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.

Eric Gordon (Emerson College) recently gave a talk at Hamilton College titled, “Classroom 2.0: How Online Social Networks are Transforming Academic Life.” Hamilton made it available as a podcast.

Here’s an excerpt from the event description:

Students are entering college with different social patterns, learning habits and cultural expectations. They are consuming and producing within global networks, and have come to demand instant gratification and constant connectivity. So how can colleges and universities respond to this cultural shift without compromising their ideals and mission? How can social networking in the classroom actually increase engagement and productivity? And how can this “culture of participation” work in accordance with existing standards of academic productivity, just as it is transforming the nature of academic work?

Haven’t been blogging here much lately, but I have been blogging over on my Emerson blog on their Learning Portals site. Using the blog has been a great way to share reading responses to class materials and to connect with and learn from other students, faculty, and staff at the College.

Below is a cross post of my most recent response to two of our readings for class, Bruno LaTour’s “The Sociology of a Door” and the intro to Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Question: How does LaTour’s concept of deskilling explain what Jenkin’s calls “convergence culture”? In other words, does convergence require a reduction of skills? If not, how has convergence reframed the common user experience of media?

Jenkins mentions the word “skills” 6 times in the introduction to his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, in reference to the new skills that people will gain, or will have to gain, in a convergence culture. He explains that new consumer/participants in a culture of convergence (or rather, in his words, those who gain “a fuller mastery over the conceptual skills that consumers have developed in response to media convergence”) will be able to better navigate the changes that convergence culture is having on “work, education, and politics.”

If in a convergence culture people will be, as Jenkins explains, “encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” then where/among whom might the deskilling be occurring in this new culture?

What I would call Traditional Media Producers (TMPs) – particularly newspaper and broadcast journalists and their editors, publishers and owners – are being deskilled by those participating in this convergence culture. TMPs are having to learn how to “read back” to the audience – as is the case with newspaper reporters who increasingly get their information from bloggers or TV producers responding to fan-fiction audiences. TMPs are the ones struggling to keep up with the changes in technology (and how people are using technology) and to find new business models in order to best respond to their intended (and unintended) audiences.

TMPs are losing control over their audience as a result of convergence culture. Jenkins writes “More and more, industry leaders are returning to convergence as a way of making sense of a moment of disorienting change.”

My fear in the deskilling of TMPs, such as newspaper or broadcast journalists, is that, in the hopes for survival in a convergence culture, they will be forced to compromise their integrity and standards. For example, the Center for Citizen Media, is looking for people to help them create learning modules for citizen journalists, including “1) thoroughness, 2) accuracy, 3) fairness, 4) transparency and 5) independence.” Modules such as these would not be necessary non-TMPs already had a grasp of these concepts. My concern is that traditional journalists will realize that if non-TMPs are not held as accountable on the basis of thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence than TMPs themselves will not hold their own work to the same level of scrutiny.

Jenkins writes that “the skills we acquire through play may have implications for how we learn, work, participate in the political process, and connect with other people around the world.”

My hope is that TMPs and non-TMPs alike will find a balance, learn to listen, collaborate with, and trust one another in a convergence culture where navigating the terrain between thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence in information production and distribution is more important than ever before.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my talk at Bentley college. Mark Frydenberg has made the audio available for download on the CIS Presents Podcast.

But, what’s way cooler than that is Holmes Wilson’s talk on “Digital News” which is also available for download.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Nicole’s set up a great new blog as “an archive and forum for my study of tactical and digital media activism and the in-built politics of new digital technologies”.

She’s developing her project online and allowing others to follow her ideas along the way. This is great. She has a page titled “workspace“, where she’s sharing notes on the project. It will be great to see how the project develops.

I am particularly excited about seeing this blog, with my recent thinking to blog grad school. I decided against trying to get permission from my teachers and the college to blog class notes beginning in the fall. Instead, I’ll take the time to blog short entries about each of my classes and share some of the key themes and knowledge from each of the classes.

I’m thinking about installing a seperate wordpress blog here on this site that will probably live at colinrhinesmith.com/gradschool. This will be a two-year only blog that will share my studies and projects from each one of my classes, along the way. I hope to share as much of what I am learning and discovering from my education at Emerson with those who care to stop by and following along. I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, I’ll be reading medi@tactics which I am sure will inform my thinking about my own studies begining in the fall.