Colin Rhinesmith

“Upgrage! Boston” photo by Digital Lyceum

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a project at Emerson College to research best practices and propose a sustainable model for creating and facilitating “mixed reality” lecture-style events. We’re interested in connecting with others who have experience in this area, particularly those at colleges and universities who are using these technologies either in the classroom or for on-campus humanities events.

Here are some of the questions we are asking,

“How are universities using this technology to foster the group authoring of events? Is it being used at conferences? Is it being used in the classroom? Are people using simple text back channels, or more involved systems like Second Life or There.com. What is the future of this practice? And by documenting what is going on, can we help shape that future?”

To learn more visit Augmented Place.

[Disclosure: I’m working as a paid research assistant on this project]

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Today, David Ardia, Sam Bayard and I launched the first Citizen Media Law Podcast. This new weekly podcast series, produced by the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will cover a range of issues relating to the intersection of citizen media, journalism and the law.

Here’s more from the post:

This week, David Ardia responds to the federal shield bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, Colin Rhinesmith talks about legal threats to co-bloggers, and Sam Bayard reflects on the Phoenix New Times arrests.

To subscribe to the podcast, visit the subscriptions page or go directly to the podcast feed.

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I’d like to welcome Mike Deehan, as the new Multimedia Production Coordinator, to the Berkman Center. Here’s a bit from my email to Mike and the Berkman community today:

Mike brings an exciting background in journalism and new media to the center, as Deputy Online Editor for the New England News Forum, a former intern at National Journal’s CongressDaily and Conference Technology Coordinator for the Media Giraffe Project in Amherst, MA.

Mike will be taking over as point person for media projects at Berkman, including webcasting, podcasting, video production, and other related efforts, as I move into my new role as a Producer for the Citizen Media Law Podcast, debuting later this week.

Please join me in welcoming Mike to Berkman!”

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Ugh. Apparently the keyboard on my PowerBook G4 doesn’t work anymore. When I type, only a few random letters appear in the field. Not sure what’s up with that? I didn’t spill anything on it. And it’s been working great since I got it well over a year now.

I need to look more it. But, wondering if anyone’s had similar problems with their mac laptop?

—

(Update: 7:45 PM) Keyboard’s working fine now. Not sure what happened . . .

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I just (for some reason) noticed that both the library at Emerson College, recently renamed after Dr. Shoo Iwasaki, the “internationally known environmentalist from Japan,” and the Media Services Center have blogs. This is great.

On the library blog, you can find a list of book recommendations, magazine/journal recommendations, and learn about art exhibitions featuring the work of Emerson College professors and others.

Over on the Media Services blog, Deja_Vu, Emerson students can find recommendations from their media collection and learn about featured films related to celebrations on campus.

It would be great if Deja Vu started to use tags like the Library blog does. This would helpful for searching the site based on topic areas. But, kudos to them for being open to using a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. It would be great if the library blog started to use a CC license, as well.

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The following is my response to a reading assignment and how it might be applied towards our group project in Second Life:

Taylor’s book talks about the social transfer of skills and knowledge in-between virtual and real worlds and the eroding boundaries between each. She makes problematic the ideas of “work” and “play” in order to create a new framework for evaluating our social participation in virtual spaces and its impact on our “everyday lives,” and vice versa. For example, through her discussions about gender and race, she makes explicit the ways in which we can use virtual spaces to acknowledge how these notions “circulate and the meanings they hold” in order to approach our social and institutional practices more critically (113).

For our group project, we are approaching our re-building/re-imagining of Govt. Center based on the idea of collaboration. In class last week, our group talked in Second Life about what collaboration in SL means and how it might be applied to our building process. In her chapter on “Productive Players and Remapping Ownership” Taylor writes

Given the intense ways users are living and embodying themselves in these virtual environments, we need to develop more complex ideas about the life of digital cultural artifacts, joint ownership, and the autonomy of user experience. (147)

Similarly, there is an opportunity for our group to use this project as a way “to develop more complex ideas” about collaboration in real life using Second Life as a platform. After reading this passage, I realized that while our goal is to build, it should also focus on how we can experiment with new forms of collaboration that might not be possible in real life. With the blurring between virtual and real, and work and play, as Taylor’s book suggests, we might then later think about how our methods can be applied to real life participatory group processes, particularly in the context of civic engagement.

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In reviewing T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds for a reading response assignment, I started to think about the language we use to talk about social web tools. Our choice of words can have an enormous impact on whether or not people choose to adopt new technologies. As in any form of persuasive argument, framing is key.

If we focus on the tools first, and not the potential social benefits, we miss an opportunity. But if we instead focus on the potential social benefits first, and the tools second, people might be more willing to explore these new technologies. For example, if we say that “people are finding jobs on Linkedin” and not, “Linkedin is a social networking tool” people, particularly those looking for work, might be more willing to explore Linkedin if they had not previously.

An article in today’s Chronicle online, titled “Educators Are Split About the Viability of Second Life” reports that the New Media Consortium asked educators to respond to the following question, “What is the future of Second Life?” However, if the question was asked this way, “What is the future of education in virtual worlds?” The survey results might have been different. Even for those unfamiliar with virtual worlds, the question implies that learning is taking place there.

I took this for granted last semester during a discussion about Jared Lanier’s Digital Maoism. But as I read more online and hear more people talking about their reactions to new technologies, it reminds that, again, that in any form of persuasion, framing is key.

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I just learned from Sam Mayfield (via the ACME listserve) that a group from Public Access Television in Vermont at the Center for Media and Democracy are going to Africa this fall to work with folks at Coastal Television in Cape Coast Ghana. Check out this short video about their trip and help support their efforts by giving a donation at Sam Land. Here are the details from Sam:

“A small delegation from Ch.17/ Center for Media and Democracy in Burlington, Vermont is going to Africa in November to visit the first and only Community Access Television station in Ghana. The Access Station, Coastal Television, has been on the air since May. This is the first form of independent community access television to exist in Ghana.

We are raising money for this trip. Currently they have the bare essential equipment needed to broadcast, produce a program, and capture community events.

It would be incredible to show up with headphones, microphones, tape stock, or even a digital camera for community producers to use - it would be amazing if this was made possible by donations! You can watch the progress of the trip or make a donation at the blog below.
http://samville.blogspot.com/

We will teach at their Television School and will encourage community members to take advantage of this new great asset in their community. Since they are far from the “major” television stations in the big city, the stories of the folks in southern Ghana are rarely told. The advent of this station in southern Ghana has revolutionary value!

If you are able to make a donation please do so, if you would like to send this message or a link to the blog to your networks, that would be great and appreciated! http://samville.blogspot.com/

Lets support Community Access Television Globally - If there is one station in Ghana there can be many more!!!”

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I just returned from an exciting meeting with three other grad students and two new media faculty, Eric Gordon and John Craig Freeman, at Emerson College. The purpose was to get together and discuss how we might envision a location-based/networked forum for sharing our work and connecting on related projects.

The majority of grad students in the group are looking at issues related to Second Life and other sociable web platforms. I am particularly interested in how physical community media centers are using networked technology to connect and empower their communities (see blog). And our two faculty members are exploring a number of related issues, including the use of networked technology to augment live humanities events (see previous post).

Tonight was the first in a series of bi-monthly gatherings to explore common threads across each of our work and build a community of support for new media grads, moving forward (which I am very excited about). We spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how exactly to classify the work we’re all doing. We all agreed that each of our research interests skim across many related disciplines, but does not quite fit into any single discipline.

So we threw out a number of “terms” to see which might best describe our work collectively. One idea in particular seemed to catch on with the group. That was Net-Locality, an area that Eric Gordon has been exploring. We agreed that we’d sit with it and continue our conversation online.

With this group, I’m most excited about the opportunity to collaborate with other grad students and faculty on related topics and to learn from each other. I look forward to seeing what happens.

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