[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. 

["internet is freedom"]

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

[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:

[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

[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.

[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.

 

 

 

[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 »

[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).

[meta meta cognition: the wired epileptic brain]

"A rare set of high-resolution readouts taken directly from the wired-in brains of epileptics has provided an unprecedented look at how the brain processes language.


Though only a glimpse, it was enough to show that part of the brain’s language center handles multiple tasks, rather than one.


“If the same part of the brain does different things at different times, that’s a thunderously complex level of organization,” said Ned Sahin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.


In a study published Thursday in Science, Sahin’s team studied a region known as Broca’s center, named for French anatomist Paul Pierre Broca who observed that two people with damage to a certain spot in the front of their brains had lost the ability to speak, but could still think.


[...]


During the several days that three patients at Massachusetts General Hospital were medically wired, Sahin’s team asked them to repeat words verbatim, and translate them to past and present tense.


In the space of a quarter-second, a small part of Broca’s area — the only part read by the electrodes — received each word, put the word in a correct tense, and sent it to the brain’s speech centers.


This tested only one type of verbal cognition, cautioned Sahin, and the focus was unavoidably narrow, but it was enough to show that Broca’s area is involved not only in translating speech, but receiving it. That role was considered specific to part of the brain called Wernicke’s area.


More broadly, the findings may represent a general rule for Broca’s area, and perhaps other brain regions: Each part plays multiple roles, rather than performing a single task (emphasis mine)."

NB: Image by Ned Sahin on the Wired site.

[Transliteracy in my Classrooms]

Ok, so I'm halfway through the second week of lecturing.  Classes seem to be going well (students are coming to class and participating! yay!) and essays, stories and grammar theory are being studied.


As I flip through the syllabus and note my "blog comment" assignments and "blog post" reflections the word transliteracy flits back and forth in my mind.  Transliteracy of course isn't on the curriculum but neither are blogging or media literacy per se.  Though transliteracy is always under development, I'm feeling a strong pull to encourage students to see their movements from writing essays in class, group presentations, blogging, reading online narratives like Inanimate Alice, and designing posters (tweeting comes later on) as examples of being transliterate. I wonder if they can name their behaviour, their learning might have even more resonance? 


I remind my students that we're participating in the online environment and honing our new/social media (and transliterate) skills because when they enter the workforce, they'll need to be prepared.  Librarian by Day gives some good life examples on the necessity to be transliterate:

"Government agencies are no longer issuing print forms, you have to access them online.  Your health insurance plan was a website and you have an account, when you call they will tell you to go there to get information. Banks are sending alerts and account balance information via text messages. Facebook privacy settings are complex and change frequently. The price of computers is dropping allowing more people to own one. Free WiFi access points are increasing, allowing more people internet access."

If our students don't experience these kinds of movement, from offline to online, how will they learn to be literate (not just trial and error or basic proficiencies)? I feel more and more strongly that helping to develop these transliterate skills needs a place in a classroom (though some, of course, are better equipped than others).  


There are lots of ways to begin. Students can use blog posts as reading or reflective learning journals. They can add comments on to the teacher-managed class blog as a way of interacting in class discussion, sharing ideas and even doing pre or post-reading activities.  The Future of Ed. site suggests venturing into transliteracy by:

• Viewing or posting a video around your lesson plan or around an educational component on TeacherTube
• Trying e-learning for your own professional development
• Learning how The Transliteracies Project is designing technology to improve the experience of reading for people of all backgrounds
• Exploring how archaeology and media can be used in your next class at MetaMedia
• Downloading courses from Stanford University on iTunes, MIT OpenCourseWare, or another open access sites for use in your classrorom

Also from the Future of Ed. site, this video with director of Media X's (at Stanford) Chuck House on the 21st century workforce:

[towards information literacy]

This Unesco report (from 2008) has a succinct definition of information literacy that has to do with people's capacity rather than specific rules:

"Recognise their information needs;
Locate and evaluate the quality of information;
Store and retrieve information;
Make effective and ethical use of information, and
Apply information to create and communicate knowledge."

Information literacy (as noted here and in the digital cultures master's module) doesn't just apply to one context, when using a computer for example, it's applicable throughout contexts and I think that's what defines capacity as literacy - readers/users can move through a variety of contexts (much like transliteracy). "IL skills are necessary for people to be effective lifelong learners and to contribute in knowledge societies."

These elements of information literacy say it all - they cross contexts:

"a. Recognise information needs
b. Locate and evaluate the quality of information
c. Store and Retrieve information
d. Make effective and ethical use of information, and
e. Apply information to create and communicate knowledge."

Citation info:

Catts, R. & Lau, J. (2008). Towards Information Literacy Indicators. Paris: UNESCO. Retrieved May 07, 2008 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001587/158723e.pdf

via ICTlogy.

Read more of the report here.

[influence of new media]

[computer human interaction conference: australia]

OZCHI 2009 – Design: Open 24/7

21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA)

23 – 27 November 2009, The University of Melbourne, Australia

http://www.ozchi.org/

Paper submission site now open: http://precisionconference.com/~ozchi

OZCHI is Australia’s leading forum for research and development in all areas of Human-Computer Interaction. OZCHI attracts an international community of practitioners, researchers, academics and students from a wide range of disciplines including user experience designers, information architects, software engineers, human factors experts, information systems analysts, and social scientists.

The main conference will be from Wed 25 to Fri 27 Nov 2009, and will be preceded by two days of Workshops, Tutorials and a Doctoral Consortium on Mon 23 and Tue 24 Nov 2009.OZCHI will take place back-to-back with HFESA 2009: http://www.hfesaconference.org.au/ scheduled to run from 22-25 Nov 2009. The venue for both conferences is the ICT building of the University of Melbourne, 111 Barry St, Parkville.

The keynote speakers for this year's OZCHI conference:

• Bill Moggridge, Co-founder of IDEO.com
• Patrick Hofmann, Head of User Experience, Google Australia
• Yvonne Rogers, Director, Pervasive Interaction Lab, Open University, UK

Important Dates

Long papers, and workshop & tutorial proposals
19 Jun 2009: EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE
14 Aug 2009: Notification of acceptance
28 Aug 2009: Camera ready papers deadline

Short papers, industry case studies, demos & posters, workshop papers, and doctoral consortium
28 Aug 2009: Submission deadline
25 Sep 2009: Notification of acceptance
02 Oct 2009: Camera ready papers deadline

Conference Theme

The 2009 conference theme is Design: Open 24/7. Accessibility, inclusivity and dissolving boundaries are core to the Open 24/7 theme for the design of human interaction with and through digital technologies. The integration of digital technologies into our everyday life allows for a seamless transitioning between open and closed, work and leisure, public and private. Open implies participation and collaboration across traditional borders between individuals, organisations and disciplines. OZCHI 2009 provides a forum to discuss all aspects of openness, open borders, open participation, open source and open architecture. Theme-related submissions may address these topics:

• Open always-on real-time ubiquitous and pervasive designs
• Open design and universality versus situatedness, contextualisation and personalisation
• Open source for design – design for open source
• Open mind – new ideas, concepts and approaches from outside HCI
• Beyond open – never closed: design for escapism

Conference Topics

Submissions in all areas of HCI are encouraged. In addition, we particularly invite authors to address any of the following topics:

• Augmented Reality
• Context and Location Awareness
• Education and HCI
• Health Care and HCI
• Innovative Design Methodologies
• Smart Service Delivery
• Sustainability
• Universal Usability and Accessibility
• Urban Informatics
• Tangible User Interfaces
• Visualisation Techniques
• Working across Cultures

Read more about the paper/workshop submission process and conference here.

[world digital library]

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.

The WDL was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations.

Read more about the background, partners, contributors and more.

[newspapers, new media & monetization]

Thanks to a link from @jayrosen_nyu I've seen this interesting article on how to obtain value from (or rather, monetize) online content. Zachary M. Seward notes that the meeting of industry execs held on Thursday was aptly titled "Models to Lawfully Monetize Content."

The report itself outlines five key changes (or "doctrines" according to Rick Edmonds).

• True Value. Establish that news content online has value by charging for it. Begin "massive experimentation with several of the most promising options."
• Fair Use. Maintain the value of professionally produced and edited content by "aggressively enforcing copyright, fair use and the right to profit from original work."
• Fair Share. Negotiate a higher price for content produced by the news industry that is aggregated and redistributed by others.
• Digital Deliverance. "Invest in technologies, platforms and systems that provide content-based e-commerce, data-sharing and other revenue generating solutions."
• Consumer Centric. Refocus on consumers and users. Shift revenue strategies from those focused on advertisers.

Why the interest in monetizing online content...to protect the print newspapers.

Paid content wall would protect print subscriptions

The report also suggests a paid content wall would help retain print subscribers, citing a recent USC Annenberg survey finding that 22 percent of online news readers said that they had dropped print subscriptions because they could most of the same content free online.

But is charging for online content the best way to generate revenue? Hard-hitting sales tactics doesn't seem synonymous with loyal readership. In James Warren's words: "collecting enhanced online newspaper user data across newspaper properties and mining that data to aggressively sell target content to specific audience segments across the network (e.g. golf enthusiasts)."

Newspapers need to get creative. Leverage some of the amazing web 2.0 tools to generate interest. Perhaps online versions might offer something for the long tail too which won't be present in the print versions (I know some newspapers are already doing this).



Note: The Huffington Post, having "reinvented the American newspaper," seems to do quite well (without a print version) though only 6% of it's news stories are original content.

[swarm theory and social media]

I'm in the final stages of editing a selection of articles to appear in an upcoming journal issue and one of the articles deals with swarm theory. Many readers here would recognise Howard Rhiengold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution or perhaps Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang who coined the term in 1989 (see the *trusty* resource wikipedia).

More recently there's the famous National Geographic article on swarm theory: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text/1 which does an excellent job (exciting and informational) of explaining the science behind swarms. Enter left stage, the ants:

"I used to think ants knew what they were doing. The ones marching across my kitchen counter looked so confident, I just figured they had a plan, knew where they were going and what needed to be done. How else could ants organize highways, build elaborate nests, stage epic raids, and do all the other things ants do?

Turns out I was wrong. Ants aren't clever little engineers, architects, or warriors after all—at least not as individuals. When it comes to deciding what to do next, most ants don't have a clue. "If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you'll be impressed by how inept it is," says Deborah M. Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University.

How do we explain, then, the success of Earth's 12,000 or so known ant species? They must have learned something in 140 million years.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence."

And that, in a nutshell, is collective intelligence and why crowd sourcing can be beneficial (knowing the right questions to ask helps too) and why tools like twitter are great resources for getting tips (maybe even on finding the shortest path to food).

As the National Geographic writer, Peter Miller, says of the ant colony the same can be said for social media: "no one's in charge."

[phd training session: digital literacy & creativity]

A full-day for the AHRC funded CEDAR (Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities), organised by the Universities of Bangor (Dr Astrid Ensslin) and Aberystwyth (Dr Will Slocombe).

As I've noted before, I'll be talking about academic blogging and the digital literacy (a favourite topic of mine).

For the students participating, feel free to add comments as directed in the presentation.



Please comment on the idea of reading and writing as “an invisible skill” (see Sue Thomas's video, 16:00) and whether you find the Stroop test challenging or not and why.


Literacy + Technology + Creativity = Digital Literacy in the 21st Century

Important that these elements are seen as interdependent


Read The Whale Hunt here: http://thewhalehunt.org


UPDATE: Keno Buss and Sascha Westendorf have joined us for a bit about their project and some hands-on experience with the De Montfort Creativity Assistant.

[social media and sustainability]

Recently I was asked to give a presentation to a group on the theme of social media and sustainability. I began with an introduction to some web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, twitter) and the usefulness of rss. Then I gave some examples of organisations employing aspects of social media to generate interest/support in an environmental issue or to garner information. Early into my introduction I asked the group (there were about 35 or so) to answer some questions to give me (and them) and idea of how they are situated in relation to social media.
The questions I asked included:

• Do you send txt msgs?
• Do you blog or comment on blogs?
• Do you listen to podcasts?
• Do you have a Facebook profile?
• Do you participate on an e-mail list?
• Have you watched a YouTube video?
• Do you Tweet?
• Do you have a Flickr account?
• Do you aggregate RSS feeds?

How do you think the group did? Would your prediction change if I told you this was research-oriented group? That mostly everyone there was over 35 (except perhaps for a few ph.d students who joined us and the speaker of course...)?

Well no one had a blog though a few did listen to podcasts and the question about tweeting generated a few giggles. Two people in the room had photo-sharing accounts but no one knew what RSS was so definitely no one was using a feed aggregator. Having said this, I think I'd have received similar answers with a younger group. In fact, having posed this questions to my first year and third year media undergrads they too did not have blogs but they watched and uploaded videos and shared photos and updates with facebook. No one there knew about rss either. So, not too dissimilar...which leads me to...

Someone at the talk implied that *we* (harumph) are digital immigrants and that our students and the groups we're trying to target (in this case, to instill change and be proactive about the environment) are digital natives, ergo they *know* this *stuff*... Firstly, I disagree that technology-use is a generational thing (think of silver surfers). Secondly, just because you or your child or your niece or whomever...has access to a nintendo ds or a psp or txts all the time does not mean that they are literate and know how to protect themselves online and recognise issues related to identity theft, bullying and even future employment (do you really want your future employer to see evidence of a drunken saturday night - I know my first and third years did NOT realise this).

I think there's often talk about helping students become *literate* (or transliterate) in the online environment - how do they navigate all the different modes alongside identity and IP (especially for researchers) etc...but what about the teachers? Where is the acknowledgment that those doing the teaching also need time to learn, absorb and choose how and if they're going to implement web 2.0 applications? I'm wondering more about this because although the group I was talking with weren't there in terms of pedagogy the questions they asked were just as applicable:

• why *should* we use [enter application here, twitter/facebook/blogs/podcasts/youtube/flickr]?
• doesn't this just add more work?
• what are the benefits?

I think it's to be expected that there is anxiety with new things; adding to our work and generating frustration but I think the examples I showed of organisations leveraging social media to share ideas and generate buzz illustrated well the potentials. I quite like what ForestEthics, Greenpeace and Sierra Club BC, the three leading environmental groups that have worked with the B.C. government, First Nations and industry leaders to British Columbia’s globally unique Great Bear Rainforest. Together, they launched a social media campaign using facebook, twitter, blogs and youtube videos. They also made it easy for supporters to send pre-written protest e-mails and add their voices to the campaign. On the 31st of March 2009 the social media efforts paid off:

"March 31, 2009, Vancouver, British Columbia – The promise made three years ago to protect one-third of British Columbia’s globally unique Great Bear Rainforest and develop the foundations for a conservation-based economy in the region has been fulfilled. Today’s announcement is greatly welcomed by ForestEthics, Greenpeace and Sierra Club BC, the three leading environmental groups that have worked with the B.C. government, First Nations and industry leaders to ensure the promise would be kept. Today’s announcement lays out the tremendous ecological and economic gains for the region and the long-term commitment to ensure the health of the rainforest and communities."

Have a look at the youtube video:

The questions after the session were enlightening. Most were excited to explore social media themselves but admitted that they didn't really know about "these sorts of things." They wanted to learn but weren't sure whether they had the institutional support. So key the to us being able to pass on knowledge is institutional/work support in terms of teaching the teachers (employees etc...) and giving them the time to learn how to use tools effectively (of course this goes for anything right? not just social media or computer technologies). I must say, the IOCT is brilliant in that respect - using twitter and facebook and blogging are recognised aspects of research and demonstrate interaction with/in the field. (disclosure: I am employed as a Research Fellow at the IOCT).

[storytelling 2.0]

It's children's stories which are pushing the boundaries of *traditional* publishing and going multimodal and mobile. Read the article on a few recent projects here (there's a snippet below) which are interesting but...I don't agree with gaming elements as synonymous with "boy friendly" (paragraph 6)! ARG! There are girl gamers out there and look at how Inanimate Alice weaves gaming alongside story development...and I know girls read that story too.

"In late January Lev Grossman, writing about the future of the book in Time, said the novel is on the verge of evolving “into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.” Although Grossman wasn't speaking to what is happening in children's publishing per se, there seems to be something in his description that taps into this brave new world.

It's clear that children's publishing is embracing the spirit of the book while finding more and more ways to tell a story outside the book. The challenge, as almost all who commented for this story said, will be figuring out how to create these non-book books cheaper, faster and better. As Katz put it,“This isn't landing in the new world, this is on the road to the new world.”

[cognitive leadership for transdisciplinary research]

Reading "Enhancing Transdisciplinary Research Through Collaborative Leadership" by Barbara Grey.


Some interesting points:

• Groupthink refers to the suppression of differences within a team and its inability to bridge power differences
• the absence of process skills (e.g., decision making, problem solving, conflict resolution, information exchange, coordination, and boundary management) has also been noted as a crucial detriment to collaboration
• Viewing the leadership of transdisciplinary initiatives as a cognitive task means that leadership involves the management of meaning
• Transformational leaders high on charisma,
  for example, are seen as powerful shapers of their followers’ aspirations which positively affects team performance
• In transdisciplinary research, the cognitive tasks of leadership largely consist of visioning and framing
• Transdisciplinary leaders need to be able to envision how various disciplines may overlap in constructive ways that could generate scientific breakthroughs and new understanding
  in a specific problem area
• Structural-leadership tasks address the team’s need for coordination and information exchange— both within the team and between the team and external actors
• Research on brokers (who occupy key positions between others) in transdisciplinary networks reveals they are high on the Big Five Personality factor of openness, displayed an ability to imagine and propose potential collaborations among researchers, and engaged in active transdisciplinary mentoring of junior faculty
• Among the boundary-spanning tasks identified as key for transdisciplinary teams are
  gaining and maintaining sound institutional commitment and support,17 acquiring funds to manage emerging areas of research and training, devoting adequate attention to and securing funds for infrastructure, and building bridges to other centers and new disciplines
• Attending to the process dynamics of a transdisciplinary team demands an especially important set of interpersonal skills that are critical to successful team collaboration

[A Digital Humanities Manifesto]

There are 29 separate points in the UCLA Digital Humanities Centre's manifesto but these stood out for me:

"The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complexity.

Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity are empty words unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and output.

The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy."

Each paragraph has links to comments from readers too...quite a few are critical...but good for discussion (say hello Digital Cultures' students!!)

[CEDAR: doctoral training and research methods]

AHRC-funded doctoral training scheme, CEDAR (Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities), organised by the Universities of Bangor (Dr Astrid Ensslin) and Aberystwyth (Dr Will Slocombe).

I'll be running the third session in May at the IOCT at DMU - transliteracy, multimodal writing/reading and (hopefully) the creativity assistant. Attendance is free, and a limited number of travel bursaries are available (see details in attachments). BUT priority is given to Ph.D students who are funded by the AHRC.



Read more about it here: CEDAR.pdf

Download the registration form here: Cedar_registration.doc

[infusing semantic web into operational data systems]

Patrick West, Peter Fox, Deborah McGuiness and Stephan Zednik from the High Altitude Observatory present their project on integrating data and the semantic web.

From their
"As part of our semantic data framework activities across disciplines from solid-earth, lower, middle and upper terrestrial atmosphere and solar atmosphere to integrative subjects such as climate response and space weather, we have collected a set of experiences: technical, collaboration and social that relate to how easy or hard the infusion process has been. We cover both the semantic web and knowledge infusion as well as underlying service infusion such as catalogs and OPeNDAP data servers."



Interesting points:

• It's easy to identify experts in each field and goo idea to get groups together to provide community support and external buy-in

• Tricky to conduct face-to-face meetings which are imperative to share expert knowledge between disciplines/fields
• Require a general ontology too cross data from one "data catalogue" to another
• tricky to gain access to data holdings etc...which are external to group
  

[the future of creative technologies conference]

xposted from the ioct blog:


Yesterday saw the Campus Centre filled with over 100 delegates participating in workshops and discussions on the Future of Creative Technologies. After the morning workshop sessions there were talks by Jim Hendler, Lev Manovich and Howard Rheingold. We concluded the conference with a lively discussion session.

Have a look at what people were saying about the conference

Twitter - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23foct08

Jerry Fishenden has a text version the twitter stream: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg9qx8bc_3hpxpkhd5

Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=foct08

Googled:

http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-creative-technologies-foct08.html

http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=129

http://transitlab.org/2008/11/20/the-future-of-creative-technologies-conference-08/

My photos on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesslaccetti/sets/72157609610632533/