[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 »

[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.

An interesting presentation on how to "restore" awe and fascination in learning using new media (there are some great ideas with augmented reality and geotagging). This definitely fits into the them of transliterate learning & pedagogy:

Digital Literacy: Rethinking Education

[media, culture & communication – visiting assistant professor]

Awesome position:


The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University invites applications for a Visiting Assistant Professor whose research focuses on digital media, copyright, and media technologies. The position is to begin September 1, 2010.


This is a one-year non-tenure track appointment that is renewable for an additional two years, depending upon department need and satisfactory performance.

The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication serves over 750 undergraduate majors and offers MA and PhD programs of study. The Department emphasizes interdisciplinary scholarship and encourages applications from a broad range of methodological perspectives. For more information please see: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/.


Qualifications

The position is open to recent PhDs who have completed their dissertations within the last four years. Doctoral candidates who will have completed their degrees by September 2010 are also invited to apply.

Further information about the position can be obtained from: Marita Sturken, Chair, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication,

marita.sturken@nyu.edu.


Note: Image from School Designs.

[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. 

[conference: foundations of information science]

Conference Date:
August 20-23, 2010

Deadline of Paper Submission:
May 20th, 2010

Notification of Acceptance:

 June 20th, 2010

Location:

Beijing

Continuing the series of FIS Conferences (Madrid 1994, Vienna 1996, Paris 2005) a new venue will be held in Beijing 2010. In our times, an increasing number of disciplines are dealing with information in very different ways: from information society and information technology to communication studies (and related subjects like codes, meaning, knowledge, and intelligence), as well as quantum information, bioinformation, knowledge economy, network science, computer science and Internet, to name but a few. At the same time, an increasing number of scientists in the East and the West have been engaged with the foundational problems underlying this development, to such an extent that the integration of disciplines revolving around information seems an idea whose time has come. A new science of information can be envisaged that explores the possibilities of establishing a common ground, of constructing a new scientific perspective that connects the different information-related disciplines and provides a new framework for transdisciplinary research.

Topics:

1.  The Impact of a New Science of Information on Society

2.  The Position of Intelligence Science in Information Science

       a. Information and Intelligence

       b. Intelligence Science as an Engineering Informatics in Information Science  

3.  The Role of Other Applied Information Science Disciplines (Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Mediated Communication, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Information and Communication Technologies and Society, Library and Documentation Science, …)

4.  The Basis of a New Science of Information

       a.  Feasibility of a single generic concept of information

       b.  Concepts, Principles, and Methodology of a “General Informatics” or “Theoretical Informatics”

       c.   Knowledge Structure of a Unified Theory of Information 

5.   Philosophy of Information

       a.   Information Ethics

       b.   Epistemology (Information and the Scientific Method, …)  

       c.   Ontology of Information   

       d.   Information and Philosophy of Science (Information and the System of Sciences – Transdisciplinarity – Consilience, …)

6.   Science of Information in Real-World Systems

       a.  Science of Information in Physical and Chemical Systems (Quantum Information, Molecular Recognition, …)

       b.  Science of Information in Living Systems (Biosemiotics, Systems Biology, Bioinformation, …)

       c.   Science of Information in Human / Social Systems

              i.  Science of Information in Human Cognition (Mind-Brain Theory, Consciousness, …)

              ii.  Science of Information in Human Communication (Linguistics, Social Networking,Communication Studies, …)

              iii.  Science of Information in Human Cooperation (Collective Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Advanced Intelligence, …)

7.   Science of the Information Society / Age (Information Society Theory, Internet Research, Social Informatics, New Media Studies, …)

Read more about the conference here.

["internet is freedom"]

Lawrence Lessing's speech at the Italian Parliament, "Internet is Freedom":

[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.”

[creativity 2.0]

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) muses on creativity:

[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

[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. 

[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 »

[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!"