Trant and David Bearman
Archives & Museum Informatics
158 Lee Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M4E 2P3 Canada

ELPUB2008: Open Scholarship in the Age of Web 2.0

2007-11-21T22:48:00.000-08:00

ELPUB2008

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 10/29/07

CFP: ELPUB2008 (Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0)

Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0
12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing
25 to 27 June 2008, Toronto, Canada

Submission Deadline: January 20, 2008
http://www.elpub.net
CFP URL: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~elpub2008/call.html

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences, and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

* New Publishing models, tools, services and roles
* New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
* Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
* Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
* Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
* Content search, analysis and retrieval
* Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
* Personalisation technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS, microformats)
* Metadata creation, usage and interoperability
* Semantic web issues
* Data mining, text harvesting, and dynamic formatting
* User generated content and its relation to publisher's content
* Usage and citation impact
* Security, privacy and copyright issues
* Digital preservation, content authentication
* Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines
Contributions are invited for the following categories:
- Single papers (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1500 words)
- Tutorial (abstract minimum of 500 and maximum of 1500 words)
- Workshop (abstract max of 1000 words)
- Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
- Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

Abstracts must be submitted following the instructions on the conference website

Key Dates:
January 20th 2008: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories):

February 28, 2008: Authors will be notified of the acceptance of submitted
papers and workshop proposals.

April 11th, 2008: Final papers must be received. See website for
detailed author instructions.

Posters (A1-format) and demonstration materials should be brought
by their authors at the conference time. Only abstracts of these
contributions will be published in the conference proceedings.
Information on requirements for Workshops and tutorials proposals
will soon be posted on the website.

All submissions are subjected to peer review (double-blind) and
accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted
full papers will be published in the conference proceedings.
Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference.
Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at:
http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB

The ELPUB 2008 conference will keep the tradition of the previous
international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the
United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999),
Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil
(2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006) and Austria (2007), which
is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians,
developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users
and all those interested in issues regarding electronic
publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the
human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal,
commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting
theme encompasses.

Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope
of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange
and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications
and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical
issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and
publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most
recent work.

ELPUB 2008 offers a variety of activities, such as workshops,
tutorials, panel debates, poster presentation and demonstrations.
A variety of social events and sight-seeing tours will be
available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the
conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Toronto, Canada. Toronto is one of the most
vibrant cities in North-America. It has a large multicultural
population, is the largest city in Canada and the 5th-largest
city in North America. There are many world class galleries and
museums across the city and you will find authentic cuisines from
around the world at reasonable prices.

Conference Host: Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI),
University of Toronto. KMDI is a graduate research and teaching
institute at the University of Toronto, and an intellectual
incubator fostering cross-disciplinary initiatives across the
university. The work of the institute spans both the scientific
study of the ways in which media shapes and is shaped by human
activity, and the practical work of founding an interdisciplinary
nexus for design and evaluation of both media and media
technologies. KMDI has acknowledged leadership, substantial
research programs and broad participation in three major areas:
collaboration and collaboration technologies, the phenomenon of
openness and new forms of knowledge production and dissemination,
and public policy and citizen engagement.

General Chair: Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough
chan@utsc.utoronto.ca

Programme Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA - Inter-Academic
Consortium for ICT, Italy: mornati@cilea.it

2007-11-21T22:25:00.000-08:00

"A plenary event including Howard Rheingold, Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig on the Future of DIY Media."

Here are the details of the event:

24/7: A DIY VIDEO SUMMIT
February 8-10, 2008 School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Conference web site: http://www.video24-7.org
Blog: http://diy.video24-7.org/

Spaces are limited for attendance at the academic panels and the workshops. The video
screenings are free and open to the public.

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved
around do-it-yourself (DIY) video:artists, audiences, technology providers, academics,
policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to
chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional,
artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

This three-day summit features:

SCREENINGS OF DIY VIDEO

On February 8 and 9, there will be screenings of DIY video that are
open to the public. These will feature curated programs on design video, activist
documentary, youth media, machinima, music video, political remix and video blogging.
The video program will culminate in an evening program and reception on February 9 that
will draw from all of these video genres.

ACADEMIC PROGRAM
Registered attendees will have access to the academic program on February 8 and 9 that
features panels on The State of Research, The State of the Art, DIY Media: The
Intellectual Property Dilemma andDIY Tools and Platforms.

WORKSHOPS AND BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER MEETINGS

On February 10, the day will be devoted to practical and hands- onworkshops for
registered attendees on topics such as intellectual property, media creation,
distribution and new-media design tools.

Attendees will also have the option of organizing their own birds-of- a-feather meetings
to connect with other attendees.

2007-09-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

On her blog, scholar Danah Boyd wrote a short essay for review by her colleagues entitled "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace". The idea was consumed - and transformed - by bloggers and news outlets world wide.

She wrote an interesting response to the criticism and misinterpretation her essay received, indicating that "I didn't write my piece for the audience who ended up consuming it." A fascinating example of how the web is transforming academic scholarship.

2007-09-13T09:58:00.001-07:00

THE SYNTHETIC AESTHETICS OF NEW MEDIA ART Presented by The New Media Caucus in Association with the College Art Association February 20-23, 2008; Dallas, TX http://conference.collegeart.org/2008/
Panel Chair: Carolyn Kane, PhD Candidate Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University clk267@nyu.edu
Contrary to traditional aesthetic theories that argue for the primacy of either the subjective and phenomenological, or formal and objective interpretations of artwork, the aesthetics of electronic media, like the logic of technical media itself, is thoroughly removed from anthropomorphic sensibility. One could say that electronic media aesthetics are marked by technical trauma.
However, much contemporary new media art criticism exemplifies a hermeneutic approach that seeks to rationalize and transform work into intelligible *art objects* for canonization and social theories. Is this approach problematic for the logic of technical media? Can certain attributes such as color, form, affect, or sound, effectively reconcile computer based artwork with the subjective and humanistic drives in art making?
The panel invites papers that address the aesthetics of New Media art in distinction to previous aesthetic models or media platforms. For instance, papers suggesting the ways in which color, sound, line, form, symbolism, affect, anti-aesthetics or ideology may be distinct to new media aesthetics are all welcomed. Essentially the panel inquires: what do theoreticians and practitioners address in New Media art, and why? Which artists and / or commercial work do you think best exemplifies these issues? Special attention will be given to those abstracts that are concerned with the use of color in New Media work.
Presenters can propose brief lectures; media or artist presentations of their own, or other artist's work; discussions; or other acceptable suggestions.
Timeline:
Due by October 1, 2007:
*Abstracts (max 500 words)
* Paper / Presentation Titles
*Confirmation that presenters will be able to travel to Dallas on February 20-23, 2008
* Current CV and a brief bio.
*Specification of presentation format
Send proposals and / or any question to Carolyn Kane clk267@nyu.edu For CAA conference information visit:
http://conference.collegeart.org/2008/

2007-09-12T16:56:00.001-07:00

experienced Toni Dove's Spectropia at a workshop in Montreal....movement activated movie, about a noirish passage through time...right on the edge of new media and interactive art...

2007-08-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Social Networking for the Digital Arts & Humanities

Digital Arts & Humanities is a place to share ideas, promote your research and discuss the digital arts and humanities. As a member of the Digital Arts & Humanities community you can:

announce activities in your field to a wide audience and keep up to date with what others are doing
exchange ideas and experience with the community in our group forums and user blogs
build your profile to show your research interests and background and search others' profiles to find contacts and identify future collaborations
use our wiki to learn more about tools and methods for your research

2007-08-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

Social Networking and Class in America

An Excerpt:

“As a society, we have strong class divisions and we project these values onto our kids. MySpace and Facebook seem to be showcasing this division quite well. My hope in writing this out is to point out that many of our assumptions are problematic and the internet often reinforces our views instead of challenging them.”

2007-07-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

Webware's Top 100 Web Applications

As voted on by nearly 500,000 users, Webware has published its 2007 list of the best web applications in 10 different categories, including browsing, communication, reference, and media:

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html

I love how the results are listed using icons instead of lists - great for quick reading!

2007-07-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

ALTX Online Network

"Where the digerati meet the literati"

This site offers a "library of avant-pop novels, collections of new media (h)activist writings, and critical ebooks. These experimental titles are available as free ebook downloads or as Print On-Demand books."

Examples of current offerings include a blog art exhibit, galleries of web art, and conversations, interviews, and audio addressing aspects of textuality, cyberculture, and digital design.

2007-07-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

Check out Seattle's McLeod Residence

The McLeod Residence is a home for extraordinary living through art, technology, and collaboration.

They are a new art gallery in Belltown, Seattle. A lounge for members is open Thursday through Saturday.

Check out their exhibits and hours here.

2007-06-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

From the desk of "old" media to new media, boingboing.net has started to post reviews of its previous incarnation, a zine started in 1988.

The older zine issue covers have been scanned in, and PDF versions of the zines are available online for a small fee.

Read the review of issues #6 here.

2007-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

MIT Open Course Ware

A free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Find more OERs on the Internet Archive's OER page, a collection of educational content including coursework, study guides, exercises, and recorded lectures. It is meant for students, teachers, and self-learners at all levels.

2007-05-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

New Media & the Global Diaspora Conference
5 to 7 October 2007
Bristol, Rhode Island, United States

This symposium focuses on the migrations of the past 100 years
- how New Media's role, both direct and indirect, in the
transmission by these communities of "living traditions" has
resulted in loss, gain and interpretation.

The symposium has the following objectives:

To encourage academic discourse focused on transnational migratory populations and the role new media plays in transmitting and sustaining their living traditions.
To create a forum for researchers in the liberal arts and other disciplines studying the nature, significance and consequence of global migration
To provide a concert performance of traditional music and dance illustrating the vitality of these living traditions.

The deadline for abstracts/proposals is 1 June 2007.

2007-04-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

Do You Feel Fine?

Check out the WeFeelFine website: http://www.wefeelfine.org/

It trolls blogs and picks up statements in which people talk about their feelings, then displays and analyzes the results in several different aesthetically pleasing ways. Limit your searches by geographic area (US and beyond), date, gender, and more.

What a great tool for attempting to capture the emotional state of the blogging population at any one time. One shortfall is that it only trolls the English-language blogs.

2007-03-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

Furtherfield

Check out Furtherfield, "an online platform for the creation, promotion, and criticism of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction."

They are also currently seeking reviewers/contributors.

2007-03-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

Old Messengers, New Media Digital Archive

A special website set up by Library and Archives Canada - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada - is now accessible, courtesy of Project Manager Don Wallace and doctoral student Joanne Stober.

The site, which is particularly intended to be a resource for students, is entitled "Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan," includes summaries of both scholars lives and works, and a set of short, accessible essays on the topic of "Archives as Medium," with contributions from Robert Babe, William Buxton, Michael Cheney, Terry Cook, Kim Sawchuk, and Lance Strate.

There's also a Forum section for further discussion.

2007-03-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a great article from the NY Times on how podcasting is changing/has changed book publishing.

Newman, Andrew. "Authors Find Their Voice, and Audience, in Podcasts" New York Times, March 1, 2007.

2007-02-16T10:12:00.001-08:00

Media Ecology Association
An "organization dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information, and research among the Association’s members and the larger community."

“Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.” —Neil Postman

2007-02-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

International Journal of Communication
This new journal is "an online, multi-media, academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The International Journal of Communication is an interdisciplinary journal that, while centered in communication, is open and welcoming to contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that meet at the crossroads that is communication study."

2007-02-16T09:50:00.000-08:00

Museum of Lost Interactions
This is very cool, though I became more suspicious of its authenticity as I browsed through the "lost" technologies they highlight. Turns out these technologies were created/invented by Interactive Media Design students at the Univ of Dundee in the UK, and indeed are not formerly existing technologies. Very cool projects, though.

2007-02-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

Social Networking through Singing

Check out www.midomi.com, a music search engine powered by your voice.

"Sing, hum, or whistle to instantly find your favorite music and connect with a community that shares your musical interests....Contribute to the database by singing in midomi's online recording studio in any language or genre. The next time anyone searches for that song, your performance might be the top result!.....Create your own profile, sing your favorite songs and share them with your friends and get discovered by other midomi users....Features an extensive digital music store with a a growing collection of more than two million legal music tracks."

Hmm, has potential to become an online American Idol talent contest forum...

2007-02-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0: The Machine is Using Us

Check out this video (2nd draft) by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It does a nice job illustrating some of the concepts and implications of Web 2.0. On YouTube, Michael says to look for a final draft in late February.

If you'd like to read more about Web 2.0, check out Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0.

2006-11-02T18:53:00.000-08:00

Electronic Literature Collection, v. 1 Released

Under a Creative Commons License, the collection is "an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature," published online at collection.eliterature.org.

My favorites among the collection are the non-texual, graphic novel-like multimedia stories. Including:

"Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw is presented in a visual and almost entirely non-textual way, although the piece has a textual basis and its narrative and defamiliarizing aspects can easily be seen. The piece's effect arises from how it cuts off possibilities, putting the reader at the mercy of her exploration history. An interface offers tiny "active" portals, which may or may not carry the story forward; a world changes scale, and unnerving events take some effort to figure out." Maybe it's the Halloween mood, but I love the dark storyline, great modern graphics, and witch-trial atmosphere. The changeable storyline is very "new media."

"Urbanalities is a mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings, this Flash movie is the product of an "antagonist remix" by babel vs. escha. Seven scenes provide enigmatic observations on the nature of contemporary life, on seeing and being seen, understanding and miscommunication, destruction and creation. The texts in the piece are generated randomly as the piece runs, so the reader's experience of the piece is never exactly the same twice." Amazing graphics, short poems, and a musical sountrack - dada meets West Side Story.

-thanks to gray for sending along the link and collection announcement!-

2006-10-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion

On Monday, 10/9, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. Read the full story. How this will change the user-driven YouTube site remains to be seen. Check out the featured video, "a message from Chad and Steve" to hear the founders' perspective on the acquisition.

Looks like the dot-com bubble has been re-inflated!

2006-10-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first New Media PNW circular! As you may recall, this effort emerges from the workshop with Anne Wysocki held last February in the UWB Teaching and Learning Center, hosted by the redoubtable Becky Reed Rosenberg. Anne did a marvelous job of taking us into the “Generous Web” by considering how “memory, bodily experience, generosity toward difference, and the pleasures of learning and engagement can be woven into the design process….” We wanted to find a way to continue her efforts and to continue to educate ourselves about our new teaching and learning environment.

Our major goal now—in fact, our only goal at the moment!—is to get a conversation started on New Media and thereby create a virtual Learning Community around a series of questions. What is it? Is there any such thing? What’s “new” about it? What gets mediated? What are its cultural implications? How can we use it, if there is an “it,” in our classrooms? What does it have to do with iPods and MySpace? Cell phones and nanotechnology? How does it relate to the digital arts and scholarship? Is it fun?

We thought we’d start with one or more of these questions, a few short readings, and a little blog. The URL for the blog is: http://newmediawg.blogspot.com –bookmark it today! The blog will be updated (at least) weekly, and we welcome your posts and comments! You may post to the blog from your email by emailing: newmediabothell.blog@blogger.com. Have fun exploring the blogger site while you're at it!

For our initial reading, how about if we look at Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) paper (http://www.cybergrain.com/remediality/borges.pdf or http://www.geocities.com/papanagnou/) and V. Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945) (www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/194507/bush). These are linked to the blog's "links" section as well.

See what you think. Hear what you think. Touch what you think.

What next?

Gray and Amanda