Colin Rhinesmith

“IDEA” via Flickr (CC license)

I’ve put together a working abstract and annotated bibliography for my course paper on collaborative design in virtual worlds. It’s public on the Hub2 wiki.

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I thought I’d use this post to share some of the work that I’m currently involved in. I find that these periodic updates also help me to get my head around it all, particularly as the semester winds down.

Grad School

This semester at Emerson College, I’m taking one class, I’m involved in a directed study and I’ve started my year-long thesis project. Here are some updates:

Hub2: As I’ve noted previously, I’m involved in a course at Emerson College that is exploring civic engagement through the design and social use of virtual platforms. Hub2 is the umbrella program, that currently involves students enrolled in a day class (that I’m in) and a night course. I’ve blogged a bunch about our group project in SL here and also on my blog at Emerson College. Soon, I’ll be starting a research paper around issues involved in the course

Fair Use, Media and Education in the Digital Age: This directed study seeks to learn more about the challenges facing educators and students in sharing online access to copyrighted material. So far, I’ve explored a number of philosophical, political, and legal issues related to this ongoing balancing act between copyright holders and educators. I’m currently structuring ideas for my research paper due at the end of this semester.

Community Media in Transition: While I’m very lucky that I enjoy all of my courses at Emerson, my grad thesis is perhaps the most exciting part of my work this semester. I’ve refined the topic a bit. I began a study recently that seeks to understand the role of the community media center for those involved in this form of local media practice. The purpose is to challenge the notion that the community media center (Public Access TV) is no longer necessary because of the Internet. I’m grateful to those in access who have contributed to my thinking on this topic.

Paid Research and Digital Media Production

The Digital Lyceum: Also at Emerson College this semester, I am supporting two faculty members for a NEH grant-funded project to research mixed-reality event production in the humanities. The Digital Lyceum, seeks to develop best practices and to propose a sustainable model for producing these with the purpose of contributing to humanities scholarship.

Citizen Media Law Podcast: We’re off and running with our new podcast at the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this project. We’re still experimenting with the format and look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Volunteer Service

Action Coalition for Media Education: The new ACME website launched this fall and we’ve been pushing our fundraiser at the site. There’s lots of activity there, including blogging from board members and others. I’m excited that we’ve been able to license our media education materials under a Creative Commons Attribution Nonommercial 3.0 Unported license.

Cambridge Community Television: I’ve been working with others in the Membership, Outreach and Advisory Committee on a report about our recent web survey of CCTV members. The survey was very successful and I thank everyone in the committee for their hard work.

For these reasons above, I haven’t had a lot of time to blog here. But, I look forward to being more active on this site as I head towards the home stretch in December. I’m also looking forward to my Television Culture and Communication Ethics and Diversity courses next semester, along with completing my grad thesis. A busy year and lots to be thankful for.

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Here’s the announcement from Nicholas Reville at PCF:

“I am incredibly excited to announce the launch of Miro 1.0.

With this launch, we are ready to build a movement for truly open video. We’re on a mission, we have a world-class product, we have an amazing community, and more and more open channels are being published every day. It’s the right time.

Comprehensive Feature Guide
With version 1.0, we’ve also published a fairly comprehensive overview of Miro features. Even our power users might notice a couple things they haven’t tried yet. Miro 1.0 Features.

Press Release
It seemed like a press release would be helpful for our reporter friends, so we’ve published one here: Groundbreaking Open-Source Internet TV Software Launches.”

So go ahead and download Miro 1.0!

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“Engage stage of Hub2 project” (Creative Commons license)

We entered the Engage stage of our collaboration project yesterday with a visit from a number of avatars to our space on Boston Island (SLURL). It was great to have so many avatars, who we didn’t know previously, navigate through the space and give us feedback. While most of the avatars spent more time visiting the other group projects, we did receive some valuable comments from those we spoke to.

Among the comments, included not being sure what to do in the space when avatars first arrived. We did add signs to help people understand what was going on since last class. However, some of the avatars mentioned that they did not see the “Start Here” flag that we placed over our “Welcome to Government Center” sign because it was too high.

As a result, we moved the sign lower and put the flag directly in the middle of the space. We hope this will make it more clear to future avatars visiting for the first time. Because this sign explains the project and the space, it’s crucial that there is no confusion as to where it can be found. Now that the sign is in the middle of the space, I hope this will make it more clear.

After explaining the purpose of the space to one of our visitors, the avatar responded, “Thanks… I like the artwork already…” The layout of the space, the winning sculpture and the three future installations in the juried space, all seemed to appeal to those new to the space. The voting process “click here to vote” seemed to work much more smoothly since we broke up the triangle and created three separate viewing, gallery-like spaces. I was pleased with this response.

Overall, while most avatars were unclear what to do when first arriving in the space — because they did not see the “Start here” sign — once they heard what its purpose was, there seemed to be a lot of positive feedback on its design.

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