[digital transformation school]

The International School on Digital Transformation
July 25-30
Porto, Portugal
Extended deadline for applications: May 10

Applications are now open for the second annual International School on
Digital Transformation, to be held July 25-30, 2010, at the University of
Porto in Porto, Portugal. The School is accepting applications from advanced
students and recent graduates from around the world with an interest in
digital technology and the enrichment of civil society.

The International School on Digital Transformation is an intensive six-day
residential program, conducted in English and bringing together emerging and
established scholars and professionals from a variety of countries. During
the week, innovators in digital communications will serve as teachers and
mentors, presenting current projects and engaging in discussion. Presenters
and students will be regarded as peers during the School.

Students of the School will have the opportunity to develop and apply
research design skills to projects important to civil society. Consisting of
approximately 30 students and 15 faculty members, the School seeks to create
an atmosphere of scholarly collegiality, fostering dialogue among diverse
perspectives including those of design, policy, and research backgrounds.
The daily schedule will include time for presentations, workshop-style
collaboration, and informal brainstorming sessions among faculty and
students.

Read more »

[phd studentships: multidisciplinary new media learning]

KTH – The Royal Institute of Technology – in Stockholm, Sweden
School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC) seeks
3-6 PhD students in Human Computer Interaction and
1 PhD student in Media Technology

The department of HCI conducts research within Human Computer Interaction, which is the study of the interaction between humans and computerized technical systems. The subject is multi-disciplinary and embraces computer science methods and tools to design system functionality adapted to the user, human science theories and methods to understand, evaluate and improve computerized technical systems for human use. It also includes methodologies for design of interactive computer systems.

Anticipated specializations
1. Perceptualization
2. Processes of change
3. Mobile digital services
4. Visualization
5. Computer supported cooperation
6. E-learning


The Department of Media Technology and Graphic Arts is a multidisciplinary group focused on technology and methods for supporting human communication over distances in time and space. This includes a wide area of media, from printing and publishing to digital interactive media, from broadcast media to mobile social media. Our education and research also cover the implications and effects of using media technologies from human, social and design perspectives.

Anticipated specialization
7. E-learning

Application deadline: May 17, 2010


For more information, please visit:
http://www.kth.se/om/work-at-kth/vacancies/phd-students-in-human-computer-interaction-and-media-technology-1.58530?l=en_UK

[DMSC Governors Challenge Virtual Institute Summer 2010]

Participate in the DMSC Governors Challenge Virtual Institute Summer 2010 by submitting media from your students and faculty representing your institutions and by registering to judge the media during our Institute using our semantic assessment model.

We also ask you to kindly forward our link to your networks to help us recruit participants: our website is located at www.sandboxnetwork.org 

Essentially, Engaged Technology is a marriage of academic service learning/civic engagement and educational technology. Our method integrates active learning and action research in the process of building e.portfolios for students, faculty, institutions and communities based on validated multi-media and service equity.

Over the past four years of our academic media tournament, The Governors Challenge, we have evolved a guided system of:

1. Omni-disciplinary research and production of multimedia (text, audio, video and image),
2. Assessment with our semantic assessment instrument,
3. Analyze/Revise
4. Publish

Bringing those two resource bases together is an underlying design for our efforts. Partnering with the University of Virginia, UNC-CH, and Tennessee higher education, we will begin our Summer 2010 Virtual Institute for the fourth iteration of the Governors Challenge, which has been sponsored by FedEx Institute of University of Memphis, Apple Inc., Microsoft, emma, Echo, and Cisco, Tennessee Board of Regents, University of Tennessee systems and the Tennessee Campus Compact, among others.

Our vision of evolving partnerships would form a strong oversight body for an NCAA-like model of engaged scholarship. With multi-media conveying the content innovations created out of these partnerships and assessment provided from other stakeholders, personal learning spaces can be networked for capacity-building in many different areas and many different ways.

We seek to help evolve educational practice by reaching a broader talent pool of ‘flat-world outliers’ who want to create life/work options that leverage dreams, visions, and potential of heretofore silo-ed talent pools. This NCAA-like model of engaged scholarship embeds the guided learning system that will also function as a platform to engage local pre-k-12 public and private (including faith-based schools) systems to form P-20 Pathways for life-long learning.

Read more here. 

[digital literacy across the curriculum]

A superb find, sure to be of use to any educator. The pdf version is available as a free download from Futurelab.

By Cassie Hague and Sarah Payton, Futurelab

This handbook is aimed at educational practitioners and school leaders in both primary and secondary schools who are interested in creative and critical uses of technology in the classroom.

Although there is increasing policy and research attention paid to issues related to digital literacy, there is still relatively little information about how to put this into practice in the classroom. There is even less guidance on how teachers might combine a commitment to digital literacy with the needs of their own subject teaching. How can digital literacy be fostered, for example, in a maths or science lesson?

This handbook aims to introduce educational practitioners to the concepts and contexts of digital literacy and to support them in developing their own practice aimed at fostering the components of digital literacy in classroom subject teaching and in real school settings.
 
The handbook is not a comprehensive ‘how to’ guide; it provides instead a rationale, some possible strategies and some practical examples for schools to draw on. The first section details the reasons teachers should be interested in digital literacy and how it is relevant to their subject teaching. It looks at the increasing role of technology in young people’s cultures, the support they may need to benefit from their engagement with technology and the way in which digital literacy can contribute to the development of subject knowledge. The second section discusses digital literacy in practice and moves through a number of components of digital literacy discussing how these might be fostered in the classroom.

The handbook ends by looking at issues related to continuing professional development for teachers and the ways in which digital literacy can support whole-school initiatives.

It is teachers that are expert in their own school context, in the needs of their students and in the pedagogical techniques required to support learning. This handbook has been informed by the work of fourteen teachers who are interested in how technology is used in classroom teaching and who took part in Futurelab’s digital participation project. Rather than being prescriptive, it aims to provide information which will help teachers to make the best use of their own expertise to support students’ emerging digital literacy.

[u.k.: new institute for web science]

 "Department for Business, Innovation and Skills   (National)

The Government today announced the creation of the new Institute for Web Science.

It is designed to make the UK the hub of international research into the next generation of web and internet technologies and their commercialisation, and was announced by the Prime Minister alongside plans for a radical opening up of information and data to put more power in people’s hands. The Institute will conduct research, collaborate with businesses, identify opportunities for social and economic benefit, assist in commercialising research and help Government stimulate demand through procurement.

The web was originally a place where people published documents that users could search and pick up. Web 2.0 has enabled users to contribute and create web content more easily. Web 3.0 will take the web to a whole new level by publishing data in a linkable format so that users and developers can see and exploit the relationships between different sets of information.

The development of these technologies will create significant new opportunities for business and the public sector. The impact of these technologies is likely to be as important as the creation of the original web, and could generate large-scale economic benefits for the UK in the global market for web and internet technologies. The role of the Institute will be to undertake research and development, and act as a bridge between research and business, helping commercialise these new technologies. It will also advise Government on how semantic technologies can be used in the public sector, and how public procurement can be used to speed their adoption.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that £30 million would be set aside to create the Institute for Web Science. It will be headed by Sir Tim Berners Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, and leading Web Science expert Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Read more here. 

[interdisciplinary assistant prof. @ washington]

Interesting post available at the University of Washington however it is only a 9 month term and seems to focus on teaching.

The University of Washington (UW) Bothell Science and Technology Program is accepting applications for an associate professor position with tenure in the Science and Technology Program.  This full-time, nine-month position will start September 16, 2010. We are looking for stellar candidates who will contribute to the excellence of our University and our S&T Program. The successful applicant will have demonstrated distinction in research and teaching in one or more of the following areas: interactive media and design, creativity and learning, interactive video, virtual environments, visualization and visual analytic systems, interdisciplinary media approaches, and computer games.

UW Bothell’s signature approach to higher education is interdisciplinarity that promotes scholarship across our six academic programs. The successful candidate will play a key role in developing an interactive media and technology curriculum and collaborating with colleagues to create a shared culture of science, business, computer science, interactive media, technology, education and the arts. Teaching experience in varied formats, including team-based, computer-mediated and interdisciplinary approaches is also requisite for the position.

Additional requirements include an earned doctorate in appropriate discipline and/or MFA, teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels, dedication to instructional innovation, demonstration of a commitment to working with diverse student and community populations, and ability to establish working relationships with regional high-tech companies.

Read more here.

Note: Image from Residence Inn.

[a pen]

Interesting digital poetry creation by Jim Andrews: “A project in visual poetry and programming. The project consists of an interactive software pen that uses four ‘nibs’ whose ‘inks’ are lettristic animations of letters.”

[panel on reading today, #interventions]

Moderator Al Fillreis, Kenneth Goldsmith, Steve Tomasula, Stephen Osborne

[literary in(ter)ventions]

Interesting talk by Christian Bok (of Calgary uni.) on language as a virus.

How to encode poetry on genomes of bacteria to act as secret message/literary artefact.

[nick monfort at #interventions]

Nick Monfort at the interventions conference talking about literature at the edge. Think of edges in graph theory and how endges act as connectors.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

[technology and teachers]

I just glimpsed this ad. while waiting for an educational site to load. I love the tag line: "no teacher left behind." Precisely. If the educators don't know how to use new media technology, how can they help the students? Educators, in general, require more support from heads of institutions (and probably governments for funding assistance too).

Although, of course, I don't think we should be scared of technology as intimated in the above image.

[new media & innovative curriculum]

Via New Media Literacies Blog:

New Media Literacies Newsletter NML Announces its Monthly Webinar Series

Webinar Series NML has recently partnered with New Hampshire's Department of Education to facilitate a year-long professional development initiative using the new media literacies as a springboard for developing innovative curriculum. Our goal is to help foster a broader perspective of what it means to be media literate in the digital age, and offer tools for translating the social skills and cultural competencies outlined in the white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) into meaningful and engaging learning experiences in the classroom and beyond. These NH educators are exploring the urgent challenges that 21st Century learners face by expanding their own learning experiences using a participatory, digital model of professional develmopment. In this context, educators are able to practice their own skills as teachers by creating, collaborating, connecting, and circulating with one another in an interactive, multi-media environment. Not only are they developing new materials for their own schools and districts, but also an 8-part webinar series focused on a comprehensive, practical understanding of the NML skills for the larger educational community. The 8-part series will begin on February 11th and share the framework of social skills and cultural competencies which shapes the work of New Media Literacies, and illustrate the skills by looking more closely at learning through such cultural phenomenon as computer game guilds, youtube video production, Wikipedia, fan fiction, Second Life and other virtual worlds, music remixing, social network sites, and cosplay. Each webinar will examine closely new curricular materials which have emerged from New Media Literacies, Global Kids, Harvard's GoodPlay Project, Common Sense Media, the George Lucas Foundation, and other projects which are seeking to introduce these skills into contemporary educational practices and leave participants with plenty of opportunities to take the material, information and methods back into their classroom. We will host the first webinar on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 7pm EST and focus on the new media literacies, judgment and appropriation as well as copyright, fair use, and creative commons. Our special guests will be Flourish Klink, a graduate student at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, and Erin Reilly, NML Research Director. See the full listing of upcoming webinars and get information on how to join the sessions at http://projectnml.ning.com/page/nmls-monthly-webinar-series.

[literature relationship manager: employment opportunity]

For those living in or near to Nottingham, this looks like an excellent opportunity, there's even a specialisation for the digital and creative economy.

Job Description East Midlands, Nottingham Relationship Manager, Literature Salary up to £35,000 plus excellent benefits package Contract: Permanent working 35 hours per week Arts Council England champions, develops and invests in art that enriches people’s lives. Our mission is to deliver great art for everyone, whatever the economic circumstances around us. Following a recent restructure, we are passionate about transforming our organisation to ensure we continue to deliver our aims. There has never been a better time to join us. The closing date for this position is 08 February 2010.

A bit more background on the role:


The relationship manager role is a new role created as part of the organisation review restructure. We require relationship managers to have a depth of knowledge and expertise in one or more particular specialism. At the Arts Council we have identified 11 different specialisms or areas of expertise. The specialisms are:

• dance

• literature

• music

• theatre

• visual arts

• combined arts and touring

• engagement and participation

• learning (children and young people, or learning and skills)

• diversity in arts practice

• digital and creative economy

• regional planning

In addition to this specialist knowledge our relationship managers will also need to be able to lead on relationships with artists and organisations, help to develop Grants for the arts applications, be an advocate for the arts and contribute to the Arts Council’s commitment to equality and diversity.




Read more here and here.

[teaching digital writing]

If I was still living in England..... This conference will be brilliant and my ph.d examiner (Ruth Page) and ph.d supervisor (Sue Thomas) will be speaking too along with "Inanimate Alice" author Kate Pullinger.



http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=281

Cost: No charge, but we reserve the right to charge a £15:00 non-attendance fee.

Last Date for registration: 14 Apr 10

Event Description:
Digital Writing crosses over Media, Creative Writing, Art & Design and English departments and demand for more higher education courses continues to grow. How are we meeting that demand and how is digital writing being taught? This free, one-day symposium is an opportunity to discuss, debate and sample Digital Writing with leading practitioners and university lecturers.

- How do we teach students to analyse digital writing?
- How do we teach students to create digital writing?
- What are the particular challenges and rewards of teaching and learning this developing genre?

These questions and others will inform the presentations and discussions.
The event takes place at the state-of-the-art Phoenix Square, in Leicester where delegates will have the opportunity to participate in a hands-on workshop and demonstration. Undergraduate and postgraduate students are welcome.

Confirmed speakers include: Award winning digital novelist – Kate Pullinger, Sue Thomas, Ruth Page and Tim Wright.
Programme: (subject to alteration) 

9:30 Registration
Coffee/Tea

10:00 Welcome
Brett Lucas, English Subject Centre

10:10 Presentation
The Transliteracy Research Group
Kate Pullinger & Sue Thomas, De Montfort University

11:00 Panel Presentation & Discussion
Doing Digital Writing
Tim Wright, Digital author
Donna Leishman, Digital author
Respondant TBC

12:00 Lunch

13:00 Panel Presentation & Discussion: Teaching Digital Writing
Digital Writing and Pedagogy: How do We Teach, What Do We Teach?
Matt Hayler, University of Exeter
Designing Narratives and New Media
Will Slocombe, Aberystwyth University
The Next Frontier? Teaching electronic literature in the undergraduate classroom
Ruth Page, Birmingham City University

14:30 Hands-on Workshop and Demonstration
Tim Wright, Digital author

15:30 Keynote Address
Michael Bhaskar, Digital publisher, Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books

16:30 Closing Remarks
Kate Pullinger & Brett Lucas

16:45 Close



Note: image from Engadget. 

[assessment in the digital age]

Via hastac:




How to grade, assess, teach, learn and structure the learning experience for students in the digital age?

Many interesting projects are working on this question, and we invite you to share others with us below. For example:

- The Learning Record, a portfolio-based evaluation system designed to emphasize student learning, not product-based outcomes
- Nils Peterson and his colleagues at the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology (at Washington State University) have been working on developing new assessment strategies and forms of classroom engagement
- Pecha Kucha in the classroom - reframing the presentation from the unstructured long-form speech to the conversation-starting breakdown
- Digital Youth Research was a 3 year project to investigate how kids use technology and media in their everyday learning. They have reports available on their site, and the group recently published a book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. 
- Re-mediating assessment, a blog considering participatory assessment models in education, authored by Daniel T. Hickey, Michelle Honeyford, and Jenna McWilliams (Indiana University).
 - The DML Research Hub, funded by a MacArthur grant, is supporting two projects. One, lead by Mimi Ito, is called Distributed Learning Research Network, and works on distributed learning that happens in social environments. The other, lead by Joseph Kahne, is called Youth, New Media, and Public Participation Research Network, and investigates the ways that youth, through social and political participation in online communities, affects their capacity and motivation to engage in social and political issues.
 - Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg's report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (also available as a free PDF). The report found that students are learning in deeply collective and innovative ways, and that learning institutions - schools - have to keep up or risk obsolescence. They offer ten principles for redesigning learning institutions and pedagogical systems to better reflect the way students learn today. The book-length version of the project, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age will be coming out in 2010.

 Note: Image on flickr by violet.blue

[pedagogy news]

Interesting pedagogical tidbits:

State law requires digital college textbooks by 2020

"Companies that sell textbooks to California universities must offer electronic versions by 2020, under a new state law.

Electronic books are generally less expensive, better for the environment and often more suited to the way today’s students study, proponents say. And a Kindle weighs a whole lot less than a backpack full of 500-page textbooks.

'Think about kids carrying around all these books — or just carrying a Kindle wherever you go,” said Joan Wines, an English professor at California Lutheran University who is doing research on digital textbooks.'"

Read the article here.

U.K. Universities are now (also) facing huge classes:


Cash-starved universities will have huge classes, says union

"Universities in the UK will be among the most overcrowded in the world within three years if savage government cuts to higher education go ahead, ­academics warned today.


The lecturers' union, UCU, said more than £900m of cuts announced last month would fill lecture halls with "some of the biggest class sizes in the world" by 2013.


A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published last year shows that while the average ratio of students to lecturers in UK universities is 17.6, in OECD countries the average is 15.3.


Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary, said that "the dreams of many hardworking parents for their kids to go to university ... will be over". The cuts would send at least 14,000 academics to the dole queue.


The warning comes after top universities accused Gordon Brown of jeopardising 800 years of higher education, saying the cuts – which the Institute for Fiscal Studies says may reach £2.5bn – would 'bring them to their knees.'"

Read this entire article at the Guardian.

[special issue of e-learning and digital media]

Here's a call for papers pertinent to all those educators working with new media (via Chris Joseph's blog):

Special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media, Editor Dr. Norm Friesen







Media today are everywhere. From educational gaming through portable e-texts to cell phones ringing in class, it seems we can’t escape. Nor can we live without media; instead, they form a kind of ecology that we inhabit. In addition, media have an epistemological function: they shape both what we know and how we come to know it: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live,” as Niklas Luhman observed, “we know through… media.”






Speaking of media in education suggests a range of possibilities that are different from what is suggested by educational technology (electronic, digital or otherwise). Describing computers and the Internet specifically as digital media casts their role not as mental tools to be integrated into instruction, but as “forms” and “cultures” requiring “literacies” or acculturation. In this way, speaking of media in education brings instructional environments more closely together with the world outside. Explorations of these terms and possibilities have been initiated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Elizabeth Eisenstein, and they are also touched upon in research on media literacies. However, more recent theoretical developments and accelerated mediatic change –from blogging through networked gaming to texting and sexting– offer innumerable opportunities for further exploration.






This special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media invites contributions that focus on media, particularly digital media, and their ecological and epistemological ramifications. Specific topics may include:


· School and classroom as media (ecologies) and the changing world outside
· Digital challenges to media literacy and literacies
· Media socialization and media education
· Histories of media and education
· The epistemological character of (new) media



Submissions for this special issue are due May 1, 2010


Length of submissions: generally 6000-8000 words


Further submission and formatting information is available at: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/howtocontribute.asp


Direct comments and questions to: nfriesen[at]tru.ca

[2010 horizon report]

One of the "Critical Challenges" from the (preview of the) latest report :


Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key 21st century skill, but there is a widening training gap for faculty and teachers. Often not seen as a priority for faculty or teacher training, digital media literacy is nonetheless a critical skill not only for students but for those who work with them. Faculty and instructors are beginning to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that it is not clear exactly how to codify the skills or set standards for their measurement.


And, one of the "Key Trends":


Students are increasingly seen as collaborators, and there is more cross-campus collaboration. Using collaborative technologies, students are working with faculty and peers in other classes and on other campuses to create online resources that both demonstrate learning and contribute to public knowledge. Research projects are conducted by larger, more distributed teams than previously, and they are often becoming more public much earlier in the research process.





Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• Tablet PCs—small, portable computers that fall in size and function between smart phones and laptops—are used to record and analyze field research during Bluegrass Community & Technical College's off-campus chemistry labs. 
• In addition to the free lectures offered on iTunes, many universities are making courses available for mobile delivery. 
• Medical students at the University of Louisville School of Medicine use their smart phones to check H1N1 updates from the Center for Disease Control.

Read the entire preview here.


Read tweets about the draft here.

[inanimate alice = the future of the novel]

The Future of the Novel is Digital: Interactive Narrative 'Inanimate Alice' Featured in Epic Documentary TV Series

VANCOUVER, Dec. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Inanimate Alice, the award-winning multimedia title from novelist Kate Pullinger, recent recipient of the Governor General's Award for fiction, features in the final episode of TVO's epic documentary series Empire of the Word broadcasting December 16, in Canada.

Demonstrating an entertaining new way to read, the interaction of Inanimate Alice makes for an immersive reading experience. Being interspersed with puzzles and games, simple to start with, growing more complex with each episode as the story unfolds, the series has a layered structure and a multi-tasking environment that digital natives feel is their territory and which teachers can employ for reading inspiration.

Inanimate Alice may feel more like playing a casual game than reading a novel, however a richly endowed story is at the heart of the experience. "Inanimate Alice has been created as a world story," said series producer Ian Harper. "It is about peoples and places and the world young people experience today. It reaches beyond borders and the constraints of language and religion."
"What is really exciting is for us to receive messages from young students on their home computers telling us they have been working on Inanimate Alice at school and asking when the next episode will be available," said Harper.

The teaching resources [by me!] associated with the Inanimate Alice series have been accessed by Departments of Education, National Libraries and major universities around the world. In Australia, the series is seen as "demonstrating an innovative way of presenting resources that support learning in the areas of English Literacy and Information and Communications Technology." Elsewhere, teachers are using episodes for improvement in English Language training. "No matter how hard we try we cannot get young students to read from books," a teacher from Singapore noted.

Harper commented, "It is gratifying to see the series being deployed across wide age ranges, encouraging the hard-to-engage while inspiring creative writing amongst the gifted. While we are immersed in the discussion about what shape the books of the future will take, we'd like to see the series be a kick-start for more traditional forms of reading."

http://www.inanimatealice.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/inanimatealice
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Inanimate-Alice/125007357446

Investors interested in learning more about Inanimate Alice contact, Ian Harper, harperjian@gmail.com

[digital writing: mfa applications sought]

Applications Sought:

 

A two-year position, including full tuition and a stipend, leading to an MFA.

Information on how to apply to Brown's graduate school is linked from the programme's website.

Since 1990, Brown’s Graduate Program in Literary Arts has earned recognition as an international leader in the field of electronic writing.  Today, writing digital media is part of the trans-departmental digital arts development at Brown involving Literary Arts, Music, Visual Art, Modern Culture and Media, Computer Science, and other departments. Links have also been forged with the Digital+Media Center at the Rhode Island School of Design. Though the focus is still on writing and thus on the text, students in literary hypermedia take courses offering the additional possibility of working in mixed hypermedia, including computer graphics, animation, electronic music, video, and virtual 3-D environments. A new experimental workshop, 'Cave Writing,' has been launched in Brown’s immersive virtual reality environment in the Center Computation and Visualization. Our faculty include Professor Robert Coover, who was the moving force behind these initiatives and, since 2007, Professor John Cayley.

Further information about ongoing activities can be found at http://writingdigitalmedia.org

Previous fellows: Talan Memmott, William Gillespie, Brian Kim Stefans, Daniel Howe, Aya Karpinska, Justin Katko. Current fellows: Samantha Gorman, Ian Hatcher, Edrex Fontanilla. Previous writing fellows who completed electronic theses or taught eWriting at Brown as graduates include: Bobby Arellano, Mark Amerika, Matthew Derby, Mary-Kim Arnold, Judd Morrissey, Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

Electronic Writing fellows have access to all the resources of the Literary Arts Program and its innovative and engaged faculty directed by Professor Brian Evenson. Please see the website for a complete listing.

 

 

 

[digital technologies and identity]

Digital Technologies of the Self - Yasmine Abbas and Fred Dervin (eds.).
Cambridge Scholars (2009).




- Information available at:
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Digital-Technologies-of-the-Self1-4438-1419-9.htm
- Introduction and table of contents:
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/978-1-4438-1419-5-sample.pdf

Inspired by the “technologies of the self” theorized by Michel Foucault in the early 1980s, this volume investigates how contemporary individuals fashion their identity/identities using digital technologies such as ambient intelligent devices, social networking platforms and online communities (Facebook, CouchSurfing and craigslist), online gaming (SilkRoad Online, Oblivion and World of Warcraft), podcasts, etc. With high-speed internet access, ubiquitous computing and generous storage capacity, the opportunities for staging and transforming the self/selves have become nearly limitless.
This book explores how technologies contribute to the expression, (co-)construction and enactment of identities. It examines these issues from various perspectives as it brings together insights from different disciplines — design, discourse analysis, philosophy and sociology.

[inanimate alice in my undergrad. English class]

x-posted at iTeach Inanimate Alice


On Thursday (19th of November) I started the final unit of the term with my English 102s at Grant MacEwan University (Edmonton, Alberta). After essays and other academic texts, our final study would focus on the multimodal narrative, Inanimate Alice.


Before I began the lesson I recalled what I had done with other classes (mostly media or creative technologies while at De Montfort University in Leicester, England). But this time, it would be a little different. I could incorporate more of a "literary" analysis as this was for an English class...right?


Interestingly out of about 30 students, only one admitted to having read something similar to Inanimate Alice (but when he was "younger"). I gave a background to Inanimate Alice. I introduced the students to Alice, to Brad. I also explained what Alice's parents do. We talked about setting and character development, noting that Inanimate Alice can be read as a bildungsroman.


We agreed to spend the remainder of the lesson reading Episodes 1 and 2. Students were also given time at the end of the lesson to reflect on their first-time reading a multimodal narrative. Some of the questions I asked them to think about included:

• How reading this online fiction is different from reading the essays in the course books or reading the texts for your research assignment
• What can readers infer about the identity of Alice? What traits does Alice seem to possess?
• 1 instance of foreshadowing
• Complete this sentence: “I think the author is trying to say....”

 
 
 Read more »

[employment: assistant or associate prof. of info graphics]

*ASSISTANT OR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN INFORMATION GRAPHICS AND DATA VISUALIZATION*

*Working title/rank:*  Assistant or Associate Professor in Information
Graphics and Data Visualization

*Type of appointment:* Tenure-track faculty

*Position category:* Tenure-track faculty

*Department or school:* Journalism/Mass Communication

*Application deadline:* Open until filled (Applications will begin to be
reviewed on January 15, 2010)

*Proposed start date:* July 1, 2010

*Position summary*

The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is searching for an outstanding assistant or associate professor specializing in information graphics and data visualization.  The successful applicant will teach courses in information graphics and visualization, which includes cartography and statistical representation, 3D design, animated graphic storytelling and other appropriate courses over time. All of the school’s graphic design courses are taught in our state-of-the-art Macintosh labs.  The successful candidate will teach a 2/2 course load and perform other customary duties of a faculty member in the school’s research tenure track: research, advising, service and teaching/advising students at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

*Education requirements*

A Ph.D. in journalism/mass communication or a relevant related field is required.  ABD will be considered with a firm anticipated completion date.

*Experience and qualifications*

   - Preferred 7 years of full-time professional experience as an informational graphic artist/specialist.
   - Entrepreneurial and/or freelance work experience.
   - An outstanding, international award-winning professional portfolio that includes print and online journalistic work.
   - Proficiency in appropriate software including Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and a 3D software program such as Maya or Lightwave.  Working knowledge of Flash and Dreamweaver. Proficiency in programming languages such as ActionScript and R.
   - A well-defined research agenda that addresses pertinent issues in information visualization and new technologies.
   - Ability to be an outstanding teacher.



*Special instructions*

Go to *http://jobs.unc.edu/1002162* <http://jobs.unc.edu/1002162> to apply.
Please submit a letter, vitae, names and contact information of least three references and a link to online portfolio materials. Supporting documents including course syllabi and other materials will be helpful in selecting finalists and should be submitted as electronic attachments to the application when possible.  Any other materials may be mailed to: 
Jo Bass
Assistant to the Dean
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
UNC-Chapel Hill
Campus Box 3365
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3365








Note: The amazing image is from Aaron Koblin who has compiled flight pattern data from the FAA for the United States and most of North America. He calls the work "Flight Curves."

[open education]

Anna Batchelder, Founder of Bon Education, has an interesting post on open education at Literacy is Priceless:

"'The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field…We’re changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.' - Cathy Casserly, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
With an increasing number of educators putting their lessons, curricula and learning objects online for others to use, customize and share, the open education movement is at a tipping point. That said, with so many educational resources available on the Internet, how does one go about finding the “perfect resource for class tomorrow” without losing too much time, money or sleep?
Before we get to the answer of this question, it is important to take a quick step back and understand “the anatomy of open education”…
What is Open Education?
Open education is a term that refers to education in which knowledge, best practices and learning objects (lessons, units, etc.) are shared freely via the Internet for others to use and under many licenses to modify and re-share.
Why Open Education?
The benefits of open education are many (customization, cost-savings, freedom to innovate, etc.), but one of the primary advantages of the open education movement is that of access. Anyone who has an Internet connection via computer or mobile phone can access millions of readings, videos, simulations, lesson plans, interactive courses and more… all for free!
Open Education and Teacher Effectiveness…
Research shows time and time again that teachers have the greatest potential to influence student achievement (North Central Regional Education LaboratoryMcKinsey 2007, Darling-Hammond 1997). Furthermore, the literature indicates that effective teachers tend to exhibit—commitment (to help every child succeed), information-seeking (intellectual curiosity), flexibilitypassion for learning (drive to support student learning) amongst several other traits (UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning 2004, Kemp & Hall, 1992). 2009, (willingness to differentiate), and
Luckily, the ethos of open education goes hand-in-hand with these findings, enabling educators endless opportunities to improve their craft. Thanks to the millions of people actively engaged in sharing their ideas and content online, teachers today have 24-7 access to continued learning opportunities, professional development, lesson planning guides and resources for differentiation. Take one look at sites like Edutopia, Discover Ed, and Connexions and you will be blown away by the number of free resources available to help educators continuously improve the content area knowledge, skills and expertise they bring to the classroom.

Where to Start—Finding the Perfect Open Education Resources for your Classroom

The following is a curated list of open education resources targeted at helping K-12 teachers find classroom and professional development resources quickly, easily and for free:

• Curriki.org—“Curriki is a social entrepreneurship organization that supports the development and free distribution of open source educational materials to improve education worldwide.  The online community gives teachers, students and parents universal access to a wealth of peer-reviewed K-12 curricula, and powerful online collaboration tools”.
• FreeReading.net—“FreeReading is a high-quality, open-source, free reading intervention program addressing literacy development for grades K-3. Schools and teachers everywhere can use the complete, research-based 40-week program for K-1 students, or use the library of lessons to supplement existing curricula in phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. The site is also filled with free, downloadable supplemental materials including flashcards, graphical organizers, illustrated readers, decodable texts, audio files, videos and more”.
• OERCommons.org—“OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 24,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being ‘open,’ these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving”.

To find additional open education resources of note, visit Bon Education.

The Future Cost of Education
A recent post on Mashable, titled, “In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero,” author Josh Catone shares a recent statement by VC and “Hacking Education” organizer Brad Burnham. He writes:
Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good… If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news.

A nice notion indeed!
To the sharing of knowledge!"

[new model for narrative: electric literature]

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days. 

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”

[...]


As for Mr. Moody, he said he came up with the idea of Twitter fiction after he fell in love with the new form. “It’s like trying to write in haiku continuously,” he said in an e-mail message.
“I like that E.L. seems as though it will try just about anything, and I think it’s important for literature that it’s always pushing the envelope, colliding with other forms, trying to find new envelopes for its message, and generally renewing itself,” Mr. Moody’s message continued. He called it a method that was partly pioneered by magazines like McSweeny’s and Ninth Letter.
Stephen O’Connor, whose story “Love” is in the second Electric Literature issue, said, “They approached me after a story came out in The New Yorker.” At about 12,000 words, he added, “Love” is a bit long for a conventional literary magazine.
“I’m hoping it will be a younger audience, all those kids like my students at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence who are always on Facebook and iPhone,” Mr. O’Connor said.

[...]


“We have an optimistic message at a time of pessimism,” Mr. Hunter said. “As writers, we got tired of the doom and gloom. The future is not something you acquiesce to, it’s something you create.”




From the NY Times. 

Image from Electric Literature. Follow Electric Literature on Twitter.

[kids online: new publication]

"Kids Online: Opportunities and Risks for Children", edited by Sonia Livingstone and Leslie Haddon (Bristol: Policy Press). 

The book provides an up to date account of how children use the internet in Europe, including such topical issues as social networking, risky contacts, parental mediation, media literacy and many more.


Ordering information is available here: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EUKidsOnline/KidsOnlineflyer.pdf

As Professor Tanya Byron, author of the influential Byron Review into Safer Children in a Digital World says, "Professor Livingstone and colleagues provide extensive evidence-based findings which enable academics, educationalists, policy makers, parents and young people to think beyond anxieties generated by new technologies and make informed decisions about maximizing digital opportunities while managing risks. An impressive and essential book, central to the child digital safety debate."


Expected Results:

• Core findings regarding children’s and parents’ experiences of online technologies, focused on comparisons of children’s and parents’ perceptions of and practices regarding online risk and safety.
  
• Patterns of risk and safety online to be identified following top-down hypothesis testing and bottom-up exploration of relationships among different variables, conducted on a cross-national basis.
  
• Evidence-based policy and research recommendations.
  

Read more here.






Note: top image from Kids Online book site and second image from Teenagers Today site.

[digital materials]

It seems quite apt, following the discussion over at the Transliteracy Research Group blog, that this new publication made its way into my inbox.




Reading Erna Kotkamp's chapter on e-learning I find numerous echoes with my own thinking of both transliteracy and pedagogy.


Here is just one, Kotkamp notes:

"According to Dewey, ‘all genuine education comes about through experience’ (Dewey 1938, 13). In a classroom setting this means that the experience of a learner has to be incorporated in the teaching to improve the learning process" (66).

Precisely. As with transliteracy, we learn about it through experience. And then reflecting on the experience - the coming together of modes, views, participatory sections - can be incorporated into the larger understanding of what transliteracy is meaning (gerund because it's under construction).


Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology
Edited by Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer


Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media yielded to a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, which begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new issues have emerged now that new media are taken for granted, and which riddles remain unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how it constitutes us as 'you'? From desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging to e-learning, from role-playing games to Cybergoth music to wireless dreams, this timely volume offers a showcase of the most up-to-date research in the field from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.


The book is available in print from Amsterdam University Press (ISBN 978 908964 0680) and as a PDF file under a Creative Commons License (BY NC ND).

[colour matters...even in the twitterverse]

New Box UK Study Finds Twitter Users of Both Sex More Likely to ‘Follow’ White Women



Between June and October of 2009 London-based digital agency Box UK (http://www.boxuk.com) conducted two sequential social experiments to test how Twitter users reacted to being followed by strictly controlled test accounts. The results strongly suggest that given a choice of following black and white people of either sex, Twitter users are more likely to ‘follow’ white women, and least likely to follow black women.


This distribution also holds when the data is sub-divided into male followers and female followers for each account, showing that both sexes are most likely to follow White Female or Ambiguous accounts, and least likely to follow Black Females. We can also deduce that on average, female twitter users are 30% less likely to follow a request from a stranger, than a male twitter user.

“While it may be rather premature to conclusively argue that white women get more followers on Twitter than non-white women or men, we do know that a digital divide does exist and that certain groups of people tend to explore new applications with greater speed and enthusiasm. Without wading into a debate on technology users, more information on the aggregate of Twitter users is necessary to come to any real conclusions about their use of technology,” says Dr. Tina Basi a sociologist specializing in ethnography for design.


Basi, who previously worked with Intel’s Digital Health Research Group argues that, “perhaps what the data is pointing to, is that our relationship, as users, with new social media remains somewhat perplexing. We are still struggling with using Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, as ways of engaging and connecting with others, and instead, fall back on using them to simply keep tabs on others. The internet, as a medium, still holds the spectacle of say film or television, and seeing someone on your screen attaches a celebrity like status to them. The lack of reciprocity for some of the Twitter accounts created in this experiment, might better reflect our assumptions about celebrity and tendency toward voyeurism, as opposed to forming any real argument about Tweeters.”


Twitter is an increasingly important platform for conducting social experiments, with its ability to tap-into and measure human communication and behaviour on a massive scale. As the platform grows, we expect to see businesses and academics harnessing this capability to ‘invisibly’ survey the real behaviour and reactions of people, enabling a new wave of social research and customer intelligence.

Read more about the methodology and report here.






Image from Dan Zambonini's post on the report findings.